A Pocketful of Licorice

In which Paola and I are dressed like mannequins.

I just think these are funny.

Beach Week 2012

Just wanted to share some favorite shots from beach week. This year, I made a list of things I wanted to do at the beach, and although I didn't do all of them, I think it got me to throw myself into the whole experience more fully than usual. My beach week reading fell by the wayside, but I think it was worth it. 

sweet old school beach chairs, c/o Buster's mom, Joan!

I love happy hours at the beach!

Tina's homemade limoncello with cream. All I can say is...holy sh*t!

Morning chat with Shatty, Rita, and Baby Payce. 

PC girls!

This counts as tan for me!

Marina took this one of her girls. 

Later, Old Lyme. See you next year. 

40 by 40: #6 go on a picnic

Krippi, Leo, and I had a simple picnic on a riverbank in Vermont a few weekends ago. Sliced cucumbers and tomatoes, olives, blueberries, cherries. And beer. 

It's such a pretty spot. I wish I could remember the name of it. It's up near Burlington. It's just too bad I forgot my bathing suit. 

Such a beautiful summer afternoon. I love it up there. And I think I should have more picnics. 

 

40 by 40: #28a outings with C. Bear

This is one of the items on my list that's most important to me. Outings with my niece, Claire (aka C. Bear). I love spending time with her - it's so much fun watching her experience new things. A few weeks ago, we took her to Roger Williams Park Zoo, in Providence. Apparently, she has recently learned how to say "wow!" and was very impressed by the elephants and giraffes. "Wow! wow! wow!" She's heart-meltingly adorable. 

Her little face is always so pensive. She studies everything. It's my unbiased opinion that she's wicked smaht. 

Thanksgiving favorites

Thanksgiving is always at my uncle and aunt's house and it's always nice, but this year, I really had a blast. It was great to catch up with my cousins (and a couple of my brothers I don't get to see all that often). And I got to gobble up Baby Claire, who is cuter every time I see her even though that hardly seems possible. Here are a few pictures...

Seriously, we can't get enough of that baby. 

Hope you all had a nice holiday!

easy shower decor

Last weekend, we threw my best friend a wedding shower and I was in charge of the decorations. We had the shower at her parents' house. Her dad has an incredible garden and not only provided all the flowers, but arranged them as well. I think he has a real knack for it. The simple flower arrangements worked really well with the decorations I came up with. 

I love the mason jars. All I did was place a white doily underneath them and add some hand cut x's and o's. I made a huge stack of them and scattered them randomly around on the serving tables and on the eating tables. 

The chandelier was one of my favorite things.

I had made a feather garland by running feathers through my sewing machine, which actually doesn't work that well. So I only had one sort of short one. Her sister suggested putting it on the chandelier and it looked perfect! 

I used a lot of simple home-made paper garlands. I did a bunch with small doilies and glittery hearts. Mainly I used them to decorate the serving tables, but I put the little bit that was leftover on the mirror here. 

I made paper circle garlands out of an old pad of K & Company patterned paper I had in my stash. 

And I cut a bunch of words out of red construction paper and made word banners. I'm going to keep construction paper in mind for all my future decorating needs. It's really cheap and I think the word banners add a fun touch. 

So, this is now the second shower I've helped plan and done the decorations for. (My sister-in-law's baby shower was the first) I think I really love decorating for parties!

Shatty's book

I've been sitting on this for what feels like forever. It's actually only been a week, but I'm so excited about it that it feels like forever. It's maybe my favorite scrapbooking project ever. And I've been doing this for over eleven years now (wow) so that's saying something. 

Paola's wedding shower is today, and this is her present. It's a book chronicling our entire friendship, which has spanned nineteen years, thus far. We met early in our freshman year at PC (1992 yikes) and have been best friends for nearly that long. I tried to do a project like this for her once before and failed because it seemed too hard. And that was about ten years ago, now. I was completely consumed by this project for about three straight days. I hardly slept. I get like that sometimes. Today, she'll get to see it and I can finally share some highlights.

Actually, the only thing I'm a little disappointed about is that some of the silver got rubbed off the duct tape during the binding process. Binding this book was a real bitch. Pardon my French. I tried about five different ways to bore through all the layers of paper before resorting to doing the pages in batches with my Crop-a-dile. 

The cover/binding was done with bookboard, duct tape, and embroidery floss (all six strands together). 

The pages are so bulky that I had to add some filler cardboard strips into the binding to get the book to lie (more or less) flat. 

I adhered fabric to the inside covers with Mod Podge. And the intro page features some pictures of wedding-related craft store hijinks. 

