What a Wednesday!

Well things are rip-roaring around here in Springville, Utah!  The first exciting moment of the day was the fact that I harvested our first bounty from our garden.  I picked some of those giant spinach leaves off about half of the plants and got enough to make a delicious side salad for Chris and my dinner tonight.  Yay!

Look at that fresh picked goodness!

We didn't really have many good salad ingredients, so we made due with what we had.   I just threw in some red onion, mozzarella cheese and croutons, and topped it off with some poppyseed dressing.  Yum yum!

I'll have to start hard boiling eggs and cooking bacon for the really yummy spinach salads.

The second exciting part of the night was the Springville Art City Days carnival we attended.  Apparently this week is party time in the city.  They have all sorts of activities going on such as contests, tournaments, displays, markets, food vendors, car shows, live music, a fun run, parade and much, much more.  It is craziness!  Who needs the Rose Festival when you have Art City Days, right?!

I must have JUST missed it by a week last year when I moved.  Yes, one year in 4 days.  NUTS.

Tonight was the first night of the carnival and the cheapest, so we figured we better make an appearance.  That place was packed!  We only got on three rides in three hours!  Totally worth is though, they were actually good ones.  The games weren't really that awesome and they were crazy expensive (seriously, how do normal people afford these things?), so we played just this one and managed to get a lame prize.

I was super disappointed we didn't make it on the ferris wheel for sunset...maybe when we head back for the parade on Saturday.

Also still need to sample some of the carnival treats.  Chris promised me a churro and didn't deliver...he better on Saturday!!

And yes, I know I am so lame for getting excited about this carnival, but I'm a small town gal now folks, remember?  Can't wait to attend my first rodeo...

Garden Update

We finally got all the beds done week before last and I was able to get everything planted before we left on our Memorial Day trip to Washington/Portland.  I was absolutely amazed at the growth over the time we were gone.  It's so fun watching the ones you plant from seeds take off.  The new transplants I picked up at a Provo nursery are finally rooting themselves and starting to grow too.

We can already start picking that spinach.  Nom!

Few empty lettuce and onion spots I may try to fill, but doubtful they will grow before the crazy heat hits.

Yes, I added pots because I had extra tomato plants that I couldn't fit.  Tomato craziness!

Corn and peppers for days...

I altered my original plans a little bit because I decided not to fill the berm with flowers this year.  I've got some of the melons and extra vine plants growing there now, so I added a few new things and switched stuff around.

Perhaps the thing I am most excited about though is that black beauty in the back corner there.  Can you believe we FINALLY get to compost?!  YIPPEE!

Next week I'll post again to show you the new garden stakes I am working on.  Gonna be so cool!

New Quilts

As I'm catching up on life from the craziness of the past weekend, I thought I'd do a quick share of some of grandma's new quilts that I just got posted up on Etsy.  They are truly magnificent and I'm even debating taking one off the market myself!

Since for some reason the colors are not showing up nearly as vibrant on Etsy as they are in real life and the photos I took of them (there must be something funky with their uploader), I thought I'd share them on here as well.

Enjoy!

Garden Graduation

Mexican Party

 Hexagon Crossing

 On The Border

Stepping Stones

Visitors!

Thursday we had the pleasure of hosting Chris' family friends, (a.k.a. second family) Dave and Terry Taylor for the night.  They were passing through Springville on the long route back to Oregon from Indio, California and brought with them some delicious wine for us to drink.  We had a blast showing them around the updated house and filling them in on the latest of Utah.  The last time they visited was when they brought Chris his blinds after accidentally shipping them to his parents in Portland!  As you can imagine, a lot had changed!

I thought it would be nice to cook them a meal as I'm sure they had been eating out plenty on their stops in various cities along the way.  Leave it to me though, to pick a meal with meat they don't eat!  This just shows you how rusty my hostess skills are after being away from Portland for a year.  You'd think with all my vegetarian friends I would remember to ask/find out about food preferences, but of course I didn't.  Whomp, whomp.

Terry, I promise next time you'll be able to eat the full meal!

I didn't take pictures, so I'm borrowing the images Terry took of our manicotti meal and posted on her blog, RV Goddess.

