Libby Mae & Buster Truman

We have two new additions to our family, the white one is Buster Truman and the tan one is Libby Mae.

We only planned on getting this sweet girl, but on the way to my parent's I mentioned to my husband that it might be better to get two puppies if the breeder had two left.  He didn't shut me down immediately so that meant there was a chance!  Haha!

My logic:  We would be going through the puppy phase with one dog and it wouldn't be that much more work with two at the same time.  Two puppies might minimize the whining and crying and separation anxiety that comes with taking a puppy away from its mother.  They are little, how much work could it be?

I'm not sure if my logic was correct!  It's like having twin babies that just learned to crawl!  They are both so little, there are many hazards that could hurt them right now.  Buster almost slipped through my back fence the other day. They do keep each other company though and play together and cuddle together when they sleep.  There's lots of shenanigans going on!  Anything that dangles is something to play with, pant legs, ruffly socks, laptop cords...the skirt of my sofa!  I may be getting rid of my sofa sooner than I planned!  Yippee!  I don't like what I have and have been wanting a new sofa for years!  Haha!

This guy.  He is so sweet.  I'm glad we got him.  Libby is a little more independent and somewhat standoffish, which is fine, she stays out of trouble that way!  Buster is curious and loving and he likes to eat.  He lets Sutton hold him like a baby and put him in a baby carrier.  He just goes with the flow.  Libby is going to be easier to potty train I think.  This guy is going to take awhile.  Libby will sit in one place if she is unsure.  Buster follows his sniffer where ever it takes him.

These two will definitely be keeping me on my toes for awhile!

Happy Thursday!

Black, White, and Flamingo Pink

My little sweetie is turning six soon!  She's getting a big gift.  I'm sure I'm totally unprepared and it's going to rock my world for a while.  We're getting her a puppy!  Our baby dog is up in Nor Cal near my parent's so we will have a simple mini party with them and our new pooch her birthday weekend.  Once we get back we are going to have a very, very, small celebration with a handful of girly girls from her class.  I'm doing things backwards here.  We don't have invites or a date, but we've got favors!

Whatever we end up doing will be outside in our backyard.  We will have a s'mores bar with an over the top marshmallow roast in lieu of birthday cake.  The linens above just came together and have been a fun starting point for the get-together.  Love it when that happens.  The black and white stripe is Ikea fabric.  I will not sew it, just cut it to fit the table, if that is even necessary.  I'm going for this kind of vibe, but less wedding-like and more birthday-like :)The linens will be layered.  Black and white stripe on the bottom, vintage floral tablecloth on top, the ric-rac trimmed dot napkins will be used somehow, someway.  One of nice things about small parties in your home is you can use real plates and linens, even with six year olds. 

And you can go a little overboard with the favors.  The girl had a lot of input here, as she should.  We bought almost all of the favors on a recent trip to Scottsdale in this small, but mighty fun store.

These are girly girls I'm talking about.  Sutton picked out a pink nail polish for each of them.

These are so fun, not included in the favor, but we'll use these at the party.  The birthday girl picked out a "6" for herself.  Her guests will get a star.

I try to avoid sweets, but one small sweet treat won't hurt.

Little lip glosses

These little things are so funny and random!  I love that Sutton wanted these.  Babies and flamingos, why not?!

Where the babies and flamingos will sleep inside the favor boxes.  We don't want them to get lost in there!

We also included a gift certificate for each girl to get a pedicure at a nearby nail salon.  I cannot explain to you how much Sutton loves to get a pedicure, it makes her day.  We wanted to share that joy with her friends.

We packaged everything up in these fun popcorn boxes, stapled them shut, added some jute webbing and an Instagram pic for fun.  I got an email last week from Walgreens with a coupon to try their new Instagram photo printing service.  It was so great.  I uploaded this picture from IG and my 4x4 prints were ready the next day (I think you can get one hour service, but I did this late at night).

Now we just need to figure out the rest of the details.  It's kind of great doing this ahead of time, one less thing to worry about as the actual event gets closer.

XO,

Amber

In Heavy Rotation Around Here

I have a super yummy one for you, friends.  My mouth likes it as much as the Real Simple corn salad.  We eat many vegetarian meals in our household.  It's not forced.  I don't consciously plan meatless days into my meal plan.  It's just the way we eat.  This is my fave right now.  Basically you put what's on the left into what's on the right and put it in the crockpot for 4hrs.  It is so good and SO easy!  I've been making this a lot on the day I work in Sutton's class.  On a super busy day it is so nice to come home to dinner already made.

