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Tarragon Whiskey Sours
Thanksgiving is almost here! This year, instead of food recipes, I was thinking I would share a drink recipe with you. My friend Matt and his buddy Eric recently started a cocktail spice and beer sauce company called Addition. I have primarily been a hard cider drinker, so it’s only been lately that I have started getting into the whole craft cocktail thing. For me it started when Matt brought me some of Addition’s clove and cinnamon cocktail spices (still in test phase), promising it would make my cider taste like apple pie, and that it did. To me that was magic. A couple of years later, they were in full production with 25 cocktail spices…
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DIY Wedding Decorations
Getting sick of wedding posts yet? I hope not, because I still have a few things to share! Don’t worry, this won’t be a long, wordy post or a tutorial or any kind. I just wanted to show you guys the rest of the wedding decorations we made, because they came together so nicely. Plus, I listed where we got everything, in case you wanted to know. Matt was able to repurpose some sandwich boards that his step-dad had made to protect some of the plants on their deck in the winter. He sprayed them with chalkboard paint and then hand drew and lettered the signage to go out on the street and at…
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DIY Burlap Bunting
I think my favorite part of planning Matt and I’s wedding was making the decorations. I’m not sure if bunting is trendy or classic at this point, but I love how it looks and it’s a great way to create signage, so I knew wanted to make some for our wedding. It’s also easy to make in different materials and colors, so there are ways to make it your own. I’d been seeing burlap all over Pinterest and in floral supply places (I guess it’s all the rage now), but it kind of makes sense. It’s a cool texture, it provides a neutral color to work with and it’s cheap. Sign me…
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DIY Wedding Invitations with Creative Market
Invitations for our wedding presented an interesting challenge for Matt and I. Neither of us are good at graphic design and we didn’t have it in our budget to hire someone. I briefly looked at websites like Minted and Wedding Paper Divas and while there was a wide variety of customizable designs on both of those sites, I still wasn’t seeing exactly what I wanted. When it comes to designing something on my own, one of my limitations has always been that I don’t know Illustrator or InDesign. Enter in Creative Market. Creative Market is like Etsy for designers, with all sorts of unique and affordable fonts, graphics and themes.…
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Ava Wedding Dress- Final Dress
We got the photos from our amazing wedding photographer, Amy Kiel, so I can finally share my wedding dress with you guys! The first few photos I took in my studio on my dress form, but the rest are by Amy. There are posts about the planning and fitting (here and here) of this dress, if you want to read about that, but this post is mostly just pictures, and some details about the construction, of the dress. The Details- Pattern- Victory Patterns Ava Main Fabric- Silk Shantung from Pacific Fabrics Upper Dress Fabric- White Crafter’s Lace form Joann Fabrics Underlining Fabric- Silk Organza from Pacific Fabrics Started- 4/19/14 Completed- 8/31/14 Practice dress- 28 hrs. Final…
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Pattern Testing: Jennifer Lauren Cressida Skirt
After the wedding was over (and with it all the planning that had taken up so much of our time for so many months), I kept getting asked what I was going to do with all my new free time when I got home. My answer was, “Whatever I want!”. I knew I wouldn’t have a hard time finding things to do and just a couple of days after we got home, I got an email asking me if I wanted to be pattern tester for Jennifer Lauren‘s new Cressida Skirt Pattern. Hell yeah, I did! I jumped on that opportunity. I had never been a pattern tester before, but…
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Maple Glazed Carrots
I’m ba-ack… from Vermont and the wedding, which was lovely and wonderful, but more on that later! Now that things have calmed down a bit though, I can finally get back to blogging, which feels good! I have so much I want to share about the wedding, but am waiting on photos, so in the meantime, let’s talk about what survived in my garden while I was gone. Carrots! My carrots were looking pretty good before I left and I was happy to find that they all kept well underground while I was away. I canned 6 pints of spicy pickled carrots, with the biggest carrots I harvested, but there…
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Blog Break
My goal when I started this blog was to average a post once a week (since that is what is realistic for my life) and I think I have done a pretty good job of sticking to that. Through all the ups and downs of the last couple of years, through my mom’s illness and death, I somehow managed to keep blogging. It gave me joy, the routine of it was good for keeping me going and it has given me a place to talk about things. I certainly have not gone this long without posting though, but there was another death shortly after my last post (my beloved dog Charlie),…
