Baby Shower Invitations: Lime and Aqua

Dear week from hell,

Me, the beach and a bucket of brews are going to spend some quality time together to forget all about you. No hard feelings.

Sincerely, me.

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We just recently got back from an amazing trip to Alaska, and boy have we had a hard time adjusting. With fire alarms going off, late work nights, and missing alarm clocks, I’m anxious to give a big heave-ho to this week and spend some quality family time at the beach relaxing and recuperating. In the meantime, (since I know you’ve been missing me dearly) I thought I’d share some DIY invitations I whipped up for my sister-in-law’s upcoming baby shower. She and my big bro are having a little boy and she wanted the invites to be fun, a bit modern and tie in with her nursery colors (lime green and aqua). She mentioned wanting some bunting at her shower, so I felt this design (which they ended up using) was quite appropriate.

Cute and simple, no? I like to give people options, but sometimes I get a bit carried away. I designed 3 invitations for this shower. Yes, there is only one baby being born, but I felt my future nephew deserved the best I could do – which entailed three completely different options.

I really liked the look of this one, but maybe it was a bit too feminine for a boy shower? Enter, option numero tres.

The chevrons are kinda funky and a bit retro, which I really liked as another option. Even though my sister-in-law picked the first card, I’d like to see what everyone else thinks. Are you batty over bunting, digging the dots or groovin on chevron? Sound off!

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Mini Updates, Round Deux

Why yes, it’s another lame post of updates. Life has been bananas recently so I don’t have the energy for a full post. But don’t fret! Some fun things are on the horizon (baby shower invitation, drapery ideas, personal posts, etc). so get amped for those in the near future. Scott and I are preparing for a big trip and just had family in town for a bit, so things have been quite hectic. I’ll be back to a (almost) normal schedule soon, but until then, here are some yummy things for you enjoy.

You may have noticed a slight update to the blogitty. Hi, my name is Audrey and I’m incredibly indecisive. I needed to bring just a bit of color onto the page(a full blog update may be in my future) so this free background from Ollibird (via How About Orange) gave me the quick change I needed. Ahh, sweet sweet color.

Be still my heart. I recently discovered this awesome DIY chandelier (via Little Green Notebook) that was spotted over at Ready Made, a great site for all things DIY. I’m not sure where I would put this beauty, but I have. to. have. it. Don’t you just want to eat it up?

My husband follows a blog called A House by the Park, which follows the process of a web-designer building an uber modern home in Seattle. The home recently finished and it’s fan-freakin-tastic. Take a look if you wanna see some modern yumminess.

And, last but not least, mister Henry-pants. My family came to visit this past weekend and we got some good quality time with my just-turned-1 nephew. Isn’t he the cutest? I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday weekend – enjoy some fireworks, hot dogs and glass bottled coke!

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Greeny Baby Shower: Bunting Bonanza

I may have found a new obsession – bunting. I started to make a couple for the greeny baby shower that’s coming up this weekend, and I got a little carried away – and made five. This may be a bit overboard for the shower, but I just couldn’t help myself! Once I whipped up one set of these cute little triangles-on-a-string, I wanted to make more – and wanted them all over my house. Take a stab at this simple little project and you’ll be hooked as well!

I started out with this simple flag template (courtesy of fellow blogger, OhBrooke). The tapered flap helps to attach your triangles to your twine (or string, yarn, whatever) and giving your final banner a clean, finished look.

I then cut a tooooon of triangles out of some fun green, black and white papers, hailing from Paper Source and Michaels. I really didn’t think about how many triangles one banner would make, hence the 5 total banners I ended up with. Whoops. I pre-folded my triangles ahead of time so the assembly would be quick and easy. I made sure the patterns of my papers were of varying scales, so the bunting had some interest and didn’t look like the same flag over and over.

I, again, went a little overboard and used a combo of rubber cement and scotch tape to attach the flags to my divine twine (love that stuff). Side note: we went looking for rubber cement at Home Depot and Target and neither store had any. The Target employee actually said that she had never even heard of rubber cement – what kind of world are we living in where people don’t know what rubber cement is!? Luckily for me, I work for a company that has an overstock of rubber cement at my fingertips for such dire situations. Phew. I used the rubber cement to hold the twine in place, and added a strip of scotch tape on the back to make sure the thicker papers didn’t come unglued (the shame!)