Ingredients:

4 orange bell peppers
1 chopped zucchini
1 can of garbanzo beans, drained and rinsed
2 chopped green onions
1 cup of crumbled feta
1 prepared box of rice pilaf
1 chopped clove of garlic
1 tsp dried oregano

Directions:

Cut off the tops of the bell peppers and remove the seeds.  Chop the small amount of bell pepper around the stem and toss into a bowl.  Add all the other ingredients to the bowl and mix up.  Spoon the mixture into the bell peppers.  It helps to cut off a little of the bottom of the bell peppers before you fill them, so they can stand up straight in the crockpot.  Place the stuffed peppers into the crockpot and cook on high for four hours.  You will have left over stuffing which is also great by itself.  You might be able to fill one more bell pepper, but I haven't tried it yet.

The original recipe is from Martha Stewart.  You can find it here.  I made some changes on accident and now this is just the way I make this meal.

Hope you enjoy!

XO,
Amber

Little Miss S Big Girl Room Ideas

Have you guys heard of Olioboard?  I played around with it this morning and it was so fun!  I put together this board for my girl's room.  Her room is bad.  I had it professionally painted when she was a baby (5 years ago) to match her crib bedding, which was cute when she was in a crib but that has been long gone and now there are so many different things going on in her room.  She doesn't care one bit, but it drives me nuts.  It's time to give baby girl an upgrade.  Most of this stuff I have been collecting for years, it just needs to be pulled together in one place!  These are just ideas I have, I'm not sure if this is what we'll end up with, but it was fun to pull it together digitally in one place.  Sometimes I need to see everything together before I can make decisions.  Many items I buy for my house are from Ebay.  If you haven't given Ebay a shot you are missing out.  I ALWAYS check Ebay before buying other places.  You can find unique one-of-a-kind items and textiles that can really make your home different.

1- Ebay 2- Home Depot 3- Young America 4- Barn Light Electric 5- Ikea 6- Ebay 7- Anthropologie 8- Ebay (this is vintage fabric and it's gone, however this is my favorite vintage textile dealer) 9- RH Baby and Child 10- Window Seat 11- House of Antique Hardware  12- Warehouse Fabrics 13-Ebay 14-Ebay

Happy Wednesday!

XO,

Amber

Watermelon, Avocado, Goat Cheese, Pistachio Salad

This past weekend we tried a new restaurant in Del Mar, maybe it's been there awhile, but it was new to us.  We had multiple plans fall apart and so we came up with a plan on the fly for a family date night.  Dinner, paint your own pottery, cupcakes.  This salad was so good, I had to try to recreate at home.

I'm just going to tell you what's in it and you play around with how much of each of the ingredients you want.  The main character here is watermelon.  Slice it into cubes.

Roast some shelled pistachios in a pan.  Nuts burn easily, so watch them.  I should've cooked mine a little longer, still yummy though.

Thinly slice some red onion.  I used about half. 

I went heavy on the avocados because we love them in our household.  Slice into cubes as well.

Now, here's the questionable ingredient.  There was some type of green herb on the salad, but I had a glass of wine or two and I don't know what it was.  It could have been cilantro, basil, or italian parsley. When recreating at home I chose italian parsley but I think any that I mentioned would work.

Put all the above ingredients in a bowl and toss together.  Squeeze a lemon on top.  Drizzle some olive oil on too, not too much.  Now grind out some salt from your salt grinder and your pepper grinder.

Sprinkle some crumbled goat cheese on top.

Lastly, put your salad in a pretty bowl and enjoy!  At home we had the salad alongside salmon and it was delish.  At the restaurant I had it with an amazing pizza with prosciutto, artichokes, olives and a fried egg on top, weird combo but it was also delicious!

XO,

Amber

This Year's V-Day Cards

Not going to lie, these babies were labor intense.  My goal was to use what I had and to make something unique.  My first idea totally bombed, so I kept playing and this is what I came up with.

The little lady cut out over 100 paper hearts with a heart punch like this, out of a vintage children's book.  Each card turned out like a mixed-media piece of art.

I cut out a some fabric hearts and burlap hearts.  These floral hearts are literally fabric scraps my friend Bianca gave me over a year ago.  They truly are the gift that keeps on giving.

When we started making these I didn't intend for every single one to be different, but that's what ended up happening.  I sewed the hearts in random patterns with pink or white thread, some straight down the middle, some across the width of the heart, whatever I felt like with that particular card.  I didn't over think it.  

This was part of Sutton's homework.  Her teacher sent home the class list and asked that each child address each card to their classmates.  My little sweetie hand wrote 33 cards in one sitting without a single complaint (I was a little shocked).

