Happy Monday!

Hope your weekend was a good one. Ours was fantastic. I didn’t get any work done on the craft room per say but I did get it moving along. How can that be? Well, I found an awesome posting on craigslist for 3 white bookshelves for $50 and snatched them up. It might have taken 3 trips, but it was totally worth it. And my photography appointment for the Insider is the 21st, so I gotta start cracking!

Sunday I caught up on dishes, did some minor cleaning, and then John and I went exercising. He is doing everything he can to get ready for boot camp, and is bringing me along for the ride. (kinda) He really just wants me to exercise more because I never do. The the weather was beautiful, even if it was a bit cold.

I have a little Easter village that I am waaay too proud of, and I set it up as the centerpiece of our dining room table.  When I called my family to wish them a happy Easter, I told my mom how I didn’t see any new houses in my Walgreens this year.  She couldn’t believe that, because she had seen a bunch at hers.  And then I thought about it, and last year I didn’t find any houses either; just the fountain and the tree!  Could it be that WNY Walgreens don’t SELL my Easter village houses?  The horror!  But, my mom saved the day.  She went to Walgreens, took a bunch of pics with her camera phone and sent them my way.  I picked out 9 (!) new houses that will be joining my village next time she comes to visit.  Thanks, Mom!

The little take-out boxes are what served as our Easter baskets.  We are trying not to eat a lot of sweets, and these filled up quite quickly, which was nice.

Dinner turned out really well. I got out the nice china and everything actually was cooked all around the same time! I’m usually terrible when it comes to that. I end up having to reheats sides or something, but not yesterday!

While we were eating, the kitties were gazing at our food eagerly. I ended up caving. Both Dune and Twilight got some Easter dinner too. They’re so spoiled. They even had little china plates, just like Mommy and Daddy.

Goodbye, Christmas.

I didn’t get to the craft room today. Instead, I designed a wedding album for my parents and took down all the Christmas decorations. The living room looks so bare now… it’s really quite sad.

Since I didn’t get to post about my Christmas decorations, I’ll take today to highlight some of my ornaments.  These are by no means all of my ornaments.  I couldn’t even find one bag of them and the tree was more than full.

I bought these this year because I just couldn’t pass up those darling little deer. Nice pick, Walmart!

This is my collection of bird ornaments. Clip-on birds were always my favorite ornament growing up, so when I started to have my own tree, of course I had to have bird ornaments. Even when I was just picking out the ornaments that went on John’s tree in the condo, I even had bird ornaments. (Thanks Mom!) I’m finding though, that these birdies clip better on fake trees than the real ones we get now. Oh well; they’re still pretty.

These are my keepsake ornaments. I have one for our first Christmas together (2002), our engagement, and of course, our marriage and our first house.

All of these ornaments were either handmade (by me and other people) or ones that I picked up in a thrift store or estate sale. Oh, well… I guess now that I look at it, I bought a couple from a store because they *looked* handmade. Whoops!

This ornament was made by a women who was staying at the same B&B we had our honeymoon at. I sat with her one day and chit-chatted with her while she was making these ornaments, and was very surprised when she gave me one! She made me promise, and I mean PROMISE like it was the end of the world, to add a ribbon to it before I hung it on my tree. Of course I obliged.

The second photo is Dune stopping helping me put away the decorations.

Oh Christmas I miss you already. See you next year!

Holiday Catch-up

Seems I’m ok at posting on Mondays & Wednesdays, but not Fridays. Ah well!

Here are some pictures from St. Patrick’s Day & Easter. Is it just me, or were these two holidays waaaaay too close together?! I didn’t even have time to decorate for St. Patrick’s Day, let alone Easter which was the week after!

I made this Sash for 106.7 KISS-FM’s “Palest Male of Rochester” contest. I did it in one night while watching TV, and was pretty proud of my $5 creation. I was going to hand sew the letters on, but ran out of time, so I hot glued them. When the program director saw the sash he loved it so much he wants to use it every year now. Whoops! Well, maybe I can pull that “08″ off for next year…  Anyway, our palest male wore the sash in the parade, which was cool.

This was all I got to do in terms of Easter decorations! I set up my little bunny village on the new table I bought on craigslist. I super cropped this photo because I’m posting more about the table on Wednesday. I was sad because I couldn’t find my bunny village church, and of all the buildings not to find on Easter!  The second picture is of the “basket” I got for John.  It’s really small because he’s on a diet.  The malted milk balls are (were?) for me!  I love that flower; it’s stem is all bendy and it was only a dollar.

I also made a new table cloth to replace my winter one. It’s ok. The center is a little bumpy. You can’t really tell once the place mats are on it.  Guess I didn’t make the seams quite straight enough. Oh, and I also bought new place mats since this photo was taken. I was going to make matching ones, but I didn’t have time. And then I found 4 brown ones at the dollar store, so I bought those in preparation for when my mom and sister come up next month.  Hahaha, I also bought actual glasses.  I realized, while taking this photo, that I was using our nice china, but didn’t even have glasses to go with them!  We only have plastic cups.  Way to be a grown up, Colleen.

