roadtrip adventures

This past Thursday afternoon, my Dad, little brother Riley, and I hit the road and headed to College Station, Texas.  As we started the drive, I couldn't help but think we were a little crazy--to and from Texas in 4 days??!?!  Well...we did it and it was quite the whirlwind!  We went down for a family wedding and had a wonderful time seeing so many members of our extended family, which is now spread across most of the middle of the country, including Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Texas, and Arizona.  Getting everyone together is becoming much more difficult than it used to be when we were all kids and living in Minnesota, so when it does work out to see a bunch of the gang (and their growing families) it is so very worth it!  And being the frugal people we are...we drove to the occasion!  Two days of driving down, a day to enjoy everyone, and two days of driving back!  Yikes, does it feel good to be home!  

The wedding was beautiful and so much fun!  And the drive ended up being pretty good as well.  Bringing a bunch of our own food on the road made the drive down so much better.  There's nothing quite as great when driving for 10 hours to be able to make up a plate of homemade goodness...yum!  That along with several knitting projects, books, audiobooks, good tunes, and entertaining conversations made our 16 hour drives quite manageable.  On the way home my brother Tanner and his wife Lindsey caravanned with us and my grandparents joined us in the vehicle as well.  

Overall, it was a great trip and a great way to start the month of May!!

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Happy May to all of you!

pretty eggs

Having our very own chicken eggs during Easter, obviously meant that we needed to make our very own naturally dyed Easter eggs.  And so that is exactly what we did!  We ended up with golden yellow, using ground turmeric, and copper, using onion skins.  The blue eggs are from our hen Birdie--she makes 'em real purdy.  

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If you haven't yet dyed eggs and are wanting to, you can find Ashley English's Naturally Dyed Eggs instructions here.  They are so easy and make such pretty colors!  

Happy Easter to all of you!  We'll be enjoying the weekend at home and with family.  I hope that wherever this weekend finds you, it finds you well.   

a day for waffles

With a husband who travels a lot, we find ourselves often very excited over relaxing days spent at home--together.  Yesterday was one of those days.  And so in honor of the day, we had waffles.  Waffles made in my grandma's old Sunbeam waffle iron that may have originated in the 1950's.  After a slightly darkened batch, we enjoyed several perfect waffles.  It was a lovely way to start the day.  The rest of the day followed in a relaxed, yet productive manner.  Buttons and a pocket were sewn on a newly completed knitting project.  A little sewing was done.  Laundry soap was made and clothes were washed.  I caught up the latest episodes of Downton Abbey.  Several rows were knitted in one of my current knitting projects.  And I enjoyed spending the day with my wonderful husband.  

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It was a truly wonderful way to spend the day, as today marks the start of the spring semester at the University of Minnesota.  It's always nice to spend a day relaxing before beginning a semester of hard work.  

Spring 2015, here I come!

handmade gifts

All of the Christmas decorations have now been put away in our house and the quiet feeling of January has set in.  However, before we all officially move on from Christmas, I thought I'd share a little about some of the handmade goodness that we gifted this year.  I love giving meaningful, useful, and thoughtful gifts and with my love for crafting, I often find myself making quite a few gifts during the holiday season.  This year a few of my favorites were mittens for all of the nieces and nephews (note: 2 year old boys do not find mittens to be exciting, nor something they want to try on for a photo shoot...), a huge infinity scarf for my husband (I used this pattern with a worsted weight), peppermint lip balm (with a mixture of coconut and olive oils), candles, and rosemary-lavender salt scrub (with a mixture of epsom and kosher salts).   

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I just love making and giving handmade gifts.  It just feels the way gift-giving should feel.  I love how it takes planning, time, and effort to create something--and not just anything, but a specific something for a specific person.  To me, it's a much more meaningful and enjoyable way to give gifts.  

How about you?  Did you make any gifts this year??  

christmas has come

I hope your Christmases were all filled with joy, laughter, and loved ones.  Ours sure was!  I've been rather silent on this space for the last week because the preparations and celebrations consumed my time.  The silence was much needed and worth it, though, as we had several lovely Christmas celebrations with all sides of our family.  

My favorite Christmas celebration, though, is always the simple one at home with my love.  With our large families that celebrate on different days each year it's hard to have a specific date to always call our own, so we decided in our first year of marriage that while the date could change, would we have one Christmas Celebration Day for ourselves each year.  This year we celebrated on Tuesday and started the day with homemade caramel rolls, a new tradition!  (Which I realized too late that my store-bought yeast must have expired...so they were a little dense!) 

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We then had our traditional cheese plate in the afternoon with a steamed artichoke and our favorite Christmas wassail (one of my favorite Christmas traditions).

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After opening our gifts to one another, which was so much fun, we ended the evening with a deliciously tender venison roast with mushrooms and onions.  

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It was a fabulous Christmas had by all!  I hope you are resting today after all of the festivities!  We sure are here.

celebrating our love

This weekend Dan and I got to escape for a few days and celebrate our second wedding anniversary.  It was an absolutely wonderful weekend, even though it's been almost a month since our actual anniversary!  We stayed at the Spicer Castle Inn and spent our time reading, dreaming, laughing, talking, and just enjoying being together.  Since the inn is on a rather large lake, we decided to take my grandpa's boat with us and enjoy one last water adventure for the season.  

Throughout the weekend, my fingers also made a ton of progress on my "honeymoon sweater," a cardigan for myself that I started on our honeymoon two years ago.  It's a project that has spent a lot of time sitting in my knitting basket while other many other projects have gone on and off the needles.  It's finally nearing completion, though, and I'm getting rather excited about it!

