Glass Etching

My friend showed how to do this on her blog and I've been wanting to try this for a long time! (Thanks Jess!) It was easier than I expected.

Basically, all you do is get a stencil or cut out letters/shapes with your Cricut like I did (UsingVinyl). Make sure to do some test-cut outs on regular paper to see if it will fit and if you will in fact like it. Stick it on where you want it,(I did mine on outside so had to have letters cut out backwards.) paint the Armor Etch glass etching cream on and let sit for about 15 min. Wash off with Cold water. Peel off vinyl and voila, an awesome, personalized etched glass!

(I know, bad picture...oooh well, too lazy enough to take a better one.)

Spunky Bathroom

We painted the girls bathroom a couple months ago, and I am now just finishing fixin' it up.

I wanted it to be bright and bright we got! I hate having small rooms painted dark, they look smaller and just not very cheery.

Cut out the vinyl lettering myself, love how it turned out!

I got the cutsie rugs for half off at Hobby Lobby!

I got some wooden frames from the craft store and modge podged them. Learn how to make these easy paper flowers Here.

Wow, almost 2 years here and I've finally completely finished a room! The kitchen is a slow work in progress. I hate trying to figure out what to do with wall space.

Royal Pain

Being crowned so many times I should feel like a Queen, but I don't...why? Ask my dentist, he's crowned me at least 5 times. Royal pain in the mouth.

In April I had a surgery on one of my previous molars that needed a root canal. I had an abcess which was making my sinuses all whacked out. They had to re-drill through the tooth, and once again gettin crowned.

Last month I woke up to find a hole on the side of one tooth. what the? How did that happen. Went to the dentist last week and found out that before my root canal on that tooth I got a filling and when they put on the crown after r.c. they didn't bring the crown down all the way-just stopped at my filling....lame. So, once AGAIN, gettin crowned.

I think I'm starting to see a pattern here. Guess I better go eat some more chocolate and continue to not floss my teeth. ;)

Cute movie

In between some great talks I was listening to on byu.tv, this commercial came on and thought it was cute enough to share! Gotta love the church!

Rag Garland

My sister and I started making one of these for this past Valentines, but of course I didn't finish it that day so it never got finished. It gave me an idea for my sisters birthday present though! I got about 6 coordinating fabrics and tore them into strips, and also got some ribbons and tied them on the twine in no specific order. I modge podged some cute matching scrapbooking paper and cut it out with exacto knife. Her reaction to it made it all worth it!

I also made a magnet board for her, but forgot to take a picture. I'll get one and show ya.

You can do this for any holiday or special occasion. For the Valentines one we made, we scrapped some small heart boxes and used red, pink, white ribbons. When I finish it, I will post it.

Alooooooha!

Tis' the season for a luau!

I helped my mom plan one for my sister's sweet 16 party, and we're very pleased with how it turned out! We had so much fun with it. I love love love and did I mention LOVE doing parties!!!

Here's how it looked:

Made our own tiki bar hut with a netted gazebo

Scalloped birthday banner

Grass Skirts

Lots of leis

Real Pineapples and coconuts (for authentic feel)

Seashells

Tiki torches (one of my favorite touches)

Beach balls

Fish Nets

Lighted Hawaiian flowers

Paper Tropical birds

Plastic coconut cups (found these at Target for $1!) with umbrella straws

Sweet Giant Tiki on front door

Tropical looking beach towel as a rug

(Found most of this stuff at Party Land- coolio store!)

For food we served up: BBQ pulled pork (from Charlie Boy's BBQ-great idea Mom!) on buns, grilled corn on the cob (the best, we found that it's so much easier to husk with no hairs sticking to it. just wrap corn in foil and grill till corn looks cooked yellow-another great idea Mom!), fruit kebabs and Pina coladas (Nay's fav.) in our festive coconut cups! Look at our awesome mom hard at work to make sure her lil dot's sweet 16 is the best ever!

And to add the finishing touch, Luau music! I made my own fun mix which included:

Nuff Sedd- Cherry Bomb

Nuff Sedd- Life is Perfect

Ub40- Kingston Town

Ub40- Red Red Wine

Ub40-Way you do the things you do

Baha Men- Best years of our lives

Baha Men- Lime in the coconut

Limbo Rock Remix (Miami Mix)

Laga Savea- Take me away

Beach Boys- Kokomo

Beach Boys- Surfin USA

Rupert Holmes- Pina Colada Song

Copacabana 1993 Remix

Imua- Waimanalo Style

Crazy Fingers- Surfs Up

Kawika Regidor- Just Called to say I love you

Big Mountain- Baby I love your way

Eddy Grant- Electric Avenue

For fun we:

Lei'd everyone as they arrived,

Hula hooped (or jump roped like Dale did =)

Went low as we could go doing the Limbo (along with the Limbo song of course!),

Tug-a-war with kiddie pool in the middle for the weaklings to get pulled into. =)

and

Opened a coconut to taste the juice inside. All this time I thought coconuts were filled with a luscious pina colada (well at least a sweet, creamy juice) but to my surprise it was bitter and oh so not what I expected!