I made a simple meal of ham, au gratin potatoes, corn, and biscuits (which aren’t in the picture, but that’s what the smaller plates are for.)

Valentine’s Day: Part 2

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone!

This is what I wore to work today and the balloon John gave me. I also gave out My Little Pony valentines because it’s 1989, didn’t you know?

These are the flowers John bought me. He thought they would look nice in my office by the window. It was funny because at first I was like “But I don’t have a window…” Hello Colleen, this is NY and you’ve always had a window in your offices. Weird flashback to Miami, right? John also got me chocolates, which we promptly ate.

Originally we were going to go out to eat, but we decided to stay in and make ourselves a nice spaghetti dinner. We are checking out one of the potential wedding spots tomorrow, so we will go out to a nice dinner after that.

Hope today was lovely for you. <3

Valentine’s Day: Part 1

So I am pretty much terrible at giving presents, AND I don’t think Valentine’s Day is all that special. Frankly, I’m just waiting until tomorrow so I can go to Target and see if I can snatch up any ‘The Office’ valentines on clearance. But I wanted to get John *something* so when I saw this, I thought it would be kinda funny. Aaaaand then I stuck a bunch of puffy hearts and some beads on it. Maybe he’ll stop using the wall now, yeah? Hope he likes it!

To be fair, I also got him a card and some candy that he really likes. But this is a holiday for the chicks, isn’t it?

Seven years, Oh my!

Today is my and John’s seven year anniversary.  Crazy!  He had his first meet and greet-type session with a local real estate firm this morning, and he thinks it went well. When he came home from it, he had flowers and a cute little stuffed panda for me! So sweet!

We spent today running errands and watching movies. It was a nice, quiet day. And I made some pasta and meat sauce for dinner, which turned out really well.

He brought me two bouquets so I would have more colors.

The panda is also a pez dispenser, lol. Here’s to many more years! <3

Hopefully I’ll get to those curtains tomorrow, but for now, I’m off to bake some cookies!

Christmas Photo Dump!

I’m on my lunch break now, which means I have access to a card reader, which means I can upload and edit my holiday photos! Although I didn’t make any presents this year, I did some other crafty things that I normally don’t do.

1. I made these little guys for mine and John’s first tree together. They’re made out of embroidery floss and the bodies came from a close pin people set, which is why they have a stand that I used as the feet. LOTS of glue needed for this project!

2. Since John and I were going to be spending Christmas down in Florida, we didn’t really see the point in getting a full sized tree. (Usually we get a real one every year.) But I couldn’t stand the idea of not having a tree at all, so we bought a 3ft. tree from Wal-Mart. It already had lights on it, score!

3. Misc. ornaments. I’m Irish (well, American-Irish) and love frogs.

4. When we got down to Florida, my mom said that she couldn’t find the angel that she made in second grade. This angel has been on the top of the Christmas tree for most of her Christmases, and all of mine. So, I decided that we (my siblings and I) should make her a new one. The angel & people are hand painted and made out of wood.

5. The little people in the front represent my sister, myself, and my brother. They are not by any means arranged by age. If they were, it should be my brother, myself (I’m the middle child by 6 minutes!) and my sister. But because my sister is left handed, she decided that she should be on the left, and that my brother should be in the center so it would go girl-boy-girl, lol. My mom loved it.

6. I guess the store was out of gingerbread houses, so my mom bought a gingerbread train, ha! This was the first gingerbread ANYTHING I’d made since I was a child.

7. My Mom and I. That icing was so hard to squeeze out of the tube!

8. (Mom’s hand) We tried to cut the cookies out on the table, but they didn’t transfer well, so we cut them out on the cookie sheet itself.

9. I think we made the dough too thick, because they baked really fat. So we ended up re-cutting them out once they had cooked!

10. The comparison between cookie cutter & what ended up baking, lol.

11. Decorated cookies! We bought icing in a spray can, that came out like mouse does, but it came out reallyreally fast. It was hard to control!

12. We were on sweets overload!

13. We also baked cupcakes with hearts of Jam. I love these so much and want to make a million more, but John doesn’t like jam and I can’t eat that many!

14. John and I went to Cracker Barrel and they had their Christmas decorations 70% off! I didn’t see anything that I wanted, until I found these for 60 cents each!

15. I’ve been trying to stick with a “looks (or actually is) handmade” rule when buying ornaments this year, and I can’t wait to make them! I’ll be sure to post the results. The Santa ones have bells!

Happy New Year from Colleen, John, Dune, and Twilight. Yay 2008!