Moving to Maryland, Part 1

As I mentioned before, we’re here! But now I’m here to tell you how it all went down ;)

We got a pretty sweet deal with this whole “The-company-is completely-taking-care-of-everything-moving-related” thing. But I’ll admit that when they told us they’d even have people coming in to disassemble some furniture before the movers came and then they’d assemble it when we moved in, I felt kinda like “you aren’t going to let us do ANYTHING?!” (however, I’m extremely grateful for that little perk now, I loved not having to worry about figuring out how to get the bed back together on move-in day…)

Anyway, the movers came last Monday and it was kind of weird for me to literally sit on the floor and just watch them pack away all of our stuff. John didn’t quite get how weird it was until we were both sitting around watching them bring everything in. But I get ahead of myself. The movers came around 8 in the morning and finished up at 3:15. That was THREE guys packing AND loading it into a truck. Insane. Insanely awesome. Everything went pretty smoothly, except for our couch stabbing our driver in the chest. No, I’m serious. I’ve mentioned before, our couch is super old and falling apart a little. Well there was a metal something sticking out of the couch near the arm and when our driver and another guy were hauling it into the truck, the couch stabbed him. Like, really stabbed him. And drew blood. Scary. Thankfully, they hadn’t packed up our first aid things, so I made him take some bandages to put on there to stop the bleeding. Yeah. Crazy, I know.

After the movers finished up, I spend the next 2 1/2 hours cleaning and I did a pretty fantastic job if I do say so myself. I think I have achieved Master Cleaner status. I no longer have to clean. Ever again.

Yeah, right. I wish. But I’m still a master cleaner. Trust me. ;)

We packed up everything we set aside for the road trip and headed over to the hotel. Had some yummy Five Guys for dinner and went. to. sleep.

Tuesday was John’s last day at Amsted and after picking him up from the train station, we went over to our favorite BBQ place in La Grange: Q BBQ. We had invited some friends over for a fun going away dinner and I’m kicking myself that we didn’t get any pictures. But we had a lot of fun and stayed chatting until the place closed. A good way to end our days in Illinois.

Wednesday – we were off! We drove and drove and drove. And ate snacks. And drove some more. We stopped for the night in a city near Cleveland. Some friends had suggested that we stop by Kirtland while we were there, but I was worried it would be too far out of the way. Thankfully, the visitor center didn’t close until 7, so we were able to check in to the hotel, grab something to eat and we still had time to get over there. It ended up being about 45 minutes away.
Please ignore how frizzy I look…it had been a long day in the car… ;)

We were taken on a tour of the historic LDS (Mormon) community of Kirtland, which had been restored by the church. It was really cool! We got to go inside the Newel K. Whitney store and see what it would have looked like back when the early saints had been there.
This was located above the store, where the Prophet Joseph Smith and his family lived for a little while. The chairs are simply props, but the table is currently on loan to the church for display and is the original table at which the prophet would have sat and received revelation. Isn’t that SO COOL!?

This is the saw mill and the ashery. We learned the both had been owned by Newel K. Whitney (who was quite the successful businessman) but he then consecrated (donated) them to the church so that when the saints began to gather in Ohio, they had ways to work and earn money for their families, as many were leaving behind jobs and homes.

After the tour, we drove up the hill to see the Kirtland Temple. The sun was setting when we got up there and it was just beautiful.

Afterwards, we went back to the hotel and went to bed, we had only one more day till the east coast!

We’re Here!

Hi everyone! I just wanted to tell you all we are officially (and finally) in Maryland! Pictures and narration of the trip and new apartment to come soon…like after we get the broken kitchen doors and the bathroom sink leak fixed. More on that later ;)

Thanks for stopping by!

Sometimes…

I can be a bit of a ding dong.

No really.

See, I have this friend Iuliana. She writes a really fun thrifting/crafting blog called Hip2Thrift. I wish I could thrift like she does. Furniture transformations make me a little giddy.

Like this hutch redo she did:
Source: http://hip2thrift.blogspot.com/2011/08/thrift-store-kitchen-hutch-redo-big.html

She also posts super cool and cheap ways to decorate. Like this easy peasy make your own chevron rug (WANT to do this. SO BAD.):
Source: http://hip2thrift.blogspot.com/2011/10/chevron-fabric-rug.html
And she has featured me on her blog! She basically told all of blogland how great she thinks my Easter cookies are.

And she’s featured me like, THREE times now! (at least I think it’s 3…) I think I’ve forgiven her for moving away to Colorado while I was in Branson without a chance to say good bye ;)

So basically what I’m saying here is that she’s awesome and super sweet to feature me on her blog and that you should go visit her (her blog, not in Colorado). I should have done this a WHILE AGO!

