My Life in Pins

Oh how I love updating our life through Pins! Here is our most recent happenings and as always you can hang out with us on Pinterest here:

http://pinterest.com/laurenhooper/

(Click any image to be taken to the pin)

I just finished this book and movie, here is my verdict in a sentence:

Books are better than movies.

I am determined to make these adorable cake stands, like sooner than soon. I have been looking at cake stands everywhere we go and can’t bring myself to buy them because they are so expensive and I want multiple of them to use for things other than cakes…..Therefore, the only solution is to make them!

Also, I am in LOVE with art journalism right now. I forgot how much I love to journal and have been journaling a lot lately and have been branching out and have really enjoyed this blogs ideas!

To up the ante a little and because our summer is going to be the most epic summer ever, we needed a very epic way to capture every little detail. I found these Smash Journals and some incredibly awesome accessories that make it super easy and fun to smash in all the things you love. The pen is a pen AND a glue stick. Genius! (PS, they have them at Hobby Lobby, Michael’s, scrapbook stores, etc, but are cheaper on Amazon!)

True story: I saw this pin and found myself measuring my face to make sure I’m normal. I am, so is Terrell.

This has been my long running goal of making the sweet picnic blanket since it is A) so cute and B) so practical. It has a shower curtain on the bottom to keep it from getting wet and dirty! This is being moved up on the priority list so we can enjoy lots of picnics this summer!

We made these fish tacos and they were thebombdotcomb delicious. And easy.

I am obsessed with all things maps and have been collecting lots of maps and frames to get some new art up soon!

We, Ok, I have decided that everyone needs to collect something and since spoons aren’t really our thing and we like to be practical with the things we keep, we decided on Postcards! Everywhere we go we pick up a 25 cent postcard, write a memory, the date or whatever on the back and will eventually find an awesome way to store/display them!  (Any Suggestions?!) One day, when I’m 80, I’m going to make all those wipper snappers sit down and look at my postcards!

I. Love. Fruit. Pizza.

These are the funniest things I see on Pinterest. They make me laugh out loud almost every time.

What have you pinned lately?

Downtown Day Trips are the best

This weekend we decided to hop in the car and take a little trip, 15 minutes down the road from Athens, to Lexington. This little downtown was so incredibly beautiful and historic, we had a fabulous day snapping pictures and playing in antique stores.

We started our day like the locals and ate a little restaraunt on the side of the road called Blaze’s. I mean what could be better than a black squirrel butler holding your menu?

We then headed downtown, met some locals, convinced Terrell to learn how to use instagram and snapped a few shots of the some of the historic landmarks.

We spent some time sifting through the goodies at the thrift and antique stores and found some treasures for sure! Check out those trolls, it doesn’t get any better than that! And oh how I love the old children’s books! I hope to have a collection just like these one day….

I found the most phenomenal old Polaroid camera in an antique store and since they are all the rage now, I knew it would be way out of my “I have 3$ in my pocket-price range”. But, keeping with our perfect day, the guy wanted 5$ for it. We dug through our change and had 5$ even, so with a handful of pennies and a promise to actually use the camera, I am the proud owner of the most beautiful camera my parents traded in years ago for a digital one! It’s funny how all things retro are coming back!

I’m so happy I could squeal, like a pig! But now the challenge is finding some film that isn’t incredibly expensive for it!

We spent the rest of our time learning the enduring history of this little town that has some very passionate citizens who are bringing it back to life. We took some really cool pictures using our tripod and are really excited about them-so check ‘em out!

We’re so James Bond.

Where have you been lately?

 

Handmade Family Calendars

Last year for Christmas we made our families these lovely calendars from Wal-Mart. They cost about 15$ each and to us that is big bucks, especially when you make a ton of them. Once I got the hang of them they were simple to make and you can make them super personalized, which we loved. But this year we started making them for even more family members and then the price went up to 20$. 20 big ones. 20 dolla dolla bills ya’ll. 20 dinero. cha-ching. You get the picture. So we had to find a more budget friendly calendar. We got so many compliments from our calendar last year and we loved looking at all the pictures ourselves, so we definitely wanted to stick with photos and we really loved the larger format to be able to write in our daily activities to keep track of our hectic life. So we found an easy and very cost-effective way to make our own and as with all things handmade, we like it even better!  

This is my favorite page!

Our price went from 20$ down to 3$! Cha-ching in my pocket! Virtually our only cost was printing the pictures. We already had scrapbook paper, book rings, glue, embellishments, etc. We printed the calendars offline and we were using a ‘friends’ laminating machine, but we made a lot of calendars and I got a little addicted to laminating things, so I found this bad boy on Amazon for 20$ and bought the laminating pouches for 12$.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0012UEXTQ/ref=oh_o00_s02_i00_details

So to make 3 calendars we spent 38$, including the machine, which is still may cheaper than the 60$ we would have spent through a photo site.