The pages of the book are a mixture of patterned scrapbooking paper, vintage wallpaper swatches, canvas, pages from a vintage pamphlet on wildflowers, fabric, and vintage ledger paper. A lot of gesso was used, and a fair number of doilies. 

I used the ledger paper pages to type out my journaling with my old typewriter. The journaling is a jumble of anecdotes, lists, things we do, and some excerpts from my college journals. I also used my scrapbooks as a source of journaling. Some of the pages are mini-recreations of scrapbook layouts I've done over the years. 

Sister Golden Hair is kind of our song. For some reason. 

We've gone on several road trips together and I have this little black notebook that I've carried with me on all of them. We've made lists about and kept pretty extensive notes on our adventures. I typed up some of our lists and notes and put them in this pocket. 

Obscure Scrubs reference. 

Anecdotes from the late 90s and early aughts. 

Shatty will know what this means. 

Juan and the rest of the Superstars have their own page. 

I used these gold Hambly frames to title a lot of the journaling pages. 

A lot of the pages feature pink stitching. 

I have a full-sized layout version of this page in one of my albums. The journaling comes right from the layout. 

Some of the journaling is hand-written. I tried for a good mix of hand-written and typed journaling. 

Rita and Kristen, the other two of my golden girls (I'm Blanche, by the way) feature pretty prominently in the book. 

I don't have a scrapbook layout about this yet, but I should. 

Inside back cover - more fabric and Mod Podge. 

And the back cover. 

Whew. Those are some of my favorite pages. I photographed all the pages pre-binding so I'd have them for myself, so I might share more pages in later posts. 

Thanks for looking - I'm so excited about this one!

 

 

 

 

Jen rocked my hair.

So, I went a really long time between haircuts and my hair was looking really bad. I mean bad. Like, ratty, shapeless, limp, tangled bad. I think I went a year without getting a cut. I should not do that. Anyway, my friend Jen, who is also my brother's girlfriend, and awesome, cut it for me yesterday and it looks WAY better now. This is about my favorite haircut ever. 

Here we are before the cut, looking sad because my hair is SO ugly. 

And here is the amazing transformation.

Seriously. My hair never looks that good. Mainly because I don't know how to do anything. Anything at all. But I've resolved to practice a couple things. 1. Making big wavy curls like Jen did on me. 2. Putting my hair up in a messy bun. Jen has gotten me into the spirit of making an effort on my hair. I even bought hairspray, which I probably haven't owned since high school. 

Jen is also doing Paola's wedding day hair and make-up, so she went with me and Jen did a trial run on her. 

Here she is, doing pretty wedding hair on Paola. 

There was also a make-up consultation. 

And practice make-up.

We had so much fun! Thanks so much, Jen! You rock!

And thanks, Nick, for the amazing pork chops and potato salad!

 

DIY wedding projects

Recently, Paola and I have spent a couple days working a few projects for her wedding. We're making pennant banners and ribbon wands and table decorations. Most of the decor will be DIY. It's been fun and exciting to work on this stuff with her - partly because I love crafty projects and partly because it's so cool to be able to help my best friend with such a big, important event in her life. 

One of our big projects is putting together pennant banners to string up all over the tent. 

Last Saturday, we spent about 2 hours in JoAnn, choosing fabric and other supplies. She's going with red, aqua, yellow, and white. 

And yesterday, she came over and we laid out and cut all the pennants. 

We were able to get about 40 pennants per yard of fabric. 

Overall, we cut out over 300 pennants. Here they are all stacked up next to a dinosaur for scale. That's a lot of pennants!

 Also, craft store hijinks have occurred. Craft stores sell a lot of wacky stuff, so hijinks are inevitable. 

Next time we get together, I think it will be a sewing day - banners are getting sewed! Ribbon wands, table display spray painting, a photo booth backdrop, and photo booth props are on the agenda. This is fun!

a june wedding

Walt has been a friend of my family's for a really long time - 20 years maybe. Last Saturday, he married Sara and we went down to Monroe, CT for the wedding. It was a great day - pretty weather, pretty bride, lovely ceremony, fun reception - we had a blast! Here are some of the pictures I took. 

I took all of them with the Hipstamatic app on my iPhone (Lens - Jimmy, film - Ina's 1935, flash - standard). I'm thinking I should switch up the settings, though. I use these all the time and I like the effect but they're washed out and they print horribly. And I need to take more pictures with my real camera. Most of my recent pictures are with gimmicky camera apps. I still need to work on taking better pictures. Another summer project, maybe. 

It's my first official day of summer vacation and I've got quite a to-do list. Half fun and half work. I'm off to tackle it. Have a great day!