This Great Fall Life: Best of Comfort Food

Since I'm nauseous all of the time thanks to night shift, I don't feel bad about fattening up when I do eat.  Thus, fall's season of comfort food.  Best-of and all-around crowd pleaser?  White chicken chili.  It's like you can't go wrong.  Just put chicken, seasoning, and then all of the things you like into one big pot and pretty much just cook it on low until it's hot.  Our sister-in-law Lyndsey turned me on to this, and it's grown since then.  I like to put it in a dutch oven or crock pot a couple of hours before sean gets home.  It's a good food to make your house smell good, which makes me feel a little Betty-Crocker-like.  It's the little things...

Anyway, here's how I do it, but like I said, I like the idea that you can pretty much put what you want.

Ingredients, sans Lysol.  The Chicken Chili kit is an essential short-cut.

Great Northern and Cannellini Beans

Put 2 cups of water and a can of diced tomatoes with the juice into a dutch oven

Add in spices in the kit, jalapeno, and chopped up boiled chicken

And put it over tortilla chips with shredded monterrey jack cheese with jalapeno

Huge hit in this house.  And super easy.  And of course it's easy to make a lot more and freeze it, which is something I can appreciate.

Four Legged Crandalls :)

I'm going to interrupt any normal sequence of blogging to post some pictures of the four-legged Crandalls...after all, they add a lot to our lives.

Mr. Grady, Nick and Lyndsey's puppy on his first trip to go tailgating in Clemson.  He wouldn't stay still long enough to catch much of his cute Clemson bandana on camera...but just know that he did wear orange.

Rora, our sweet cat back from the brink of death since last month.  Sadly, her brother Oliver wasn't as lucky, but we're glad to have this sweet girl back happy and healthy.

And Mr. Mogatu, fat tabby, the longest-standing member and hands-down most photogenic of the furry variety of Crandalls

This Great Fall Life: Frame Project

I think that one of the easiest and cheapest seasonally decorating options is replacing picture frames with seasonal ones that have seasonal pictures (in this case, I had tons from part of our engagement session in the woods of the Botanical Gardens that our photographer Kim DeLoach marched like a mile down a trail to get to).  Thus, my project of the week: replacing picture frames on our living room bookshelf and kitchen.

Plain wooden frames.  These are like, 2 bucks.

Painted...

Scrapbook flowers and buttons :)

Completed corner

And some brown ribbons

Completed #1

What I like about doing this is that I like painting, and it's easy to collect stuff I already have for them.  Like for these, I had tons of flower petals, leaves, paint, paint pens, wires, burlap, and buttons, so I just collected everything in my box that looked fall colored and put them on frames.  

#2

#3

#4...buttons and wire

You get the point.  Anyway, our living room bookshelf is now welcoming fall in all its glory.  Is it obvious that I love this season?

This Great Fall Life: Wreath #3

Continuing with my love of burlap, following my bubble wreath, I thought that the pictures in our hall bath should be seasonally swapped with a more "fall" visual appeal.  And I'm big on wreaths now, so that's what I went with.

I like to periodically check out Craftaholics Anonymous, which is where I found this.  I like that blog, mainly because it always has tutorials for things that are pretty simple and mindless that I can do while we watch TV and hang out at night.  And this was no different.  Easy and relatively quick.  I pretty much followed the tutorial with the exception of having to dye some of the burlap.  Rit dye is a favorite craft material of mine because it's just particularly useful for a variety of things.  Not that I use it a ton, but I always love it when I do.  So that's how I got purple burlap.  Turns out that colored burlap is hard to come by in the store.  Who knew.  Anyway, here's some progress pictures:

Hot glued burlap strips

Completed flower

I did this Clemson style in honor of football season's part in fall

Buttons wrapped in fabric.  I thought this looked good with plain buttons too.

And the final product

This Great Fall Life: Wreath #2

Like many others, I have recently found a new love in the form of pinterest.  And like many others, have recently pinned this burlap bubble wreath and subsequently created it for my front door.  Actually, I created it in huge form for the centerpiece of my dining room wall, and subsequently promoted it to front door and moved this masterpiece to my dining room :)

What I love about this project, is that it's modifi-able (is that a word?) for the seasons.  Since I'm in love with it, I've given a lot of thought to the various ribbons that will accompany it throughout the year, as soon as I'm over the fact that I spent seventeen dollars inadvertently on the 2 yards of brown ribbon that I bought to hang it from and have the heart to switch it out.  As a side note, that's a little ridiculous.  I didn't think it'd be more than a dollar or so per yard and after it was cut she rung me up for seventeen dollars...are you trippin'?

