Casey Turns 2!

Yesterday, our sweet pup turned 2! Last year, I took her to Three Dog Bakery in Plano to celebrate. So, this year, I took her back! Except, this time, we went to the one in Southlake since it's closer.

Where are we going??

Happy girl after the bakery!

 

Casey got a new bone, some "chocolate" chip cookies, and a pupcake!

Birthday bone!

She thought everyone was out to get her bone!

Here she is with the pupcake.

She loves those things! Happy 2nd birthday, Casey girl!!

Summer Vacation Project No. 2: Sewing Extravaganza!

For my birthday this past March, I asked David to get me this:

But, sadly, I haven't really had time to use it. In April, I found some fabric at Hancock Fabrics for $5.99 a yard!! So I made curtains for the dining room...but, I didn't use my sewing machine. I used the no-sew method described here. Easy peasy. Best of all, the curtains cost me $18! Wooo hoo! I also made a table runner out of coordinating fabric using the same method.

Well, I ordered a third coordinating fabric with the hopes of making a seat cushion for our window in the kitchen. Here's the three fabrics:

One day, I'm going to find the courage to tackle that project and we'll have a seat cushion made out of that striped fabric. But for now, I'm sticking to the less intimidating projects. Like making pillows. ha! Really, it's not hard to sew four straight lines. It took me less than an hour to make these two pillows using leftover fabric.

My friend, Melissa, came over last night to sew! She bought this little baby sewing machine from a friend of hers, and has never sewn before. Ever. And somehow, she trusted me to teach her! 

 Our original plan was for me to show her how to make pillows. But then, I came across this tutorial for making pacifier pockets! And it seemed easy enough, so we decided to make those instead. Famous last words...

Melissa came over a little after 6 and we had dinner. Then we started our sewing project around 7. Fast forward FOUR HOURS and we had these:

Melissa's pacifier pocket.

My pacifier pocket.

We may have underestimated the time it took to cut out the fabric from the patterns. And the interfacing. And then sew the whole dang thing together. It probably wouldn't have taken us so long if: 1) we knew what "cut on fold" means, 2) Melissa's baby machine's foot pedal worked the whole time, and 3) if we knew how to turn that teeny tiny strap right side out. Not to mention that this pacifier pocket is like four inches tall and three inches wide, making it VERY difficult to maneuver with the sewing machine. Long story short? I probably won't be making another pacifier pouch, so this really is a one-of-a-kind item. But I'm so proud of Melissa! This was her very first sewing machine project, and she did so well!!! Yes, it was a little bit of a frustrating project, and there were the occasional cuss-fests, but we persevered and did it!

Needless to say, I'm a little terrified to start my seat cushion project now. But at least that will be all straight lines and will be like 90 inches long and 24 inches wide. Should be easier to maneuver...maybe.

Summer Vacation Project No. 1: Wedding Signs

A friend of mine from work, Shelby, is getting married on August 20th! Well, let me back up and give you a little history. When I first started working at the DOB, there were three other girls in my office that I quickly became friends with - Shelby, April, and Melissa. Well, Melissa moved to Houston and transferred to our DOB office down there about three years ago (maybe four? I can't remember). And April resigned about a year ago. :( So that left just me and Shelby in the Arlington office (and out of our office of approximately 20 examiners, there were only 4 girls, including us! So sad.). Well, Melissa moved back to the Dallas area last month, and she came back to our office! So, since the four of us have remained close, we try to get together for dinner every now and again. Which is actually harder than it should be since: 1) we travel out of town for work a lot, 2) April lives in Wylie, 3) Shelby lives in Grapevine/Trophy Club, and 4) Melissa and I live in Arlington/Grand Prairie. We always get together around Christmas for dinner, and then throughout the year, when our schedules come together, we schedule dinner!

Okay, so Shelby is getting married August 20th!! So the four of us decided to get together for dinner to see Melissa's new house and make wedding signs for Shelby. She was kind of going for the vintagey-chic look, so I started googling around to see how we could accomplish the crackle-finish on her painted signs. I figured we'd just crackle the paint and then use an Exacto knife to carefully cut out the wording she wanted and Mod Podge it to the signs. Easy enough, right? Well, that's when I came across this website. Use iron-on transfer paper for the signs?? That would be so much easier! Done! And I found this website that claimed that Elmer's glue would give us the crackled paint finish we wanted. Okay, so spoiler alert: One of these techniques worked amazingly well, and the other was an epic failure. So here's what we did:

These are our supplies: base color acrylic craft paint (black), top color acrylic craft paint (white), Elmer's glue, foam brushes.

