We just returned from an un-planned trip back east, and while the reason for the trip was somber, it became such a celebration of life, living, and family!

yup... still obsessing over this

swoon

these gorgeous leather sandals...

...are just about perfect aren't they?

sometimes you just need a cupcake....

...and tonight was one of those times!



I don't usually bake, and when I do its from a box (sorry mom!) , so I can't claim that these cupcakes are anything special.



However, their bright colors and chocolaty goodness is just what the Robinson's needed.





And on a side note, I dropped in on the Bend the Rules Sewing Swap blog, just to see whats going on, and I was pleasantly surprised to see my Napkin/Placemat set featured! See it there on the header? So exciting! It almost makes me want to join another swap!!

in love!

These amazing collages by Jenna Robertson - made from recycled wool sweaters - have me swooning.

You can find them locally at Noun - one of my absolute favorite places to spend money!

Have you seen this?

I know it made the rounds in blog-land a few months ago, but I just spent a few minutes playing with my poladroid and I am so in love! Its a super simple, free, application that turns any old digital photo into a mini work of art.

Now I can pretend I am half as talented as the lovely Jen of My Polaroid Blog.

Good Reads!

Thanks for all the great book suggestions! I am so looking forward to this summer and all those wonderful days of sitting on the back patio, enjoying the late sun, and a few pages before dinner!

What does it say about me when I buy more books than clothes?

The Big Read Top 100 Meme

I found this on QuestTwentyEight, and felt the need to post… if only as a reminder of all the great literature I would love to have time to read!

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE (or highlight in pink if you can't underline...)
4) Reprint this list in your own blog.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible (I have read a good portion… probably more than half, but I would feel really lousy claiming it!)
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres (this was on my list… until I saw the trailers for the movie version and I lost all interest! I will definitely accept recommendations of anyone out there LOVES it and thinks its worth it!)
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The DaVinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (the whole series was/is a favorite of mine!!)
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (HATED this book!)
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac (I actually have this in iTunes but am waiting for the right road trip or long flight!)
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville (started… but never finished!)
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

51 out of 100 is not at all shabby, especially considering that “The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.”

Any recommendations? I am always looking for a good read!

my little snow angel

T grew up on the east coast, and so for him, snow is a much loved friend. To him, snow means days off from school, mugs of hot cocoa, tromping around, and soup. He gets super excited whenever the forecast predicts freezing temperatures (which is hardly ever here on the west coast!) and he has decided that one day we "have" to live somewhere cold so I can experience a real winter. (uh huh, sure babe, someday we'll do that....)

And so, last week when the weatherman started predicted snow, T spent every spare second chopping firewood, stocking the pantry (with popcorn and hot cocoa) and talking about all the fun things we could do on our "snow day."

This morning, as the flakes started to fall you could actually see T's excitement growing. He would race over to window every few minutes to give us an update on the flake size, consistency, and sticking ratio. And finally, after begging all morning, he finally got me to go outside for a little tromp...

(thanks for letting me wear your new boots honey!)


Of course, since i ventured out in the snow for him, he had to do a little something for me....





T looked like he was having so much fun that the neighbors had to come out and play too!

seeing red

i think i might have a black thumb.

no, seriously.

I somehow managed to kill a rosemary plant. You should have seen the horrified look on the face of the garden guy at our farmers market when I explained to him why I needed to know very specific instructions on caring for the new one. And I am pretty sure I saw him watching me while I browsed the strawberry starts, probably making sure I wasn't harming them by getting to close. Although, I am not too sure how he thought I could hurt those darling little plants. I mean, it's not as though I carry a bottle of weed-be-gone in my purse, whipping it out whenever I am threatened by a stray basil bush.

Thankfully I have an accomplice in T. Together we wage war on the chlorophyll that surrounds us by systematically imposing periods of drought followed by massive floods. I think the technical terms are "forgetting to water,"and "over-watering." Its actually quite sad, seeing as how both of our families have turned out more than one card carrying, green thumbing, garden genius type. Case in point - my brother runs an Organic Farm which manages to not only yield enough produce to feed his family, but then he sells the excess, for profit, at a farmers market! It is truly mind boggling that we share the same genes.

And yet every spring finds me filled with fresh hope that perhaps this is the year my gardening skills will kick in. I make the Saturday morning farmers market pilgrimage carefully choosing the plants that look the healthiest. I get lured in by those Early Girl tomatoes, whose yellow buds whisper promises of summertime salsas and salads. And the handsome heirloom varieties that hint at a scrappy will to live. They all get chosen. And when the garden guy isn't watching, I nonchalantly slip a strawberry start into my tray, hoping that this year it will live.

And so, you can imagine the epic failure we experienced this year when our natural ineptitude combined with an extremely wet and chilly summer. Our entire harvest consisted of about 8 tomatoes, 1 strawberry, 2 jalapeños (that never got hot), and a couple of sprigs each of dill and sage. It was a dismal failure.

So instead of feasting on the glorious fruits of our own hard work, we did what any self-respecting urbanite would do: we hightailed it back to the market, bought 20 dollars worth of organic tomatoes, and proceeded to can them, fully willing to pass them off as "ours" come winter.





