Monday, July 11, 2011

Road Trip!

I spent the first two weeks of summer on a loooong road trip with my Mom and the kids! Here are a few pictures that show off our adventure.

James and Makenna at the Reno "zoo"


Our first stop was in Reno. James fell asleep with Lucy!


Then we drove to Salt Lake City Utah, the big hit of the trip was playing basketball with the big boys. Makenna is good!


Lots of cousins on moms side were visiting at the same time.


Visiting Aunt Maureen and Uncle Tracy. Aunt Maureen let them make cupcakes!!


Loving the trampoline with Cousin Melanie!


Visiting the Utah Zoo (this one was a legitimate zoo). James loved the dinousaur exhibit.


Holy TIGERS!



Visiting Grandpa Les and his bulldogs!


The favorite thing about Grandmas house was all of the creepy cirtters.


Spending time with Grandma Joan


This was our looooong drive home


We stopped to visit the salt flats. James kept saying "just give me some tomatoes and let me dip them in that salt!" He learned that the salt in the salt flats wasn't ready to eat yet!


Back in Reno eating In-N-Out Burger


Swimming in the hot tub back in Medford.


The trip ended here in Salem where James got a hair cut by a read "professional"!


We had a wonderful time but were all ready to sleep in our own beds and eat real food by the end of the trip!

Saturday, June 4, 2011

Spring Update


Well my promise to myself to update every weekend is pretty much gone right? Maybe I can get back on it starting this summer! Here is a quick update of everything that has been going on with us this spring.


Mom has a new baby who was born with a cleft pallet and is being treated at Doernbecker Children's Hospital in Portland so they have made a few trips up here recently. On one of their trips up here we went to my favorite Children's Museum! The kids had a blast in the jungle room.


Andy has been playing softball on an city league team that is a mix of men from our church and dutch brothers employees. Weird mix! The team isn't that great but on sunny days it is nice to spend some time outside.


This is moms new baby (can't show her sweet face!) I am in love with ruffles and this onesie with a ruffle bum was very quick to make.


One of moms trips was on Mothers Day weekend! We got to take her out to dinner and enjoy the weekend with her and the kids.


Spring is my favorite time to teach in the classroom. So many great things to learn about! We found this butterfly one day while we were outside. It had recently been released by a kindergarten classroom and wasn't ready to fly away yet. The kids got to study it for a long time! We are now raising some butterflies of our own.


The biggest and BEST news of the spring: TeriAnn and Jesse are having a BABY!!!!!!! We are all very excited to be Aunts and Uncles and Grandma and Grandpa! She is due December 22nd (right around my winter break!) I already tried to start shopping but it's hard when you don't know the gender yet! Can't wait to keep updating more and more about the new adventure in our family!



Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Quilt #5!!

I have finished my 5th and by far my hardest quilt yet! I'm slightly delayed in posting about it because it was being made as a birthday project for my sister. I didn't even start making it until the week of her birthday so of course it was very late getting to her! Last week I finally finished it and sent it off in the mail. I'm excited to share some pictures of it now that it is no longer the "secret" project that I am working on. The pattern was purchased from the amazing blog Cluck Cluck Sew!


The longest part was cutting out 168 triangles, 168 kites, and 42 circles!


The middle circles are appliquéd on.


I used 17 different fabrics to make up the random color pattern and the brown to bring them all together.


There is very little quilting, just a few straight line stitches up and down each block.



My first pieced backing! It's a little random but was meant to use all of the pieces of fabric that I could.


Washed and folded and ready to be mailed off! It arrived to my sister a few months after her birthday but I hope she enjoys it as much as I enjoyed making it! There are definitely more quilts using this pattern in my future :)


I have one quilt that I have been working on for a long time waiting just to be quilted and one quilt that I am dying to make! Then I need to take a bit of break because this is getting expensive!!! I'll be back at it this summer :)

Friday, March 25, 2011

Spring Break

A nice perk of being a teacher is getting this one week off each spring. I love it because it gives me a chance to clean the house and finish up projects but most importantly because it signifies the end of the school year is near! I counted today and we have only 12 weeks to go!