I had everyone come over to the Photo Op and pose away! Love them, you all look great!! Especially that orange guy in the middle- how festive is that shirt! I taught him well. ;)

For dessert we brought out kebabs which I made before here, except I used marshmallows instead of bananas this time!

I had a blast with everyone!

Hope you had a sweeeeeeeeet birthday Nay!

Sunday entertainment

This is what we do for entertainment around our house on Sundays...... sit and watch our girls getting bopped on the head and then laugh our heads off play so peacefully and nice together.

FunDay

It was fun to get out and have fun with our girls this weekend.

Liberty Land was a short but fun time. Faith had a blast on the airplane ride as you can tell. hah We couldn't help but laugh We felt bad for the poor girl. =)

We got on our favorite ride, bumper boats. It was Mikkie and I against Tim and Faith. Although our water war was being thwarted because of some kids we didn't even know who thought they were being funny ganged up on us and shot us mercilessly. I would have drenched them and then some but the rain did that for us.... after about 3 minutes it started pouring, so we had to get out. We were already wet, so what was a little more water.

Yesterday we spent the afternoon in Alpine. We originally wanted to move there, it's so beautiful, but very pricey. One of my favorite places there is the Peppermint Place. My mom used to take us a lot when we were kids. It was so much fun to go on a shuga rush with a whole bag of goodies and play at the park right after! Those were the days. I miss the old Peppermint Place though, they've moved and changed a bit- it used to be bigger and more stuff and you could go upstairs to watch them make taffy and create frosting shapes on the candy canes. They do have a perk with the new place though, serving gelatos! That's the whole reason we went there this time. Faith and I shared a mint chip with dark chocolate and Tim had Acai Mango with strawberry . It was delish! They have a bunch of flavorful candy canes like rootbeer float, pina colada, strawberry lemonade, etc. and taffy which Tim loves and peppermint bark which I luh-hove! Last time I went I got a prickly pear and hazelnut gelato...those 2 are by far my favorite and I was quite sad they didn't have it this time 'round. You've gotta try this place out if you haven't been; if you have been, it's time to go enjoy yourself again! =)

We went to a park just down the street after to indulge in our sweets. I have lots of memories there also. I'm sure glad the weather turned out nice so we could enjoy the nice day out! They have the coolest playground....the ground part. I know, weird, but it's little bits of red and blue rubber- smells like someone's burnin' the rubber. It's way cool to walk on though- bouncy! This was Mikkie's first time in a swing alone. She thought it was pretty shweet.

Paper correction

I was notified that the CTR paper in my missionary kit did not work, so just to let you know I fixed it and reposted the link on the previous post (Missionary Kit Freebie). Thanks!

Missionary Kit Freebie!!

** NO LONGER DOWNLOADABLE FOR FREE **

This took me longer than I anticipated.

I dedicate this kit to my awesome bud of a brutha, Paul, who is on a mission right now (6 months left!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

He is basically the reason I started doing my own digi kits. I told my mom I would scrapbook his pictures (digitally of course) and so I went searching all over the internet for some fun missionary digi kits...I couldn't find squat! So, I said to my self, "Self, what about making your own!" What a great idea. Thank you. =) So the search then changed to find every possible tutorial out there to make my idea a reality. I got a tad (ok, a lot!) distracted making other kits, then told myself I couldn't make any other kits til I finished this one.

This kit is a lil bit different because some of the papers are photo backgrounds. I got permission from Paul to use some of his pictures he's taken on his mission, I was excited! You can also use them as overlays by lowering the opacity, there's many cool things you can do, hope you have fun with these!

**Free for personal use only**

A sad "tail"

Wanted a pet

Got a bunny

Happy family

Drove home

Sneezing attack

Allergic daddy

Stupid allergies

Bunny returned

Sad family

Yo this 'Gurt is goooood!

My sister introduced me to Red Mango for the first time last week and I'm hooked! I love fro yo and I love pomegranate anything, another great combo! What makes it even more tasty is putting grahams on top. I need to try Tangomonium next!

And the winners are................

I know...it's past 12:00, thanks to my computer who all the sudden decided to be retarded and cause me stress! I can't capture screen shots right now..sigh, but the winners are:

#5

Katie Webb said...

Oh my goodness Laura I'm absoutely loving your blog and now I'm a follower :) I'm also super in love with those Fall decorations!

July 31, 2009 3:31 PM

who will get the "Give Thanks" blocks!

AND

#13

on the Sutton's said...

Hey Laura I became a follower, this looks like fun. I sure hope I win!!!

August 3, 2009 1:55 PM

Who gets the set of 3 "autumn, Fall, Harvest" blocks!

Congrats you two!!! Contact me at lmjharper@gmail.com to arrange getting your prize!

