Recipe: The perfect weekend morning

Who doesn't love the weekend? The best part: cooking breakfast with Tony! Breakfast is my favorite meal but sadly I refuse to get up early enough to eat more than yogurt or instant oatmeal during the week. I eat breakfast at my desk pretty much everyday so sitting down to enjoy a "real" breakfast is such a treat....a luxury, really.

The ritual: wake up without an alarm, spend extra time playing with the pup, play some good tunes in the background, and then...get busy cooking.

Sit down to breakfast and enjoy the morning sunlight...a recipe for the perfect weekend morning.

Begley loves the weekends too!

Happy weekend!
Rachel

Free Printable Recipe Cards

I love recipe cards (big surprise, right?) and these are adorable...not only are they adorable but you can print them out for free (!!!) from Vale Design. There are a few other designs on the site but these are my favorite. Click here to print yours!

Our DIY Save the Dates

I've been hanging on to these photos for quite some time but now, I'm finally ready to show them off. These are mine and Tony's save the date cards. I designed everything myself, with my tiny bit of design knowledge...all using Paint and Microsoft Word. I chose the color scheme and design around our October wedding, played around with the wording and fonts and there you have it!

I bought card stock from Michael's and Hobby Lobby and ordered the envelopes online. The envelopes are made out of recycled brown paper bags which were an excellent touch and nod to our wedding style (at least I thought so!) A regular printer, paper cutter and glue finished them off...oh, and quite a few hours of assembling!

Our invitations will match this design but we've yet to start production on those - they will be even more complex and time consuming!

Did I mention we made the cards into magnets?

Though the cards and invitations are a pretty big thing to undertake, I'm very thankful that we did it. It's pretty special to hand make each invitation using your own design....oh, and we saved a TON of money by making our own (that never hurts!)

Decorating Inspiration

This past month I've been busy collecting lots of decorating inspiration for our house. I am ridiculously excited to have a house to decorate, a blank canvas for all of my ideas. Living in apartments for the last 5 years has been very limiting when it comes to personal style. Below are my two favorite photos which were featured in an article on Apartment Therapy.

I envision our living room looking a lot like the photo above. Our couch and chair are the same beige as this one and we're painting the walls blue. We'll throw in some cool prints with the pillows and there you have it: our living room.

I LOVE this photo, I love every element here, I want to move right into this place! I would love to have this living room but we've already got that design covered. We are, however, using this same color scheme for our kitchen and dining room. Gray walls with white trim, golden yellow and brown as accent colors - Its going to be excellent, I'm stoked, enough said.

Friday, May 29, 2009

Our House

Here it is, the reason I've been completely MIA for nearly a month.....our house! We have been insanely busy running here and there, doing one thing or another for the house almost every single night this past month. We should be closing on the house next week, we should have closed on May 20th but I've come to learn that this stuff does not always go according to plan...actually, it never goes according to plan. We've had about 50 different plans at this point and none of them have worked out.

Anyway, I've still been busy collecting some good stuff so hopefully I'll have a few days to make some posts before the real craziness begins. This house has already been a lot of sweat and tears on our part and I'm sure the blood is soon to come with all the moving and painting.

I'll post more photos of the house in the future, after we get moved in. Hopefully some good before and afters!

Friday, May 29, 2009

DIY: My Wedding Favors

I'm currently debating between these 3 wedding favors:

from The Knot

Caramel apples bought from Huber's Orchard in Indiana (delicious) - with custom wrapping.

From Cookbook Catchall

Homemade caramels by me - packaged in some cute container.

From Brides.com

Small homemade jars of apple butter (the first recipe I posted!) - This would be extra special but lots of work (well, for my dad) haha.

All three of these ideas would be excellent for our fall wedding....I want something that's more unique than jordan almonds and other candies and I think these are all great ideas.... I just can't decide! Thoughts?
Saturday, May 02, 2009

DIY: My Wedding Cake

Photo here

As I mentioned in the DIY recipe cards post, I've been thinking about having a cake bar instead of a traditional wedding cake. These photos are some of my inspiration. I love vintage cake plates.... I also love baking cakes. Having a homemade, old fashioned cake bar would be a perfect fit for our style of wedding.