I spent the beginning of the week working on my super secret project. It is soooo close to being done and I can not wait to show it off!!



My second secret project was a belated cake for Makenna's birthday. I took it in to my parents house and told my mom that I just didn't have time decorate it. I think she knew something was up when I couldn't stop smiling as she cut into it!


A RAINBOW cake! Whenever you ask Makenna what her favorite color is she says "I love every color of the rainbow, but my favorite is purple." I thought this was appropriate!

Andy has been doing P90X now for a few weeks and didn't want to take a break even when we spent 3 days with my parents. He has all of the kids doing yoga with him!


To get out of the house, Mom took us all to a play center in Medford and they had the best dress up clothes! James wants me to try and make one of these for him... hmmmm...


Makenna wants me to make her a skunk costume! This one was cute too.


Can you see the rainbow? This was on our drive home.


Spending the last few days of spring break getting the house all cleaned up and sleeping in! I hope everyone else was able to take some time to relax as well!

Sunday, March 6, 2011

World Wide Web

I am constantly reading home decor and sewing blogs! Recently I have been obsessed with two exciting tools to use with the blogs.The first thing I found makes reading my blogs a lot easier. I have seen google reader used before but I didn't like that it was an extra page for me to go to and you didn't look at the blog in it's original screen.

While reading a blog, I saw somebody else using this add on to their google reader. It is a little next button that stays on your bookmarks bar. No matter what page I am on, I can click on the next and it will take me to a blog post that I have not read yet. Then I just keep clicking next until it tells me that I am all updated on my blogs! So much easier!! (When I can find where I found out how to do it, I will update. )

The second thing that I am supppper excited about is a great new website called Pinterest. I can not tell you how many things I have found on the web and think, that would be fun to make! Then I bookmark it and it gets lost in a sea of a million other bookmarks. Pinterest helps us visual people to see all those bookmarks! This is the opening page that you can browse through and see what everyone else in the world is pinning!


After finding pinterest I had to wait a week or two on a waiting list before I got an invitation. I was so excited when I got the e-mail a couple of nights ago! I have just gotten started adding all of my bookmarks to the site. I love all of the categories that you can put things into.


These are all of the quilts that I either can't wait to make or have on my list to make again and again. I just love how visual everything is and how all of the quilts and inspiration for quilts can be on one page.


My other favorite part of pinterest is that you can look at what everyone else is pinning. Make it Perfect is a blog that I love to read (and where I found out about Pinterest!) I can go to her Pinterest home page and look at all of her great pins! I've typed in quilt to the search bar and looked for hours at hundreds of different quilts that people have pinned. Then it's easy to repin them to my board!

So that is my rant of why I love living in the technology age! I'm working like crazy on a special project that I can't wait to show off in a few weeks!


Monday, February 21, 2011

Crafty Saturday

It was a very busy in our house this week! We started off with Andy having a minor surgery (everything went well and he is fine now!), on Thursday our computer quit working and on Friday our water heater went out again! Thankfully we got everything fixed before Saturday and we were ready to relax for the weekend. We had an amazingly crafty Saturday that even Andy got involved in!

I have an entire craft room in our house and yet I tend to move everything out into the family room so that I can be closer to Andy and the TV. I've recently taken over our dinning room table. There are about four projects going on here and I made progress on each of them over the weekend!


This pile of apples has been calling Andy's name to make into an apple pie. If you know my history with pies you know why I have been putting him off for a while now. I finally made a deal that if he makes the crust I will take care of everything else.

The most successful pie our house has ever seen! It took some good team work (and a lot of cleaning up the kitchen afterwards!)


Andy's birthday was a couple weeks ago and my sister sent him a personal ice cream maker. Another part of our successful Saturday was going to the grocery store so we finally got some ingredients to make ice cream.


We finished the day off with a dinner date, movie and Andy eating his homemade ice cream with apple pie!


I'm excited to have Monday off to spend some more time sewing, sewing and more sewing! Hopefully this week turns out to be as good as the weekend was.