And thanks to everyone else who participated! Don't worry...there will be PLENTY more chances to win more prizes, so stay tuned! =)

Heaven on a stick

I found this recipe and thought I'd give it a shot cuz it looked so easy. It's a fun lil treat to whip up when you're in a hurry!

I did mine a lil different though, instead of toothpicks, I put them on kebab sticks, so I call mine:

Brownie Kebabs

* Bake 1 box of brownies

* Wash strawberries and hull

* Cut bananas into big chunks

Alternate on stick and then drizzle with chocolate. Instead of syrup, I melted some milk chocolate chips in the microwave to drizzle over them. I like it better than syrup cuz it hardens! mmmmm....

IF YOU HAVEN'T ALREADY, ENTER THE GIVEAWAY HERE, WHICH ENDS TOMORROW!

Yummy mistake

I wanted to bake something to take over to our new neighbors today. I planned on "Amish Friendship" bread, but the plans were abruptly ruined when I realized that instead of using only 1 cup of the "starter", we used ALL 8 cups of it! Oops. Tim used his mathematician mind to try and figure out a solution. We weren't about to throw it all away! So, we decided to just make something to get rid of it. We tried waffles. Too sticky. Crepes? Turned into an apple blob. What about cupcakes or muffins? hmmm....these are pretty tasty! I wanted to call them Oops-I-made-a-mistake-cakes, but Tim thought "Serendipity cakes" sounded more legitimate, for the definition of Serendipity is "good luck in making unexpected and fortunate discoveries." Unexpected it was.

So, here's our serendipitous recipe. =)

Serendipity Cakes

· 1 (.25) package dry yeast

· 1/4 c. warm water – 110 degrees

· 3 c. flour

· 3 c. white sugar

· 3 c. milk

· 1 c. vegetable oil

· 1 c. white sugar

· 8 eggs

· 4 tsp. vanilla

· 6 ounces Instant vanilla pudding mix 1 (5 oz) & ½ of 3 oz. box

· 10 shakes of cinnamon

· 1-2 cups of peeled, cored and chopped apples

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour cupcake pans (or you can use cupcake liners). Mix yeast and warm water in bowl, let sit a few minutes. Add the rest of ingredients and mix well. Fill each half way (don’t fill too full.) Bake for 20-25 minutes. Take out, sprinkle with powdered sugar, cool off and Enjoy!

Let's eat already....

My parents were kind enough to watch the girlies while Tim and I went on a much needed date!

Funny story, (well, it was funny afterwards)we drove up to go eat at Old Spaghetti Factory and drove around trying to find it. We even had a gps and couldn't find it! Fine, Chuck-a-rama was our second choice, so we headed just down the street and realized that they had changed it to "Crazy Buffet"....ok, quite the name. Didn't sound very enticing (Neither does chuck-a-rama, but I already know the quality of the food is superb), but Tim went in and checked it out, which ended up being a ghetto lookin', seafood smellin' place. We can't ruin date night, so we went lookin elsewhere. We found House of Spices on google, which sounded great, I'm always in the mood for Indian food. We get there (in a very familiar parking lot we drove around not very long before) only to find it is actually a Indian grocery store! Arrrg. I was getting rather hungry and impatient. I didn't feel like trying to search for another restaurant to try, so we resorted back to the usual (but always the best) Olive Garden. I'm glad we ended up there. Tim called them before we got there just to make sure they didn't up and disappear also. 3 hours later we finally got to eat!! It was pretty funny in an annoying sorta way.

We went to Hollywood Connection after to go skating! It's been so long since I've been. We both got rollerblades. They are easier to use than skates....they would've been even easier if we got a decent pair. It brought back memories of when my friends and I hung out at good ol' Classic Skating back in the day. I always brought my own blades, so I was cruisin the floor.

Tim busted out his moves I didn't even know he could do....skating backwards, kneeling and all sorts of fancy pantsy moves. I suddenly felt like a lame skater. At least I had speed. oooooh yea!

I can skate on one foot...do I get a point on the coolness scale for that?! =)

Oh we had such a blast together that night! I am 100% persuaded that having regular date nights with eachother keeps the spark alive in the marriage. Not just any dates, but loosening up and feeling like kids again having fun!

Fast forward to next day. I really wanted to have a sno-cone. I looked up a recipe to make the syrup and found some at good ol' AllRecipes and decided to try it out. It was fast, fun, free and freezing! Here's the recipe I used.

Snow cone Syrup

• 2 cups white sugar
• 1 cup water
• 1 (0.13 ounce) package unsweetened, fruit-flavored soft drink mix

In a saucepan, stir together the sugar and water. Bring to a boil, and boil for about 1 minute. Remove from heat, and stir in the drink mix. Allow to cool, and store in a container for pouring. Pour over shaved ice to flavor.

For the shaved ice, I didn't have a machine or a blender (nope, didn't get one for our wedding =) so I just used the trusty dusty Vita Mix, which worked out great!