My pantry shelf is now stocked and ready.

And there is always next year...

its been three years...

our third anniversary came and went with little fuss. we celebrated in our own favorite way - T brought me flowers, and i cooked him dinner (classic meat and potatoes - very rare treat in our mostly vegetarian house).

it was sweet, low key, and perfect!

i have known T for over ten years now, and while 5 of those years were spent in different states (and even different continents!), it has been the most amazing journey.

we met when i was 17 years old, at summer camp! T was working in the kitchen, and i was a counselor in training. it took us all summer to even start talking, although absolutely everybody else knew about the enormous crushes we had on each other. we spent several months writing letters and emails, which eventually turned into phone calls, which eventually turned into visits. he came to California, i went to Illinois. he came to England, i went to Portland.

eventually we got married...

i am the luckiest girl!

wow!

i hardly even know where to begin....

today was a pretty rough day for me. the kind of day when all you want to do is climb into bed and hibernate for the next week. the kind of day where you really wish it was a Friday, so you don't have to face anything until Monday. the kind of day where you end up being snippy with your husband, after he did absolutely nothing wrong.

but as you can tell from the title of this post, my day has completely turned around!

i received my package from the flirty apron swap, and boy oh boy i lucked out! my partner so completely "got" my dream vacation.

here is what i wrote...
I have a love affair with the ocean, so my absolute dream vacation would be located somewhere sunny, where the water was a clear blue, where there was a hammock hanging under a shady tree but still over the water, and i had a stack of amazing books! I would also get to eat amazing food, spend romantic nights with my husband in a hut that overlooked the water (perhaps it is one of those huts that is on stilts coming out of the water?), and take horseback rides down the beach, and of course i would never get sunburned, and i would have unlimited drinks but never get drunk, and i could swim and play all day and not get wrinkled prune-skin. :)

and here is what she created...

back in august (this girl was on the ball!) she posted about the fabric here. and i immediately fell in love with the darling mermaids, the sea turtles, the schools of fish, the colors... everything about it! i wanted so badly to rush out and buy some of the fabric for myself, but i resisted (i still had to buy the fabric for the apron i made for my partner after all). instead i just kept visiting her post, dreaming of this beautiful fabric and hardly even daring to hope that it would be for me. after all, there were probably a hundred dream vacations all having to do with the beach.

and then a few days ago, i saw this post about the finished apron, and i immediately showed it to T, saying something along the lines of "this is my favorite apron, and i really wish it were mine, but it probably isn't because it is too perfect." (still trying not to get my hopes up *too* high).

thankfully i was wrong, and this apron gets to stay here with me!


she also included many yummy looking recipes for fruity summer drinks, as well as two hurricane glasses - perfect for holding on to the last little bits of summer here in the NW...


and the pocket detail! its so cute....


i think what i love best about this apron is how it ties together all of the different parts of my dream vacation....
- the color scheme is so soothing and relaxing - it reminds me so much of beautiful sunsets, crisp clear water, and sand between my toes. it puts me in the same mood that a hammock and a stack of books does.
- the swimming girls remind me of those glorious summer days of my childhood, when i could literally spend all day in the water pretending i was a mermaid, diving under waves, body surfing, and making sandcastles.
- and the pattern is just "flirty" enough to entice T, who pretty much immediately asked for a fashion show (a la empire records... if you know what i mean).

like i said.... she got all of the parts of my dream vacation!

so a huge thank you to the wonderful creator of this apron... Adrienne - you definitely made my day!

its done!

just a quick note to announce that my flirty apron is finished and mailed!

check out my photos here

i will post more when i receive mine!

flowers and flowers and flowers... oh my!

i love weddings.

i love the big white dresses, i love the flowers, the dancing, the cake, the guests. but i especially love seeing how people work elements of their own style into the little details. over the last two years i have watched two couples plan and execute their amazing celebrations, and both times i have been honored to be involved. with my own third anniversary arriving at the end of this month, i definitely have weddings on the brain. here are some of my favorite details:

the first wedding was a lovely rustic affair inside the octagonal barn at McMennamin's Cornelius Pass Roadhouse in Hilsboro Oregon....



....which we completely draped in lights. it was like dancing in a fairy castle....


the oh so talented bride did her own flowers....



and the favors were a mixed cd of the couple's favorite music and comedy numbers....

(professional photos taken by Adria)


the second wedding took place at gorgeous Bridal Veil Lakes in Corbett, OR. It was unusually rainy this August, however the precipitation only added to the lush ambiance of the lake (which is completely surrounded with trees and flowers)





i was able to help create the floral arrangements....


…and i can now say that i am an expert at providing “first aid” to drooping pomander balls!

the bride kept a vintage feel using old mason jars as vases (and by pairing an anthropologie shrug with her gorgeous handmade dress!)


(photo cropped to maintain privacy)

the couple escaped for a moment directly following the ceremony...



...and later shared a romantic boat ride!


a big thank you to these lovely ladies for letting me share your beautiful celebrations!!!