This is the original calendar printed from Wal-mart.

As we were playing with them we realized that the photos that overlapped made the pages more sturdy and using 2 sided tape rather than glue made the pages less wrinkly. You can embellish them more or leave them simple, we loved the combination and had so much fun making them! All we did was layer the calendar pages and the next months picture page together in the laminating pouches, laminate, hole punch and put book rings through and hang!

Here is our version!

Here are a few of the pages I made:

Our friends always love seeing who made the calendar cut

The book rings. You can use any size depending on how you like the pages to hang.

This was a very quick project, but I have a feeling that if I wasnt in such a hurry I could have spent weeks working on it!

And last, in honor of our wedding anniversary, my favorite shots from the wedding. They just never get old!

Travel Time Capsules

We. Love. Traveling.

We seriously have an addiction. We want to go everywhere, see everything, do anything and meet everyone. But sometimes it isn’t always in our best budget senses. So we must find ways to travel and to remember our travels on the cheap-cheap. We’re actually pretty good at it and this summer were going to get GREAT at it. Our plan is to pack everything up into storage, load up our car and take off! We are super excited and have a whole map planned out of where were going and sights to see and friends to visit. We will do a whole post of our destination goals soon, but our main goal is the Grand Canyon, hence this post: Our Life in Pins. We will be sharing our journey and our money-saving tips and travel suggestions along the way, So the blog will take a small turn from the crafty+ thrifty to the travel + thrifty for a while, but we hope you will like following our journey! (and it is the only way our families will have proof were alive-so they will be reading!)

Back to the matter at hand. In our travels we always pick up lots of little knick knacks and sometimes things just happen to show up in my bag, like wrappers and gift tags, maps, info cards, etc. And I always LOVE picking up seashells from the beach. I needed a way to save all that stuff and display it and saw Young House Loves’s Time Capsules and they were perfect! I immediately began rounding up mason jars (our favorite items for any & all occasions) and keepsakes from meaningful trips. Now we have a whole shelf dedicated to displaying the sweet little mementos. They are super easy to make and easy to change-up and have so many different options that you can change to make them unique to you. The labels are simple cardstock + ribbon + my handwritten description of the trip.

 

We made one from Nicaragua and it is definitely my favorite because it is so colorful and has so many fun and different items, unlike the others whose content are all pretty similar.

The Nicaragua Time Capsule has crayons that the kids used to color at VBS, a tile we skipped with the kids in the lake, a pebble from the lake/beach, the Jicaro Project label which lets me know who made my sweet candle, a bracelet I made with my favorite child, Angel, a Cordova, a feather from the Ginnys that lived at camp with us, a beautiful flower that I pressed, a Nica state flag patch (were trying to collect them and eventually do a project with them).

This one is from our first vacation we spent with his family. We walked along the beach and picked up shells and accidentally brought home sand. A lot of sand.

This one is from our honeymoon in Hawaii and yes I admit, I picked up the black and white rocks because they use them to compare good and evil in Lost. I am still a little obsessed…

We love movies and going to the theatre, so we keep all our ticket stubs and stick them in here, yes Lincoln Lawyer was a good movie

I love this one so much! We collected dead coral from the ocean floor as we were learning to scuba dive. We worked really hard for these! And I made a simple scuba flag out of cardstock to stick in this one.

 Simple, meaningful and fun. My favorite kind of project. What are some ways that you have preserved your favorite travel memories?

Were Back!

Hello friends! We have just returned and reoriented ourselves from a fabulous week long trip to Nicaragua with 20 of the most awesome college students that we could find in Athens! We have so many stories and awesome pictures to share, we want to really take our time and process through them so we can give you the best glimpse of what our time there was like. So be looking for those posts coming up soon! Until then I will leave you with some teaser pictures.

Now onto Bizness, I have been agonizing + working really hard + reading lots of blogs + doing nothing + talking myself into this + talking myself out of this. So finally I am enacting my Etsy shop with only 1 item. I know that is the biggest NO NO in Etsy selling, but that is the only way I am going to get it done, so I’m doing it. I have lots of other items listed in drafts and have a million ideas in my head that will come to fruition, but I figured the only way to do is just to do it. SO Here you go! Here is the first in the line of handmade greeting cards and I am VERY excited about these! We began making them to say Thank you to all the wonderful people who supported our Nicaragua trip and they were very popular and so fun to make that I decided they were how I should start my Etsy shop. So hope on over and pick some up to send out to who ever deserves a thank you from you lately!

http://www.etsy.com/shop/ThisHandmadeCircus

Nica

The homes are so beautiful and the people even more so….