The project itself was simple, but extremely time consuming after making the management decision to buy the biggest foam wreath that Hobby Lobby had to offer.  It took more like 2 1/2 yards of burlap contrary to the tutorial and more like 200-250 pins.  I measured all of my squares 4x4 for the sake of consistency in the "bubbles" which I think is a good idea, and this was really helpful in my quest to cut and measure straight.  I used it for multiple burlap crafts following this one.  Anyway, here's a few pics, but the tutorial is pretty straight forward.

A few of the 200+ squares

Bubbles

Finished product

And the seventeen dollar ribbon

Burlap is my new favorite material.  Happy Fall!

Christmas Crafts: Wedding Invitation

In looking at fall wreath ideas, I came across a picture of a wedding invitation ornament online and thought that it was great (that's my "credit" since I don't know where I saw the picture and upon googling it, came up with a lot of potential sources).  I'd considered framing our invitation, but it was shaped kind of oddly, so until now, it's just been sitting in a box of wedding stuff.  But now, it's in an ornament :)  From the picture, it seemed pretty self-explanatory, so I just picked up a box of empty ornaments and did it this afternoon.  So my new past time is going to be figuring out what to use the other 3 glass balls for since Hobby Lobby didn't sell them individually.

Our wedding invitation and clear glass ornament

I cut the invitation into strips, and then cut off excess so there wouldn't be so much white space, and then curled each piece around a pen

My addition to this idea was spray gluing the inside of the ornament and then pouring and shaking around some silver and white glitter.  We used silver in our color scheme, and silver and green were both on the invitation.

The other thing that I added to it was the ribbon that we tied our programs with.  It's olive green, and matched the font on the invitation.  Nostalgia..  After cutting up the whole invitation, I found that I would have needed more than one invitation to fill the ball, which I didn't have, but I liked it this way too since you can roll it around and read different parts.

And the inside.

Fall Wreathing Project

I love pretty much everything about fall.  I love decorating for fall especially, and more especially than that, fall candles (which doesn't have anything to do with this post, but Yankee Candle's fall spices is really making me happy lately).  And I've been waiting for fall for a while now, ever since I decided to embark on making a fall wreath, which was sometime in January.  Whilst trying to decide what to do with my life should nursing not work out, I gave some thought to wreathing, but only wanted to do it during the fall.  So here we are, finally in the fall, so I can finally make my wreath.

This project was pretty simple.  I have read tutorials on using a foam wreath and hot gluing leaves and the like in place, but I think that's too messy.  Hot glue isn't really my favorite craft tool.  I've also seen some done with wire, so that's what I did.  Basically, I just went and picked out everything I liked that I could wire onto a branch wreath.  There's a pretty big selection of fall foliage at just about any craft store, so it took a while to decide.  I sat there for some extended time deciding flowers vs pumpkins and sparkley vs matte tones, and ended up going with all of the above for lack of a strong desire to go one way or the other.  I think that fall stuff looks really good with a lot of texture, so I did my best to get that, and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

4 dollar branch wreath and a collection of fall foliage stuff that I liked

After wiring a leaf garland around the branches

In progress, evening it out.  I added some yellow feathers, berries, a pumpkin, a sunflower, more random leaves, and some yellow sparkley beads to the garland by the time I was finished.  I pretty much felt like one of those kids who has to use ALL the craft stuff on the table.

My sunflower, aka, my favorite part

And the finished product, hanging on my door like something straight out of Southern Living.  Well, Southern Living might be a stretch.  But you get my drift.

Yep, there she is.  This should probably be a little higher, but it's gonna have to wait.

Labor Day

This past weekend, Sean and I got to go down to Bluffton and visit Sean's family...and the beach.  We did some beach time, pool time, and shopping, and met Nick and Lyndsey's new puppy, my nephew-pup Grady.

Mr. Grady

Bro and Sister-in-law Nick and Lyndsey

Lone picture of Seanie and Me

Yay Twins!  With a foot of space.

Grades again

Ok... no more pictures...

We spent some time with Gram

Sean's Parents

And them again, humoring my need to take a million pictures

Queen's Landing

Last weekend, Sean and I went on a dinner cruise on Lake Norman that I got him for Christmas.  Yeah, we're just now getting around to using it.  It was a pretty night with a pretty sunset, and pretty decent food.