For dessert I made the rosemary bread and served with vanilla ice cream and strawberries.  Luckily, this contained no sausage.

On Thursday nights I play softball down in Spanish Fork.  One of the girls I played volleyball with in the fall asked me to join her team and I couldn't pass up the opportunity to meet more people!  Terry and Dave decided they would like to come watch and I was so excited to have some people cheering me on.  They even got Chris to come watch which is a huge feat as he HATES watching baseball/softball.  Yes, even when his wife plays.  What a Scrooge!

All in all, it was a great night and we loved having the pleasure of their company!  And to make their visit even more enjoyable they sent us flowers yesterday as a thank you!  So beautiful and they smell wonderful!

Love you both!

Chris Learns to Bake!

Can you believe this is his first time ever?!

And he made the delicious rosemary bread we have been waiting all fall/winter/spring for.  I am so proud of my husband!

I wonder if this is his last time too...hmm.

It still tasted delicious, don't worry. ;)

Rock Garden

I really wanted to attack the back berm with flowers this year, but quickly realized that might not be a great idea considering 1) I've never planted a flower garden before and 2) It's HUGE.

I figured I should probably start off small and make sure that I wasn't going to fail completely before spending a lot of money.  I cleaned up last year's upper vegetable garden area and decided it would be a good first try spot.

After I got the area bordered and the soil prepped, I had Chris go with me to pick up some rocks around around the neighborhood to give it a bit more character.  We seriously had to go one block and found A TON in one of the many empty lots.  Once I got those placed it was time to started planting.

I had opted to go with a cool color scheme of only white, purple, blue and pink flowers.  Since I'm basically teaching myself as I go, I'm really hoping that the nursery I got all the plants from isn't lying about what can survive here.  I also hope I didn't plant too soon as we've had some crazy weather here this spring.  Cross your fingers they all make it.

I'm sad I don't have a before picture to show you...can you believe I couldn't find one picture of my garden last year?!  Nuts!  Imagine a lot of dirt, corn stalks and many, many weeds.

Here's how it turned out.

Where you see blank spots I have bulbs in.  They will hopefully be irises, lilies and Peruvian daffodils.  I have no idea if they will actually come up.  I have more faith in my tomato seeds actually making it, honestly.

Can't wait to watch it fill in though...so fun!

Lamp Revamp

I have to let you guys know that this post contains a spoiler for a future post.  I was hoping to show you the other project first, but certain clean up work which I am too annoyed with to even talk about (CATS) is prohibiting me from showing you the finished product.

This lamp had been sitting in the corner of our bonus room for I have no idea how long.  It was there before I moved in.  When I started fixing it up Chris asked me where it came from, so my guess is Mary donated it to him and he stuck it in the corner of the house for the last 3 years of him living here. 

And, Mary, if it was from you, I'm sure that the shade did not look like this when you gave it to him.

Who knows, right?

I did that pretty gluing job you see along the crack though to try and keep the thing from completely falling apart.

I decided that this lamp, if spruced up, would add some nice character to the (spoiler alert) freshly redone bonus room.  I thought a dark brown base would look nice with the medium brown I had painted the walls.

I went and grabbed a can of spray paint and went to town.

For the shade, my first thought had been to buy a new, but the selections at good ol' Wally mart didn't fit it.  Since I had no idea of it's origins and didn't want to spend too much, I just decided to cover the shade instead.

I had some leftover linen from my kitchen curtain project and thought that it would fit in well with the rest of the room.  I used the shade as a guide to cut the pattern.  This takes a little time to get it perfect and would recommend cutting butcher paper first as not to ruin your fabric on accident by making a bad cut.

I ironed one side under 1/2 inch so that I would have a clean edge on my seam.

Next I just used fabric glue to attach it to the old shade.

Already so much better!

Last step was to finish off the top and bottom edges so they would look clean.  I debated for a bit on what to do and finally decided to make a binding using the same linen and instead of gluing or machine sewing, I used yarn to create big stitches across it for and added flair.

Tools needed were the yarn, a tapestry needle and a drill with a 1/16 inch bit.

Here you see the finished shade and a sneak peek of the new brown bonus room wall!

Finished product!

So happy with how it turned out!