My life in Pins

True story, Im addicted to Pinterest, just like everyone else on the planet and I can seriously plan my whole life around and describe it to you via Pinterest. So here is what we’ve done lately:

(Click on the picture to take you to the Pinterest link)

You can check out all my Pins here:

http://pinterest.com/laurenhooper/

We have had this delicious dinner:

This was Delicious Chicken Enchilada Pasta!

We tried this recipe, it didn’t work so well for me:

I have made this:

I really want to get better at this embroidery thing, I really like it!

I tried this and it didn’t work for me:

I cant wait to make this!

Were doing this at the end of the month!

And, another spoiler alert: Were going here this summer!

There it is! That’s our life recently in Pins! Check out all my Pins here:

http://pinterest.com/laurenhooper/ 

House + Life Updates

Hello there! Welp, were back baby! I have been so torn lately about posting new blogs posts on here because I feel like I’m not saying anything and trying to hard to fit in with the other fancy blogs. And the longer we go without posting the more daunting it feels to post….But I decided that this is our journal, we have followers, and we have Awesome stuff to share with the world. So we are pledging to blog when we feel like it, not on a certain schedule like the “blog advisors” say you should. We are also going to share random things that we do in our home that you can do too and were going to share stuff about our life. Because we do really cool things and you can’t tell us other wise because this is our blog. So BOOM!

 We have some REALLY exciting things going on, and we are promising to start sharing them SOON! But first here is a little update on what we’ve been doing lately and maybe you will gain a little wisdom from it

First, we got a really awesome new camera, so we are taking lots of crazy pictures and attempting to figure this thing out, so as we learn we will share info so maybe you will learn some tricks!

Second, I have been struggling a lot lately with coming home from work and becoming an amoeba on the couch and watching, yes I am admitting this, Vampire Dairies. I did an activity with my college girls small group and we tracked how we spent our time for a week and I was way disappointed with myself. So I have been working really hard to get in gear and be productive! Those are always my famous last words before a 3 hour TV stint. To combat this, I recently invested in Laura Simms Roadmap to Action journal/planner/How to guide.

You can check it out here: http://createasfolk.com/roadmap/ 

I’ve been doing lots of soul-searching through this to envision my “perfect life” and work towards that by getting rid of the clutter. The second book I’ve been reading that has me doing LOTS of soul-searching is The Emotionally Healthy Church,

check it out here: http://www.amazon.com/Emotionally-Healthy-Church-Strategy-Discipleship/dp/0310246547 

I am reading this along with the other small group leaders at our church and man, it is rocking my world! I have been so convicted about the areas of weakness that I struggle with, like being lazy and being a bad listener (please don’t tell the social work licensing board, they may revoke my license for this statement) but I have been learning through this book about how Paul viewed weakness:

⁸ Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. ⁹ But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. ¹⁰ That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

2 Corinthians 12:8-10

I am learning admitting my weakness is the first step in allowing the Lord to make me strong. So this week I have been practicing that and have been making progress! Every day I’ve been trying to do a little project or two and to JUST DO IT!! Isnt that crazy, that if I just get up and do stuff, I feel productive and when I feel productive, I feel energized and accomplished and excited about my day?

So here are a few of the small projects I’ve been tackling to make our house beautiful and our life less stressful and more productive and organized!

We decided we needed a vision for this year. We used this sweet idea from Creating Clever and made ourselves a Mantra. She gives a template, but I couldn’t quite figure it out, so I just used a simple word document, printed it out and mod podged it to an old canvas I painted over (sorry mom, your topiaries are gone forever). Check out the tutorial here: http://creatingclever.com/the-aileen-manifesto

We used the other canvas to paint this sweet picture that we also live our life by on:

I’m still unsure about the colors, I may paint over the letters again, but we’ll see.

Here they are hung on either side of the entertainment center:

Next I got out the craft glue, random paper, fishing line and clothes pins and voila, my craft room has a pretty little line to hang inspiration on!

 Notice, the zebra box? Fabric + glue + cardboard box = Storage needs met.

Next, we have the sweet grocery list, that I downloaded from here: http://www.divshare.com/image/10728008-39f

I used my sharpies, made it pretty, laminated it and Bam! Reusable and pretty grocery list!

And the answer to my life’s greatest problem: The monthly menu board! Such a great idea! We plan out meals for the month, make a grocery list from it and now we have NO question about what is for dinner and I only have to go to the grocery store about once a month! It makes my life soooo much easier! I highly recommend this!

Spoiler alert: We have some exciting things to share this week and that week with the arrows may have something to do with it!

See this is how happy all this pretty organization makes me!

Be sure to come back to hear lots of new and exciting things this week!