Seriously. Do it :)

Craftingness

What?! I know. Two posts in a day. Long story short: I have too much time on my hands. And John’s at a scout camp out. Which leaves me to my own devices and compulsive blogging. ;)

But I digress. Did I tell you I made some super awesome stuff?! Because I did. At least, I think it’s pretty awesome. Ha! Anyway…

I went down to visit my aunt on yesterday. We were supposed to make a cake. Then she calls me the night before and tells me that the party she’s making the cake for isn’t until Monday. Making and finishing the cake on Thursday is a little early. But I went down anyway to visit. And she made cupcakes. All day. Mostly. ;) We also cut out some vinyl stuff and designed some stuff and ate some stuff. But anyway, she gave me some clear tumblers she found at a store out here called Deals. I’ve seen them around and I’ve seen people do some fun vinyl on them, but I’d never seen clear ones at the stores, so I never got around to it. Thanks to Michelle, I now get to try making some personalized cups. Yay! And I’ve decided that they will be our official road-trip-to-Maryland cups ;)

I went with a “His” and “Hers” thing and I think they turned out great!
I made surfboards for John’s and I made a couple of different designs. I really wanted to do chevron for mine (I know, I’m completely obsessed) but because of the shape of the tumblers, the zig zag stripes wouldn’t go around very clean. So polka dots it is!
Here are the other surfboards ;) Isn’t that flame one SO COOL?!
I totally over shot on the amount of polka dots I’d need for mine, so I put some on top too.

So fun right?! So excited to use them for our trip! John loves his surfboard cup. I always get a kick out of when he gets excited by stuff I’ve cut out of vinyl. It validates me somehow ;)

I also made some cute things for our bedroom. I know. I can’t help it. We’re moving in a week and a half, but I just can’t stop making décor. I’ll have you know that I ordered a slipcover for our chair (it matches the sofa slipcover) and it came in today (YAY!). I have not put it on the chair. I’ll put it on after we move. You should be so proud. We can’t really sit in it at the moment anyway. It’s surrounded by stuff we’ve brought of from our storage unit downstairs.

Back to the point. I found this print idea on pinterest and it pretty much sums up perfectly how I feel about me and John so I knew I had to make this for our bedroom.

Perfect, right? I know ;) Michelle gave me some grey and yellow vinyl as well as a flat canvas to use. (Have I mentioned she’s awesome? Because she’s pretty awesome. She also shares my love of vinyl, we’re buddies)

Lastly (for today), I started another little project for the bedroom. I’m going to take some left over yellow chevron fabric from my pillow covers and use it to hang these vertically from each other, but I haven’t gotten to that yet. But I used these little 4”x5” canvases (LOVE canvases!) and printed off some vinyl and slapped it on there. Once I get them all connected, then I’ll hang it up. It will be cute, don’t you think?

I’m wondering if I’ll need some sort of embellishment on there with the words. It’s looking a little blank right now. I’ll have to decide once I finish them up. Hm…

And that sums up my crafting for the last couple of days! Besides the vinyl stormtroopers I cut out for my mom’s new car. Can’t have a car without stormtroopers.

Easter Cookies: Extreme Edition

I’m feeling rather nontraditional this year. I realized this after I was looking through the weekly grocery ads and they are advertising everything you’d need for your Easter dinner. I didn’t really plan on being nontraditional, but given that we only have a week and a half left before we leave (YAY!) I am trying to be somewhat minimalistic in my grocery shopping, especially with the perishable things. So I was discussing this with John and I was telling him that we wouldn’t being having an “Easter Dinner” and he was okay with that. I asked him if he wanted to dye eggs. Not really. I didn’t really care either way. So we’re not having an Easter dinner. Or dyeing eggs. Which is okay. Because that’s not what Easter is about.

…

It’s about cookies.

 

I’m kidding.

KIDDING. ;)

However, I made some super awesome Easter/Spring/Good bye cookies for the people at John’s office. Remember the cookies I made last year for the Easter baskets we made for my cousins?

Cute right? ;) Well, I decided to be more fancy-pants this year. (And I have a much better sugar cookie recipe this time around) But enough talk. I show you now. *there are a lot of pictures, I loved them so* ;)
I did 8 different designs, the hard part was figuring out the designs in the first place. I found some awesome inspiration online and kind of took it from there. It took me about 6 hours to do 40 cookies. My hand and neck hurt like you wouldn’t believe! But would you believe it? I loved every minute :)
These two ended up being my favorite. I just loved the brush embroidery flowers on the blue background. Just lovely. And my lace on the green one there just looked exceptionally nice ;)
I made the trek this morning to John’s office, it’s a 20-25minute walk from the train station and I was terrified I would trip and fall, or run into someone, or someone would attack me for my cookies and they would all fall and break. But I made it without any problem and set them up on a big tray I found in the kitchenette. John sent out a mass email to everyone in the office, and by the time we left, there were about 6 cookies still on the tray! ;) Everyone was so impressed.

We stopped for lunch and I ended up giving a few out to the cashiers at our lunch stop. It was pretty funny. Now we have two left. Chances are John will eat them ;)

And those are my fancy-pants Easter cookies! I’m really happy with them. They took forever, but all the detail that I made sure to add really made a difference in the way they turned out. I’m quite proud of myself :)