Happy 4th of July!

I created this fun 4th of July print with Wordle.  Wordle is a fun website that allows you to generate "word clouds" from text that you provide.

Have a fun and safe 4th of July weekend!

Cheers!

M is for Mojito

One of my favorite summer drinks is a Mojito.  They are so refreshing and great on a hot Summer day.  Plus, I can omit the Rum and still enjoy them while I'm pregnant.

Melissa's Mojito Recipe:

1-1.5 oz Rum

1 oz Simple Syrup (recipe below)

1 Lime 

10-12 Mint Leaves

Approximately 6 oz. Club Soda

Choose your glass of choice, add mint leaves, juice from one lime and simple syrup, then muddle.  Next, add ice and rum (unless you are preggers, like me), stir and fill remaining glass with club soda.  Garnish with a lime.  Enjoy!

Simple Syrup Recipe:

2 Parts Sugar

1 Part Water

Bring water to boil, add sugar and stir constantly.  Once sugar is completely dissolved, remove from heat.  Allow to cool and thicken, then bottle.  I usually leave my simple syrup in the fridge for 4-6 weeks.

Simple Syrup

Mint

Lime, mint, muddler, & citrus press

Cheers!

Happy Champagne or Mojito Thursday!

Cheers!

Spray Tan

Our fence got a spray tan a couple weekends ago.  I think we had one maybe one and half days without rain, so we decided to try out the new paint sprayer, I received for Mother's day.  We share a fence with our neighbors and the side we share with our neighbors behind us, was put up before the rest of our fence and was way more faded than the other sides.  It was in desperate need of some stain or a spray tan :)

The paint sprayer worked great and there wasn't too much over spray.  The only thing that slowed us down was that we had a tarp hanging on the backside of the fence, so we wouldn't spray into the neighbors yard and garden and we had to keep moving it.  Oh and we ran out of stain with about four feet left, so Chris had to go across town to pick up more.  At $35 a gallon, we didn't want to buy more than we needed.

Graco Spray Station from Lowes

Fence Before

Fence After

Big improvement from before, even if you can still see the water stains our sprinklers have left.

While Chris was spraying the fence, I stained our raised garden bed with a brush.  Its amazing how different the fence and the garden bed colors turned out with the same stain and different application techniques.

By the way, we enjoyed a nice salad, courtesy of our garden last night.  It's so convenient to be able to go to your backyard and pick fresh fruits and veggies.  

We have a few different colors going on in our backyard, but the spray tan improved the look quite a bit.

We are finally having some warm weather here.  I'm looking forward to some fun in the sun!

Happy 1st day of Summer!

Cheers!

Raised Garden Bed

The last couple of weeks I have been working on my garden, when the weather has been cooperating.  It's a raised bed, that my husband and I built last year.  It's approximately 4 feet by 6 feet and 18 inches high.  

Last year, was the first time I had my own garden and I planted tomatoes, strawberries, squash, broccoli, peppers, chives, shallots, mint and basil.  I might have gone a little overboard, but I was excited.  Not everything was in the raised bed, some were in planters.  It was so much fun to watch everything grow and to go out in the back yard and be able to get veggies and fruits fresh from the garden.  

This year, I decided to try a few new things: romaine lettuce, sugar snap peas, and cucumbers in addition to tomatoes, strawberries, mint and basil.  I also expanded our strawberry section this year.  Parker really enjoyed those last year.  They spread really fast, so I have a couple pieces of wood placed in the garden to contain them in one end.  I decided to skip the broccoli this year.  It took up way more space than I realized it was going to.  The mint and the basil are planted in separate planters, since mint spreads like a weed.  I'm excited to see how everything grows and turns out.

And yes, I know the raised bed and our fence need to be stained.  Its on my list of things to do, but I need to wait until the weather has a couple days without rain in the forecast.

Next year, I would like to have another raised bed so I can plant a few more things.

Here are a few pictures of how the garden looks now.

Romaine Lettuce

Tomatoes

Strawberries

Cucumbers

Snap Peas

And this is little of what we harvested last year

Hope everyone has a wonderful Memorial Day Weekend!

Happy Champagne Thursday!

Cheers!

Citrus Party

I am part of my sorority's alumnae association and a few weeks ago we hosted a luncheon for alumnae and active members, with a citrus theme.  

I loved how our centerpieces turned out!  We took oranges, lemons and limes and sliced them and propped them up against the glass.  We used end pieces and extra whole limes to fill the vase and hold the slices in place.  Then we added some fun white flowers to the top. 

To go along with the citrus theme, I made cupcakes and topped them sugared citrus candies.  Unfortunately, I didn't get any close up pictures of the cupcakes.

Here are a few pictures from the luncheon.  We had so much great food, with lots of fresh fruit and some lemonade to wash it all down.

Cheers!

Happy Sparkling Cider Thursday!

Happy Sparkling Cider Thursday!  We will be replacing our Thursday night champagne for sparkling cider or some sort of sparkling mocktail for the next little while.  We are excited to announce, we are expecting baby #2 in November!

This is also the reason there hasn't been any posts lately.  I've had pretty bad morning sickness (all day sickness), but its slowly getting better.  I'm hoping to get back onto the blogging bandwagon soon.  And the weather is finally starting to warm up, so hopefully that will motivate me to get to work on some projects.

Guess who is excited to be a big brother?

Cheers!

Oh and check out my husbands new blog here.  It documents his 30 day experiments in business and life.

It's About Time

I finally finished the buffet I had been working on!  It took a lot longer than expected, but its done.  Here are all the steps (at least I think its all of them)

Steps

1.  Take hardware off

2.  Remove doors and drawer

3.  Sand buffet, it was pretty scratched up.

4.   Wipe down

5.  Fill any remaining divots or scratches with wood filler

6.  Lightly sand

7.  Wipe down one more time

8.  Prime

9.  3 Coats of Valspar's Bistro White paint 

10.  1 Coat of Minwax Polycrylic Protective Finish in a satin Finish

11.  Another coat of paint, because the polycrylic gave the buffet a yellow tint, that I wasn't very happy about.

12.  Bought and returned new hardware

13.  Spray painted old hardware with Krylon brushed metallic spray paint in a satin nickel color.

14.  Reinstall hardware and attach doors

15.  Somewhere between all these steps my husband repaired the drawer.  It was a little loose.

16.  And in between most steps wait for paint to dry

17.  Bring inside from the garage and give Chris back his parking spot.

After

Before

Happy Champagne Thursday!

Cheers!