From Field to Can!

On Saturday we went and picked a huge bucket of fresh strawberries. I found on one of my favorite blogs an easy recipe for strawberry jam and thought I would try my hand at it. We kept a few around to eat on ice cream, shortcake, and right out of the bowl! Fresh strawberries don't last long around this house though so I had to make the jam quick!

Here is a very small portion of what we picked all clean and cut:

It took me for-EVER to mash up all of the strawberries. I meant to buy a potato masher at the store but got all the way home before I realized I forgot it. That would have made this whole process a lot easier! I didn't even take a picture of the huge amount of sugar that I had to add because I don't think anybody would eat it. Here are all the strawberries, sugar, and surjell mixed together and ready to be canned!

These three are all ready for the fourth of July! Those lucky enough to join the Iron Gate celebration just might get one of these!

These two are my favorites! I know that it's just strawberry jam (and super easy to make) but I still had to make it look adorable!

This is how much two batches makes. It's all a frozen now but should be more than enough to last us for the whole year and lots to give away!

I followed the directions from Sarah at the Thrifty Decor Chick but it also follows very closely to the directions on the surjell box.

June 13th

Two years, two great things to celebrate, two days filled with bad luck!!

Our wedding day was beautiful! I have wonderful memories that fill that day. All of our favorite family and friends were there and we really had a great day. But it rained on our outdoor reception...

And our caterer (don't even get me started on her) brought the wrong size table clothes. On top of that she didn't even seem to care and my mom was the one running around to find something, anything to cover the wooden tables. She found these blues ones at the hotel next door and I am grateful but look at them! The blue didn't quite fit with the rest of my soft green and pink decor. Every time I see pictures of these I cringe! (Thankfully because it rained nobody sat at these tables for very long)

One year later and it's our one year anniversary. We decided that instead of doing gifts we wanted to take a mini-vacation to celebrate together. We want to wait though until I am off for the summer so that it can be a three or four day vacation. So our actual anniversary day was spent going to church, cleaning, laundry, Andy smelling up my house with beer brewing and was supposed to end in a nice dinner. This is us right before we left the house for dinner....

Let me rephrase that, this is us right before Andy locked us out of our house without any keys to get back in or start up a car. This is my very unhappy face :(

To make things worse while he was using my phone to look up a locksmith it died. He didn't have his on him. No better time than this to meet our new neighbors! While we were waiting for his Dad to send a locksmith Andy decided to try his own hand at breaking into our garage door. He was successful!! I am freaking out! If Andy can break into our house that means that anyone can! Needless to say we are making sure that our garage to house door is always locked now and the deadbolt lock is always locked! We finally made it out to dinner that night. This picture is before all of that bad luck struck.

When we got home we tried our year old cake top! The white cake part wasn't bad but the frosting and filling were nasty! It made a long trip from Medford to Salem when it got the most beaten up, then moved from apartment to house and has been squashed in the back of our freezer for awhile so it's not aesthetically pleasing either! We both took a bite and then threw it away :)

At dinner that night the waiter gave us this free cupcake because it was our anniversary so we ate it instead! It was delicious!

Needless to say, so far we have not had the best of luck on June 13th. Fortunately we did have a great honeymoon so hopefully the next few weeks will bring some better luck!

The Start of our First Garden.....

..... and possibly the end too!

Well most of you know that I am not a gardener. I know very little about plants. Even though my Mother is a Master gardener I was never the one to be outside with her and to learn all of her expertise. With that being said, one of the first things we decided to do in our new house was plant a garden!!! It's a small corner in our yard, with tomatoes, pumpkins, squash, jalapeños, cucumber and strawberries!

(I had just watered them)

The jalapeños are doing good!

The tomatoes are doing great!

The squash/ cucumbers (because I can't remember which plant is which), is not doing so hot....

Neither are the pumpkins :(

This is a patch of sunflower seeds! We will see how they do eventually.

The good news is that it rained last night and that seems to have helped. And yes I have been watering them. I've also called my Mom and Sister to consult a few different times because I still have no clue what I am doing!

It's About Time

We FINALLY signed the papers yesterday!! That's 11 days after we were supposed to sign them!

They had told us we would for sure be signing them on Thursday and it would be closed on Friday so we could be moving in right now. They were wrong again and we signed Thursday at one meaning that it won't close until Monday. There is a chance it won't close till Tuesday which would mean that we will stay here until the next weekend because we wouldn't be able to use Andys Dad's moving truck from Tuesday through Friday. If it closes on Monday like it's supposed to them we will be moving in Monday at 5!

We signed a billion papers, most of which said the same thing over and over, some of them were even blank! At least that step is over and fingers are crossed that everything goes right from this point on!

Friday was even more stressful on top of trying to find time to sign the papers. I got a voice mail from my Mom during class on Friday (during music!) that said she was going in for a cat scan at noon. She had stomach pains all week and the doctor thought it might be appendicitis. We pushed up the signing of the papers a few hours so that we could leave for Medford as early as possible if we needed to. Luckily, it was not appendicitis and she did not need to go in for surgery that night. She found out that she has cist on her ovaries. Still very painful but will hopefully go away on their own. We are very thankful that everything will be ok (and that she still gets to go on her vacation next week!)

We are very glad that Friday is over! Now we waste away another Saturday and Sunday and prepare for moving on Monday! Off to the Salem Saturday Market!

Baby John's Quilt

This is my second quilt and was far more challenging than the first! My very favorite friend Ashley is expecting her second baby any day now. I really wanted to bless them with something special and that was why the entire quilt experiment started in the first place (that I am totally obsessed with now). This is a "rag" quilt, it has raw edges all around the middle squares so the more it gets washed the more snuggly it will get. Last Saturday we met up to get a little pampering and to hand it over so now I can share the pictures with you!

I purposefully did not show any progress pictures along the way so that it would be a surprise for her but I did take some. At some point this week or next I will post some of them.

I used the tutorial for the quilt top from here: http://crazymomquilts.blogspot.com/

and the tutorial for the binding from here: http://www.vanessachristenson.com/

One More Week

Our closing got pushed off one more week :( The appraisal took longer than it should have and there are a TON of people processing loans right now so even though we were supposed to be signing papers yesterday we didn't. Our lender said we have a one percent chance of signing them tomorrow but more than likely it will be Monday. Which means we won't move in until next weekend because we gave them three days after closing. Like my mother said, as long as we close some time we should be good. But my house is a DISASTER!

That is only the beginning of it.

I was having a hard time living in it for this week and now it's an entire week more! We have been praying that they would find somebody to rent our apartment out asap but now we are really praying that they haven't quite yet because we were supposed to be out by Sunday. If they keep us to that we will be homeless for a week!

I guess I just have to do what I do best and get to organizing!

My Obsession

Andy pointed out that I may have some little itty bit of an obsession with blogs! Ok so maybe it's not just a little obsession I actually think it's a pretty big one! Recently I switched from using Internet Explorer to "Google Chrome". Why? Because it's pretty and fancy and I thought what the heck. So needed to move all of my favorites over and sort through them at the same time. I found that I have a TON of projects saved that I would love to do and a TON of blogs that I really like to look at whenever they update them. To keep them all in one place I added them to the side bar on this blog. It makes it easier to see if my favorites are updated and which ones I have looked at recently.

Andy also pointed out that I have made a major shift from baking to sewing and I noticed that most of the blogs have something to do with either sewing or home decor. I'm sure i'll find a few more crafts and then swing back into baking before to long! Coming soon is a list of all the quilts that I am itching to make!