Gettin' ready for Halloween

As always, I get ultra excited about pumpkin carving season. It's a close tie between getting to play in pumpkin guts and making art out of squash. Either way, we had fun this year! Bryan kept it traditional, and I tried my hand at making a dia los muertos pumpkin:









Also-- I had no idea how creepy my picture of trees was until it was photographed covered in spiderwebs with creepy pumpkins in front of it. Go figure! Very headless horseman-esque...

An Evening of Art

Last Wednesday I had the opportunity to go see Art Chantry's exhibit and speech in Tacoma with my sister and her boss, Ken. Art's work is fantastic-- (I've seen it before, keeps getting better!) and the company was great as well! Always great to have a night out with Amy, and it's been awhile since I've gotten to see Ken (I took an intro to art class at Pierce right when I started getting interested in design... definitely got me excited about doing it for a career!) So fun overall! Art is an amazing speaker and always makes me want to go home and make things. Then throw them outside. Then Xerox them. Then make them AWESOME.

My sister and I:


Me, Ken, Amy:



Art:

A Wonderful Birthday!

Today ended a wonderful birthday weekend for myself! My actual birthday was today, but yesterday night I was super spoiled and had a few friends over for a night of pajamas and wine-- so much fun! A few of us found some particularily cozy footie pajamas (Dr. Seuss pajamas? Check.) and ended up having a great time! A few pics from the evening:




Tonight we went over to my parents for some pizza and relaxing, and also got to prepare for our food-on-a-stick potluck (the birthday celebration continues!)-- so, with the help of my mom's amazing pie dough recipe, I present pie pops! (courtesy of the wonderful Bakerella)



My mom has been on a pinning-marathon as well, and made some apple butter-- which I used in my pies! It tastes fantastic, I'm so excited to try them!



Walter helped, of course.







I am so luck to have such amazing family and friends! I'm feeling incredibly spoiled. Right now I'm finishing off baking the last batch of pie pops, snuggling with Bryan and watching Totoro... yup, it's been a great birthday :)

Dreaming again...

The neat thing about having a house that's been remodeled a few times is the interesting little nooks that are left behind. In our 60 year old house's case, it happens to be a rather large nook in the back of our kitchen. (Which; there is no photo of; partially because I'm feeling lazy, the other part being I don't care to show you that it's currently the spot my treadmill and recycling live-- and that the treadmill is more of a clothes rack these days) Woops!

If there's one thing I've learned whilst dreaming about extravagant things to do with this nook (mostly involving renovating our entire kitchen) it's that kitchen things are expensive. Countertops? Expensive. Cabinets? Especially expensive. And floors for a kitchen nearly the size of our living room it seems? Expensive. Which is why I'm currently dreaming about an idea like this:



Bam. Add a bit of drywall. A pocket door. (Heck, even regular pantry-type doors.) Some shelving/maybe a spiffy little stainless steel island from Ikea.) Easy-peasy. Sad, sad empty space that I keep my well-used treadmill dry my clothes in? Fixed. And pretty useful too I would say. (Because be honest-- who has room to have all their appliances out at the same time?! Half of mine sleep in the laundry room.)

So, added officially to the 'dream' list. Done.