Latest DIY

Before: Crowded dresser top and too many necklaces in too many places [The shadowbox used to hold some necklaces but was limiting, so I swapped them for the earrings]






The Solution: Hang the chunky and long ones on the wall. I bought this 5" 4 hook mount and had Ben add the three additional knobs. (Sadly Home Depot didn't have colorful ones like Pier 1-but I didn't want to spend that much either)





The result: One less thing on the dresser and a pretty, untangled necklace display.

Sugar Sugar

It is officially the holiday season, as evidenced by the cookie dough lunch I had Wednesday (I was making sugar cookies!). For our wedding we received a year's worth of cookie cutters, which I haven't made much use of. This week I broke out the leaves for a fall treat.


The last 24 hours alone have been filled with other sweet treats.

-Cupcakes, seven layer bars, and brownies for a girl's night
-Starbucks peppermint hot cocoa, chocolate chip cookie, & cake pops (all before 10am)



The Starbucks treats were compliments of the Johnson Controls hospitality tent, where our friend Adam works. We stocked up on goodies and enjoyed the Milwaukee Holiday Parade on Kilbourn Ave.



Through the morning vendors with carts filled with balloons, toys, and cotton candy rolled by, yelling things like "Cheap plastic, high prices!" I don't think they got much business :) It was a fun way to start the day and enjoy the upcoming holidays!

Pumpkin Carving

I decided that I should really be better about starting seasonal and holiday traditions. Need proof? Ben and I have been married for over two years, and this will be our first Christmas putting up a tree. We travel a lot, so we have allowed ourselves to use that excuse for not getting it up thus far. Last year we did actually bring it up from storage, there just wasn't enough room in our apartment for it. Not that our apartment magically increased in size since then...

Here are some pictures of our pumpkins, which we carved on Halloween. Since we procrastinated the carving, they lasted about two days before getting moldy :(

The stems were so dry they came out when we tried to pull the tops out!

I'm Pinterested

Today Ben and I had four of our sort-of-long-distant (hailing from Madison and St. Cloud, MN) friends visit for the day. We took them to the Public Market to enjoy the array of foods available, toured the Miller Brewery-something we have wanted to do since driving by it so many times-and realized we had six people around our table for dinner the first time! I think. It sure felt that way.

James took some great pictures and I'll hope to post those once I see them on Facebook. It was a great day, and such a treat to hang out somewhere other than a hotel in Minneapolis, where we congregate for conferences several times a year. We will have to visit their homes soon.

While here, the girls introduced me to a site called Pinterest.com. Apparently they had tried to invite me to this earlier, but I mistook it for an invite to a social networking site and deleted it. Now I'm checking it out, and I can see why they wanted to share it! It's so fun, and right up my alley.

Check it out: www.pinterest.com

It's an online way to organize ideas you love and be inspired by others. This will probably work better than my binder of ripped out magazine articles and pictures I've been keeping [although I will never love looking at anything on the computer more than on real pages].

You can find everything from awesome images like this (#Edward_Horsford Photography/water balloon bursting at high speed) :

to craft ideas I never would have thought of on my own, like this:

Now I'll just need to make sure I don't spend TOO much time on this site!