A little bit from our past weekend....

This past Monday (in case you didn't know by now, our "weekend" is Monday and Tuesday!) we took a trip to the Baltimore Ikea. We went not really having any big purchases in mind, just a few small items and maybe just to look around. We've both been really liking one chair in particular the past couple of trips to Ikea. The "Poang" model. This chair has been around for a while and at first neither of us were really crazy about it. It just looked, well sort of uncomfortable. One day, we sat in it and realized we were wrong. Very wrong actually. It's quite comfortable and actually has a nice shape. So we ended up finally buying one. We opted for the straight black one and hope to make our own slipcover for it. An extra $89 for a green cover didn't seem like a bargain when this one was just $28. I didn't have a chance to take a picture of ours (it's rather dark right now) but here's the one from the Ikea website. Ours is just like this one, except our wood finish is more brown.



This past Christmas, Kinsey's parents gave us a really nice down comforter. We hadn't used it yet, because we haven't had a chance to make a proper duvet cover for it. We found two really nice covers for only $12 each. One is a light blue with circles, and the other is a green and white pattern. This one is on our bed now:





Kinsey's bread of the week was Challah. Here's a before and after shot. This was my favorite bread to date that he's made!





So good!

New Series Debut....and Bread

I'll be listing my first in my new series of embroidered wall art today. Here's a look at my first finished one:




And a close up of some embroidery stitching:



I'm really excited about these. Like I said before, the new designs were inspired by an old collage I did years ago. I'll have to try and track that artwork down and take a photo to share. I really like the idea of capturing a person in nature. I'm tending to focus on the same type of silhouette for the girls-windswept hair, angular shoulders, thin waist, and an A-line skirt/dress. I enjoy being able to play around with different fabric prints and textures and then incorporating embroidery stitches in random places throughout. I really like the layered look of the ones I've been doing in the past few days.....however this first one isn't too layered. Hopefully, I'll have the other ones up and listed soon....mabe tomorrow morning when the light is right!


Yesterday, Kinsey continued his new pursuit in the art of bread making. This time he decided to make french baguettes. The final results were wonderful!

Here are the mini loaves on our pizza peel getting readying for their trip in the oven.




The warm, soft, delicious inside of the bread. I think I ate most of a loaf myself when they first came out....they were smaller loaves though!



A small pile of amazing baguettes....and a half eaten one!

A snowy day baking bread...and crafting.

Yesterday, it began snowing (again) in the afternoon. The previous night Kinsey got the sudden urge to bake bread, so the snowy afternoon provided the perfect setting to try out a loaf. After much time spent rising, and resting, and kneading, and resting, and rising, and finally baking.....this was the final product.


Here's a picture of the nice cross section.



Mmmmmmm.....The bread went great with my corn/tomato/black bean soup I made.

So, today was, much to our delight another snow day. Unlike before, the snow kept falling for most of the day. Until about 4 or so, which left just enough daylight to shovel out the car and sidewalk. I measured just about a foot of snow. This of course is on TOP of the 18.5 inches we had just on Saturday. This morning was a very productive day for me as far as crafting goes. I'm in the process of working on some very new (and possibly some of my favorite things ever!) designs. I got about 3 done and just love them. I'm not ready to quite share them yet....maybe I'll post a picture soon! They're really unlike things I've done before. However, they were inspired by a painting/collage I did for my high school art show when I was senior. I've been playing around with this for a while and finally reached a really good point. That's all I can really say about it now.
Anyway, I'm exhausted from shoveling snow again, but here's a few pictures from today's snow storm.


This was what it looked like when we woke up in the morning....and actually what it looked like for most of the day! Can you believe it? More snow?


Here we go again...


Kinsey wanted to see who deep the almost 30 inches of combined snowfall was.


I was peer pressured in following of course. Here's me just taking a break and relaxing in the mound of white around me. These all were of course after we did all our shoveling!

Snowy Saturday

We got our first real snow storm in quite a few years this weekend. This is how we awoke today. Our car was barely visible! The snow starting the night before, but we were at work. We had to clean off a good number of inches from our car at 9pm, so this was just from about 9:30pm to around 10am!






We only have one snow shovel. Realizing that this snow would be way too much work (and take twice as long!), I remembered I thought there might be an extra shovel in the shed left by the people who lived here before us. So I shoveled a path out to the shed to take a look and found not just one, but two snow shovels! (A little beaten, but nonetheless they proved to be quite useful!) As you can see, the snow was to my knees. Luckily, it was still pretty light and fluffy, so shoveling wasn't too much hard work.



Here's our fence in the backyard with all the snow piled up.



This is a shot of our snow covered backyard. You can see our birdfeeder poking out a little and the black railing along the steps in the center of our yard. Other than that, it's just snow.


The snow piled on top of our little shed. Talk about a lot of snow!



I measured about 18 and a half inches. This was taken at the edge of our back porch. Could possibly be more, but 18.5 is definitely a lot of snow!

Black Bear, Black Bear...

This is probably one of my favorite images I've done. Lately, I've become really interested in bears. More so from a visual aspect. I stumbled across a headboard someone had created with a stained piece of wood and a painted bear face. This embroidered art was inspired from that headboard.



I've been playing around with different images and this one is my favorite so far. I'm in the process of designing one which is just a bear's face. I'm hoping to embroidered it in a warm brown color, instead of the black I used for the full body bear. I'm sadly almost out of this wonderful light woodgrain fabric. I picked it up about a year ago at my local thrift store for a mere .99 cents. I know there's a lot of other woodgrain prints out there, but I haven't found one I like quite as much!

New Home!

So it's been a while since I've not only wrote here, but also listing new projects in general. Kinsey and I bought our first home in October of this past year and have been busy doing various projects and such. We were pretty lucky in that the house we bought was in really good condition and recently remodeled. Most of the walls were painted in colors we would've picked ourselves. We didn't really have to spend time ripping up carpets and repainting the walls. Here's a picture of one of my favorite rooms (obviously this was before we moved anything in!), the dining room.



One room that is still a "work in progress" is one of the upstairs rooms. This room is to be Kinsey's craft/collage/music room. The walls as you can see were just a simple shade of white which kind of made the whole room seem a lot smaller than it is.




Yesterday we just decided to go ahead and paint. So we headed off to our local Home Depot and picked out a warm brown color. Here's a picture of one of the walls painted in the final color:




We're quite pleased with the final outcome.


And here's a look of a new design I'll be posting in our shop this evening: