Merry Days

 This was a fun quick little Christmas craft that helped get me into the Christmas spirit :) My sister was so sweet and gave me the vinyl which says: "Merry Days and Silent Nights". I wanted to put it on some sort of plaque and remembered I had this shelf from IKEA. I bought it for $1 in the as is section last year! I had it hanging in our old laundry room but apparently it was too heavy since it fell out of the wall. Ooops! So we moved it with us to our new house and it's been sitting in the garage. After I put the vinyl on it, I decided to put something on the side. I like to use what I have laying around, so I used some brown wrapping paper and some lace. Then I tied tulle around it.

 I was excited to put it up on our entertainment center which Tony made!

 Isn't it awesome!?! He only had the four legs to work with and made everything else from scratch. The cupboards are a cute bead-board, someday I'll have a good camera to show detail :)

Mudroom Makeover

 

Look what Tony's first project was on our house! He was so sweet and transformed our mudroom into a much more usable space! It's the best Christmas present ever!!! Now we have the perfect place to hang our coats right when we walk in the door. 

(before picture)

Here's a few pictures of the progress.

I love the bead-board and the cute hooks! 

He even redid the cute bench to make it match :)

It makes me happy every time I see it!

Exciting Changes

I can't believe how long it's been since I have blogged! We've had a lot of exciting new changes since then. The biggest news is that we sold our cute little old house in Syracuse!!! YAY!!! The whole process of selling it and buying a new house was quite a miracle and the Lord truly blessed us with so many tender mercies along the way! I am so grateful for his guided hand :)

We did do a few final projects before we left our Syracuse home. This was definitely the biggest! We added a second bathroom in our laundry room! 

It was pretty crazy (and scary) seeing Tony take a jack hammer to the floor :) We didn't think we were going to be able to add this bathroom without using a sump pump. Luckily we found the sewer connection when we started digging! YAY!!! We were never so happy to see a 4 inch pipe! It was like striking gold! Some how we finished this bathroom in a week and moved soon after :)

I had hoped to blog about our new house back in June, but my computer actually died and would not connect to the internet. Anywho, this is the house we chose to build :) We loved the red brick on our last house and decided we also wanted it on our new house. So the front exterior is red brick with brown and cream color hardy board, with white trim.

Although I love two-story houses, we decided to go with a rambler. It just seemed more practical and functional for our family. The picture above shows the potential of our future basement :) For now we are enjoying the nice open storage space and Max loves having a place to ride his scooter :)

Here is our main level floorplan. The one thing we did end up changing during the building process was the kitchen island. I loved how it was curved (as it's shown in this plan) but when they actually started building it and had the holes for the plumbing, we realized there was only about 7 feet for our dining room and walkway to get to the sliding door. We love to have people over for dinner and we knew our family would be getting bigger soon so we decided to change the island to create more space. Now it runs parallel with the fridge and oven. Here's a few pictures of the building process :)

 It's was so fun to see each new step on the house but we really loved when it was finished :)

 We are so thankful to be here and have lots of space to learn and grow together as a family. We truly have been so blessed!

White Ruffle Dress Part 2

I've had a few people wanting to know a little more detail about my White Ruffle Dress. 

So here it is again! :) I am also planning on making another dress like this with different material, so I will do a tutorial soon.

 Last Sunday I tried it out with a blue cardigan and a blue and white striped belt (which I found from a thrift store for $0.50--YAY!!!). 

Here's a better close up of the ruffles--just 2 simple ruffles that extend almost up to the shoulders.

Just above the end of the ruffle is where I added the Velcro. And the first part of the snap is just behind the collar.

 So it velcros across the top of the shoulder and then the snap prevents the gap between the back and the front of the collar.

Here's the dress without the cardigan. It could easily be made into a cap sleeve, but I knew I would be wearing a cardigan with it so I just made it a wider tank top. You might notice it is very see-through:) I loved this material, but it is thin! I didn't want to buy tons of it and I only do projects if they are simple and fast, so I actually just wear a cap-sleeve white under shirt (from Down East) and a white skirt underneath it. 

Can you tell? It's much less time consuming and works great for me:)

Car Seat Cover

I had my second boy (sweet little baby Braden) back in December and my awesome sister Amy (Happy Scraps Blog) made me this CUTE car seat cover!!! I have loved it and used it everyday since. I am now a big fan of car seat covers:)

 

I LOVE the fabric she chose!

So a few weeks ago I decided to make one for my friend who was about to have a baby girl.

 I'm so happy for her!!!

I used a cute red polka dot fabric on one side and this yellow, brown, and red flowery print for the other side. I knew my friend liked the ric-rac around mine so I did the same thing for hers.

 Somehow I forgot to take a picture of the handles on it:) but I added ric-rac to those as well. I also made them Velcro so it would be easy to take on and off. Then I made it reversible (adding handles to each side) in case she wanted to change it sometimes.

I'm glad I have friends that have baby girls, so I can make fun girl things once in a while!

Here's a snapshot of another one :)

White Ruffle Dress

 I've had the idea for this dress for about a year now and finally made it a couple of weeks ago for Easter Sunday! It didn't quite turn out the way I pictured it in my head, but I still like it. The inspiration for this dress actually came from the red flowery belt. I found it at a thrift store for $0.50 and thought it would be so cute on a white dress. I bought the cotton blend material at Hancock Fabric for about $10.

 This dress is SUPER simple. It really just consists of two pieces of fabric (the front piece and back piece) and then ruffles and a small collar added to the top. It actually kind of looks like a potato sack without the belt:) I didn't want to take the extra time to do a zipper or lots of buttons so a made it baggy enough to just fit over me and then with a belt it looks fitted.  It actually Velcros at the top of the shoulders and the collar has a small snap on each side, so I can slip it on easily.  

The good thing about this dress is it is very versatile! I can put any belt with it and any cardigan with it, so there is tons of variety. It makes it so fun!