I sewed wax paper together to make the outer envelopes for about half the cards and then I ran out of time.  It was down to the wire.  The cards were due today and I was literally packaging them up until the last minute before we needed to head out the door to school.

For the other cards I just neatly folded the wax paper and attached the name tag with a clothes pin, worked just as well :)

Now, comes the box.  Did you think that was it?!  This year, also as part of her homework (I'm telling you kindergarten is intense!) she had a family project to do.  We needed to make a box to hold Valentine's given to her from other kids.

This was a super fun project and she and I worked for three hours one night.  It is over the top!   She put stickers all over it.  She glued while I applied this red trim along the top of the box.  It was in a stash of vintage trim that was my grandmother's.  We attached a picture of her, so when the lid is off her classmates will know it's her box.

I let her use the glue gun for the first time which was pretty exciting for her.  We glued and layered, and glued and layered.  Hearts on top of hearts on top of hearts.

I also let her use the iron for the first time.  I applied heat n' bond to this floral fabric and I cut out the heart shape and she ironed it on the top of the box.  I made the bunting and she applied the red felt letters to the top of the bunting.  They worked out great.  They are precut felt letters with adhesive backing, so she just peeled and stuck them on.

I'm happy to say (and a little surprised) our box wasn't the most over the top box at school today at drop off.  It was amazing what some of the kids came up with.  I saw one box that was made entirely out of legos!  In her instructions, her teacher mentioned that if done right these boxes can be a special part of the children's childhood that they can put little treasures in for years to come.  I hope that's true for S.  I had her apply the little red birds and told her when she sees them she can think of me :)

This is our homemade Valentine from last year.  If you would like to see the step by step you can check out the guest post I did for my friend Erin at Such Small Steps.

Hope you have a love filled Valentine's Day!

XO,
Amber

DIY Anchor Embossed Wrapping Paper

 

One of our good family friends turned four last week.  His mama threw him a pirate themed birthday party over the weekend.  I love a party with a theme, don't you?!  It makes gift buying/wrapping fun.

I was bored the night before his party and came up with my own anchor embossed wrapping paper.

Here are some of the supplies I used.  Let me tell you a little secret too about kraft paper, you can get huge rolls of it in the paint department at Home Depot for cheap.  It is wider and heavier than the typical kraft paper wrapping paper, which is sometimes good, sometimes not so good, but you get a ton of it.

The first thing I did was wrap my gift in the kraft paper.  I used super tape instead of regular tape.  I did this for two reasons, 1) it is stronger than conventional tape which is a bonus when dealing with bulky paper and 2) it's double sided, there is no tape showing on your wrapped package.  It's the little deets :)

Next, I faintly drew diagonal lines across the package with pencil.  The width of this ruler was ideal for this.

See, faint lines.

This stamp pad gets a lot of loving.  Can you tell?  It's called a watermark stamp pad.  If you wanted to simplify this project you could just as easily stamp with standard ink and forget about embossing.

I'm a huge fan of embossing so I stamped away.  Before you apply embossing powder the stamp is clear.

I staggered the anchors as evenly as I could, just eyeballed it and kept the stamp between the lines.

Now this is embossing powder.  It comes in a ton of colors.

I sprinkled the powder on each anchor and then the fun part comes.

Shake the powder off and see your clear stamps become full of life.  I shake my embossing powder onto a manilla folder.  Then I close the folder so all the excess powder falls into the crease of the folder and pour it back into the powder container.  No waste.

Not done yet, after the powder is applied I went over the anchors with this heat tool.  It's one of my favorite crafting supplies I have.  They are around $24 at Paper Source.

As you go over each anchor, the embossing powder almost liquifies and the stamp becomes raised up and shiny.  It's super fun, like melting sugar on top of creme brulee!  After I went over all the anchors I erased all the pencil lines.

Once I had my packages embossed I also embossed a big blue four on my signature hangtag (the only reason it's my signature is a bought a box of 1,000 hangtags aka lifetime supply!).  Then I attached a personal note and tied everything together with cotton twine.

Two of the three gifts we gave our buddy went along with the theme.  The first one, pirate magnets.  They are so cute, magnetic, pirate paper dolls basically, all contained in this tin container.

The other item we gave him which I absolutely love is this anchor on linen colored canvas from Land of Nod.  His mom has a monogramming business so I thought this would be so cute to embroider his name or to put his monogram on it.

This wrapping project could be changed to suit all kinds of themes, the age of the recipient, hearts for Valentine's day, etc.  It was pretty easy and really fun.

If you want to see the deets of the party, you can check out my friends blog, Little Presidents Design, here.

XO,

Amber