It was a truly wonderful weekend--one which made me love my dear husband so much more.  Here's to the rest of our lives together, my love.

wedding this and that

Why, hello!  It's been a few days of intense grading around these parts, but I thought I'd squeeze in one more post about wedding goodness before moving on to all of the wonderful fall things that are beginning to fill my days.  

Last week I shared a bit about our wedding (our wedding day) and a few of the things that I created myself (my wedding dress, wedding flowers) in order to save money and truly make it my own.  Today, I'd thought I'd share a few more of those things, in hopes that you'd be inspired to take a simpler approach to event planning and celebrations.  

In our world of Pinterest and DIY craziness, it's easy to get swept away in the excitement and creativity of it all.  However, a lot of the DIY ideas out there aren't really all that cost effective!  My goal, when planning our wedding, was to be able to make things myself for much less than I would have been able to buy them.  I love making and creating things, but if the final product is not cheaper and/or better quality than the store-bought version, I don't usually think it's worth it.  

Today I thought I'd highlight a few of the things that I really enjoyed making and ended up being super happy with the finished products, both in cost and quality.  

The decorations were by far my favorite.  While I don't have pictures of everything, I was beyond satisfied with what I created for our reception and ceremony.  My inspiration for these started with a few pieces of fabric that I found in our wedding colors and accents.  These accent fabrics were then used for our "bride" and "groom" signs for the head table, for decorative shoe clips for my ladies, as a hair clip for my 'lil lady, and as the background for some of our beer-bottle and glass bead magnets that we gave as favors.  Being the coordinated person that I am, I thoroughly enjoyed incorporating these fabrics into as many things as possible.  

One of my favorite decoration pieces were the tissue paper flowers that I made with some of my girlfriends.  We spent one lovely summer afternoon at my house making these wonderful flowers for just a few dollars and they added so much to the beauty of our day!  They were made from the tissue paper of old unwanted sewing patterns that I got at a textile sale for $0.10 a piece.  I purchased 30 patterns (for a whopping total of $3.00) and I think we only used about 10 of them!  We secured the flowers with floral wire that I got at a craft store for a few dollars and put them into vases that were made from bottles that I saved from my kitchen recyclables and wrapped in twine.  I absolutely loved the way they turned out!  And this project was SOOOOO affordable! 

The table runners were made from burlap coffee bags that we got for free from a local coffee roaster and they were covered with a layer of sheer fabric that matched the sheer overlay on my wedding dress.  Once again, I adored the coordination and the prices! 

For our ceremony, my dad built us a gorgeous arbor, which now stands at the entrance of our garden, and we filled the area around it with hanging baskets and potted plants from my dad's and grandma's houses.  Since the ceremony was right next to the reception tent, the plants added color and life to our reception as well.

A friend of ours (pictured below) graciously lent us the beautiful birdcage that our 'lil lady carried down the isle.  I wanted something different for her and the bird theme was perfect.  A similar borrowed bird cage was also used as a "card basket" near the dessert table.  While I loved the color and fun that these pretty bird cages added, I also loved how I was able to borrow them and not spend a dime! 

We loved everything about our wedding, but one of the things that I loved the most was the fact that we were able to celebrate our love together and begin our lives together without any debt or wedding bills to pay after it was all said and done.  Part of this was due to the generosity of our family and loved ones, but it was also due to the fact that I got creative with the things that I could control.  It can be hard to save much money when it comes to venues and food, but you can most definitely save money by finding creative ways to decorate.  Making all of these things I did also provided so many opportunities to spend time with those I love.  We crafted together and enjoyed each other's company.  It made our wedding much more of a communal affair.  In my opinion, being surrounded by community is one of the best ways to start a marriage.

wedding flowers

When it comes to saving money for a wedding, making your own flowers is a quick and relatively easy way to do so!  If you're going for a more natural bouquet look, it's pretty easy to not only assemble bouquets and vases yourself, but boutonnières and corsages as well!  After helping to make most of the flowers for three of my cousins' weddings, I knew that flowers were definitely something that I wanted to do myself.  

I chose flowers for the wedding based on what I knew I could easily access in Minnesota in September.  I fell in love with maroon and yellow celosia and decided to try growing it at my dad's, my grandma's, and my apartment.  While we didn't end up with quite as much celosia as I'd hoped for, we still had enough for it to play a big role in our arrangements.  

To add to the arrangements, I purchased a few bunches of things from Market Flowers in Minneapolis.  They specialize in selling bulk flowers at prices that are close to wholesale.  I really wanted Billy Balls in my arrangements, and was beyond thrilled when I found out that they stocked them there.  

The last bit of filler flowers and greenery came from all around my dad's property.  We used hosta leaves in the boutonnières, wild plume grasses in bouquets, and anything else that caught our fancy as we walked around the yard with a pair of scissors.  The day before the wedding, my ladies of honor, aunts, grandma, and stepmom all offered their creativity as we made all of the floral arrangements for the following day.  After making flowers for several weddings, I've found that the time spent with the ladies that day is so valuable and it's so much fun to be able to really enjoy the flowers.  For some many weddings, there are gorgeous flowers that you hardly get to even smell!  Making the arrangements yourself gives you the opportunity to really enjoy them, and enjoy each other.  I loved that. 

I was beyond thrilled with the way the flowers turned out!  The colors were perfect, the shapes of the bouquets were just whimsical enough to make me smile, and the Billy Balls were so adorable!  In the end, I think I spent about $200 or less on all of the flowers.  I was pretty pleased with that price tag, and so happy with the finished product.  

If you feel unsure of your flower arrangement abilities, take a class, watch some YouTube videos, or just start experimenting!  It's really a rather simple and fun way to save money and your skills will certainly be called upon for years and years to come.