A Castle in Your Room!

This is what my little boy needs!

Kale Energy

Last night I made this recipe from Elana's Pantry.

I've only had kale one other time and wasn't too big of a fan, but this looked good enough to try again...and we liked it. I polished off about half of it in one sitting, and it filled my biggest frying pan when I made it. I probably ate 3 cups of this stuff, it was that good. My body was really craving something deeply green and this hit the spot. My husband tentatively agreed to try a very small bite. He looked very surprised and said it wasn't too bad. An interesting side effect was that I couldn't go to sleep afterwards, my family were all asleep, and I was wide awake. Nice to have energy, nice to craft at night - who knew kale would actually do it?

Maybe next time I make this it will be earlier in the day, so I burn that energy off with my little one!

Soon...a house!

My little family is in the midst of some pretty big life-changing decisions. Job. School. Housing. It's big.

We have been house hunting for the last 2 weeks, and have settled on the one we want, last night we made an offer on it!!! We feel really good about this particular house, and the decisions we've made for right now.

So all this has me thinking about all the things I can do with my own 4 walls, and my own bit of earth. Roses, and vegetable gardens, berries, lavender bushes! I'm even excited about ground cover, mulch, and a lawn mower.

We recently did some rearranging of our apartment (some of which is in the last post) and I really enjoyed looking at Apartment Therapy books before moving things around and sewing a few things. Now, as I think about a whole house to color for us I again turn to apartment therapy for some inspiration.

http://g-cdn.apartmenttherapy.com/2637265/lula4_rect540.jpg

I love the white wall and dark red wood combination. Ideally we'd like to rip up the carpet and lay brazilian redwood floors down. I'm excited just imagining it in my mind.

http://g-cdn.apartmenttherapy.com/2638945/lula5_rect540.jpg

The possibility of hanging pictures wherever I want to! I like the colorful things on the wall balanced with the white shelving. Love shelves!

I really like the colorful little quilt too! I'm thinking about hanging our wedding quilt up in our living room. Maybe I'll do a post about that quilt someday.

http://i-cdn.apartmenttherapy.com/uimages/ohdeedoh/deuce1.jpg

Again, the wood floors and the white walls. That's a nice simple quilt pattern. I think I'd do contrasting bright color if I made a quilt like that. Love the cubbies under the window.

http://i-cdn.apartmenttherapy.com/uimages/ohdeedoh/lead%20photo.jpg

What I See In The Morning

My living room. Our apartment is all of 500 sq feet and we do most of our living in this room. We have two bedrooms, but use one of them as a office/studio.

Do you see the rosy light on the walls in this picture? It's because of the curtains! I took down the ugly blinds that go clacky-clacky in the breeze, and in their place perfectly fit some metal hooks from Ikea, so I whipped up some curtains with fabric also from Ikea...gotta love Swedish design!

I measured the window and then bought 1 yard of fabric more than that. So my window was 3.5 yards long almost exactly. I bought 4.5 yards of fabric, the home-dec length was good for the height of my windows. Then I cut off the selvages and sewed a rolled hem on one long side and both short sides. I sewed a deep hem of about 4 inches on the other long side. I originally put the deep hem at the bottom, but that drew attention to the exposed hardware a the top, so I flipped it around. Much better.

These are the hooks I was talking about. They fit right into the slot for the blinds...amazing! No holes in the walls, beautiful curtains.

It's like wearing rose-colored glasses all the time!

Here is Sam standing on his highchair, regular fair for around here.

The nostrils!