Voila! Bunting brilliance right there, folks. I don’t know why something so simple gets me so hyped, but I really love this stuff. Would it be wrong to incorporate this into my daily home decor?

Yeah, maybe. But perfect for a boy baby shower, no? Let’s hope the Mom-to-be doesn’t judge me for showing up with a bag full of bunting to decorate her house. My house is living vicariously through hers.

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Hello, White Grout. Nice to Meet You.

I’m you’re all too familiar with our kitchen. The cabinets are just dandy, the countertop and backsplash are simply stunning, and the floor is, well, disgusting. Our kitchen (and master bathroom) flooring are the bane of my existence. I loathe them. They’re dirty, dingy and building standard – oh, the shame! The previous owner installed this monstrosity and then proceeded to turn the grout a yucky brown color, thanks to owning a dog-sitting business out of the house. You thought that grout was supposed to be brown, didn’t you? Nope, it’s dirty. Welcome to my shame fest.

Here is our kitchen floor before this weekend. I’m totally airing my dirty laundry here, but you really have to get a good visual of the before so you can appreciate the after that much more. We’ve always hated this dingy flooring, but didn’t see the point in replacing it (since that would involve pulling out our perfectly good cabinets). We’ve researched a lot of grout cleaners and grout stains over the past year or so, but just weren’t convinced that anything was worth the time/effort. Boy, were we wrong. We popped into Lowe’s this weekend to research another upcoming project for this spring, and happened to drop by the tile section to pick up some grout sealer. We started to look around at the grout products and saw a grout cleaner that caught our eye. We were looking for something to do that afternoon, so said “why not give it a go?” All those years of research were thrown out the window on the whim that the first product we spotted at Lowe’s would solve our dirty-grout problem. Go figure.

We brought home this cheap-o bottle o’ acid (sounds scary, right?) and a scrub brush and decided to try our hand at cleaning our nasty grout. We needed to crack the windows in our house and use some rubber gloves, but the rest of the job was fairly simple. We mixed this solution with some water to dilute it and then scrubbed the wash along the grout lines. After letting it sit for two minutes, you scrub the dickens out of your grout with a scrub brush and let the magic happen.

Wait, what? We have white grout?! We were incredibly shocked at the amount of dirt that came out of our sad little grout lines, especially since we’ve been trying for almost 3 years to clean our floor with bleach and typical cleaning products, to no avail. If you’re in need of some serious cleaning power, we would highly suggest using this product or something similar since it kicked our grout’s dirty little butt right out of the kitchen – and with minimal effort to boot.

This side by side comparison makes me scream with glee and vomit a little in my mouth, all at the same time. It’s amazing what years and years of use and a lack of grout sealer can do to a kitchen floor. We used this product in our master bathroom as well and the results were jaw dropping. The grout isn’t perfect (it is old and worn, after all) but it’s WHITE. I never thought I’d see the day.

Have you found a similar product out there that just made you say wow during the process? We couldn’t believe the results this little bottle of heaven produced. Share the goods!

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Greeny Baby Shower: The Inception

I’m at that point in my life where my friends are having babies. Alien children are growing inside of their stomachs and will soon be walking the earth amongst the rest of us, by some form of magic or science fiction. Can you tell I’m not quite at that point in my life yet? :) While I think babies are fine and dandy, I’d rather spend my time at this point being an awesome aunt and throwing fun baby showers for my friends who are into the alien-in-your-belly thing.

One of my best buds in Charlotte has a bun in the oven, so I decided to team up with my friend Evelyn and throw a fun shower for the parents-to-be. My preggo friend was a bit nervous to have a shower thrown for her, since she’s not into the whole “measure my belly” and “guess the poo” types of games that most showers entail. I promised her that this party would just be a gathering of friends with a simple premise, yummy food, and loads of baby gifts. And some fun decorations that tie perfectly into my modern theme. Because that’s how I roll. We met the other night to discuss our agenda and came up with a crisp and clean color scheme that will be perfect for this no-nonsense modern mama.