Photo here <- this blog is great, I love her tag line: Creative. Thrifty. Sane. I like to believe that about myself as well.

Photo here

Taking on the task of making the cakes will be incredibly stressful - what if I burn them?! I'll be testing out cake recipes before the wedding and posting them on here! We'll see how those go and then I'll decide if I can handle it.

Saturday, May 02, 2009

DIY: Recipe Cards

It's no secret that I love collecting recipes so what better project than DIY recipe cards? I've thought about designing my own card (that matches our handmade invitations and other wedding stationary) and including a special family recipe to give as another favor at our wedding. I've also considered having a cake bar with several different old-fashioned layer cakes instead of a traditional wedding cake - I could share those cake recipes on cards and display them on the cake table for people to pick up as they get a piece of cake. I'm not sure if I'll use these ideas but I'm definitely going to design my own recipe cards to have on hand because well, why not? They're great, I love them and they would make great gifts!

You can find recipe card templates for the ones above at Etsy and Apartment Therapy. For a small price you can download the template and customize it to your own preference but with a little creativity, card stock and printer you can make your own 100% customized card so... why not?

Thursday, April 23, 2009

DIY: Coasters

This project is fantastic - I love DIY projects that are simple but still look like you would have paid a big price in the store. I ran across this DIY coaster project because someone made these as favors for their wedding. I'm not so much interested in that as I am in just making them for myself! I could also see making larger ones for use as kitchen trivets or using ones of all different sizes and patterns as a great wall art project. These would also make great custom gifts for any occasion - you could even make monogram coasters for someone.... yup, this is a keeper.

For complete directions click here.

Side note: After reading over the directions I became even more excited at the fact that you get to use Mod Podge. I used this stuff in high school for everything - collages on storage trunks, lamps, you name it and I Mod Podged it. Sadly though, I haven't had much use for it since then so the fact that this project uses Mod Podge gives it an additional star from me! Slightly dorky, yes... the end.

Unique Idea: Screen Door Pantry

Another genre of my collection that you'll be seeing a lot of is home ideas. Since we'll be looking for a house soon you can bet that I'll be looking for design inspiration. This is one idea that I absolutely love:

From Apartment Therapy

Its so unique, affordable and just all around awesome. Hopefully we'll have a pantry so that I can actually put this one to the test (hope you like it, Tony!) I also love the use of old jars as storage containers and the fact that they illuminated the inside. The only problem: you have to be organized since everything is on display...but, that's not a bad thing!

Wedding Inspiration

Because we are busy planning our wedding you can probably count on the 30% random assortment being well, mostly wedding related ramblings. This post is just about my basic wedding inspiration. Before we began looking at venues or cakes or thinking about flowers, before anything, I created this inspiration board:


This really embodies the feel I'm hoping to achieve on our big day... a casual but beautiful ceremony with a laid-back brunch reception to follow...and, inspired by fall of course. I loved the idea of using simple jars as centerpieces and the rustic burlap on the tables. Unfortunately I collected these images before this blog began so I can't give credit to where I found them (same goes for below!). Anyway, we have decided on a venue for the ceremony and reception and I think it will be perfect for the style we are hoping for!

Peterson- Dumesnil House, Louisville, KY

The photo doesn't begin to give justice to how gorgeous the house is. I'm still keeping my same theme and hoping for a more vintage feel. I'm also set on using jars for centerpieces - old blue Ball jars to be exact...I am so excited about this idea! My parents already have a few and Tony and I have been able to find a handful at the local Peddler's Market (we're also accepting jar loans from other family members, *hint hint.)

More inspiration for jar centerpieces

Another thing I'm excited about is making my own invitations, other decorations, and maybe even cake -- more to come on all of those topics later but for now I just wanted you to get the idea of what we're going for! I could post on wedding topics forever but that's all for now.

This blog could be just the remedy for Tony's, my parent's and my co-worker's ears - somewhere else to talk about the wedding other than constantly rattling on to them!