Using your base color, paint the wood and let dry completely.

Then, brush on the Elmer's glue - not too thick, but not so thin that it dries immediately.

Then, when the glue starts to dry and get "tacky", you'll want to brush on your top coat of paint. The glue will kind of bubble when it starts to dry and just use your finger to see if it's tacky - you want it to be sticky, not gloppy like wet glue. When you brush on your top coat of paint over the glue, brush it on in one direction and try not to go over the glue over and over again. Just one coat should do ya. When the paint and the glue start to dry, you'll see it start to crackle, and you should be left with something like this!

Crackled paint!

Success! So, as you can see, Elmer's glue + acrylic craft paint = crackled paint success! Which leads me to the epic failure...iron on transfer paper to add print to the signs. I didn't even take a picture. They looked pretty terrible. We tried it on three of the small signs, and the text transferred blurry and weird for some reason. So I painted over them. April's going to use her Cricut to cut out vinyl lettering for them instead. So the painted signs will sit until April mails me the vinyl lettering (you know, since she lives all the way in Wylie). Oh well, live and learn! I still need to get some sandpaper and sand the edges, so they look more weathered, but I think they turned out really well!

4th of July Weekend

Our two week vacation from work started this past weekend! We don't have any real plans to do anything, except NOT go to work. Ha! We started our weekend on Saturday with a July 2nd shrimp boil at our house. Unfortunately, I didn't take any pictures, and our neighbor hasn't posted any (yet?), so I couldn't steal any from him. I did, however, steal this picture from Amy's facebook. We had two of the cutest little girls at our shrimp boil - Katie and Vaughn! Aren't they adorable in their red, white, and blue???

We boiled about 4 pounds of shrimp, 2 pounds of potatoes, and 7 ears of corn. We also grilled about 25 chicken drumsticks. I was secretly hoping that we'd have a ton of leftovers that we could eat throughout the week, but, we were only left with about 8 drumsticks! Bummer! Oh well. I guess that means the food was good! I also made fruit salsa and cinnamon chips, which apparently was a huge hit! I used strawberries, mango, kiwi, pineapple, and blueberries - sprinkled with just a bit of sugar and cinnamon. Delicious and refreshing!

On Sunday, we drove out to Argyle to Clay's mom's house to go swimming! It was about 100+ degrees outside...and the pool was a nice and cool 90 degrees. Haha! Clay had driven up from Austin the day before with his new girlfriend, Andrea. And she brought with her the most delicious homemade enchiladas, rice, beans, and HOT salsa! Everything was SO good!! I may or may not have eaten two plates of everything...

On Monday, the 4th, we hung around the house being lazy and then we went to the Ranger's game with our friends, David and Krissy. We stopped at Sherlock's first for a bite to eat and a couple of drinks. When the waitress informed us that they had Strawberry Malibu snow cones for sale, we just had to try one.

DELICIOUS. So good. It would have been even better if we could have taken it with us to the ballpark, though. ha! Luckily for us, we snuck onto the Lexus club level at the ballpark and got into the air conditioned Irish pub. We sat in there until about the top of the third inning, when the sun started to set.

After watching the Rangers soundly defeat the Orioles, we stuck around for the fireworks show!

The show seemed a little short, but I'm assuming that has something to do with the down economy and budget cuts. ha! Nevertheless, it was fun! And here's a fun fact - fireworks were first used to celebrate the 4th of July in 1777!! Who knew! They actually first used fireworks on July 8, 1776, but that technically isn't the 4th of July. :)

Last, but certainly not least, I made a 4th of July wreath for our front door! I found this one on Pinterest and LOVED it, but the girl made hers by cutting out over 500 felt stars. I'm sure that took FOREVER. So, I cheated and just cut 3 inch by 3 inch squares. Same thing only different once you cram them onto the wreath!

Hope you guys had a wonderful 4th of July!!