This “mood board” of sorts is basically where we’re headed with the shower. No barn yard animals or dump truck themes for this Mom. The things I know about her are as follows: her wedding was black and white, her nursery will be green, and she lives and breathes on candy and cupcakes alone. Put those all together, and voila, a shower idea was born.

I’ll keep you all up to date with the details once the actual shower comes together, but for now I’d like to share a quick little invitation that I whipped up in Illustrator the other day. Yes, you read that right – Scott and I have taken the plunge and decided to teach ourselves Adobe Illustrator. Photoshop is still my number one bestie, but for anything that we plan to print, Illustrator is where it’s at. I know I wanted something simple and graphic for the invitations, and I wanted to make sure I wasn’t pigeonholing us into a theme by making any sort of animal or baby-themed item the focus.

A bunch of fun fonts in varying sizes, placed just so to fill up the page was just the ticket. The dotted lines help to give the invitation some structure and keep the mis-mash of text from being too difficult to read. The little pops of chartreuse bring in the fun accent color, and draw the reader’s attention to key points as they read along.

I printed these on my old standby, white card stock. I really do have a lifetime supply, so thank goodness I’m into DIY invitations. I’m still debating on rounding the corners of these bad boys for a softer, baby-ish feel, but I’ll let you give me your two cents on that one. Stay tuned for more modern baby shower items coming your way in the future!

Images courtesy of yours truly, the almighty Google, Whisker Graphics, Etsy, and Flickr

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Nifty Gift Idea: Part Deux

Earlier this week I shared a fun little gift that my mom whipped up for my siblings and me, and how you could adapt it for newlyweds, new parents, homeowners, etc. The gift was so super simple to make, and it saved her oodles of money by being DIY, rather than purchasing the photographs from a website. Along those same lines, I made a calendar for my mom that was a big hit, but wasn’t a big hit to my wallet. I’ve seen all of those calendars that Snapfish and Apple offer, but I wasn’t quite sold on the formatting or the standard 8.5 x 11 shape. So, in the name of all things DIY around these parts, I took to my trusty photoshop and whipped up a quick calendar that was even more special because it was completely custom.

I started off with custom front and back covers. The front cover was fun to create because I got to play with different fonts and colors together… making me realize that I need a larger library of fonts to work with. Future project? I also added a little message to mi madre on the back to let her know her lovely children collaborated on this calendar for her, and a date to commemorate the occasion. Also, if you know me and my family, you’ll notice that the last name has been tweaked to something a bit more generic. You have to have some anonymity in the blog world, right?

After the front and back covers were completed, I made one template for my calendars and simply tweaked it for each month but changing up the dates, colors and adding everyone’s birthdays and anniversary dates. I wanted the template to be clean and simple to not take away from the most important part for my mom- the family photographs. I threw in some fun photos of things we had done this year, either as a family or as our separate couples. I loved doing this custom so that I could coordinate the text colors to the pictures I selected – a bit obsessive compulsive? Possibly.

I had this little calendar spiral bound at my local printer, and the grand total came into about $20 for printing and binding. Not too shabby, right? I didn’t take a final picture of the product (bad blogger!) but I used some of Whitney’s Divine Twine, threaded through the spiral binding and tied in a bow, for my mom to hang her calendar wherever she so pleased.

I’ve learned that any gift that was made by hand is a thousand times better than something bought from a store. Don’t get me wrong, anything from Anthropologie is always welcomed with open arms, but a gift like this or something else that took a little time on the part of the giver is a win in my book. Any other DIY gifts out there that you’d like to share?

Divine Twine image courtesy of Whisker Graphics

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Nifty Gift Idea

Since the holidays are gone and done with, I’m sure you’re relishing in all the amazing gifts you received. And by you, I mean me. This Christmas wasn’t necessarily a blow out or anything, but the gifts I did receive were thoughtful and down right bitchin’. My creative Mom definitely went all out by making all the girls custom aprons and finding cool scarfs on Etsy, but her best gift was something that I thought I’d share with the blogosphere because of its heart-felt sentiment and simple DIY-ness.

My Mom and Dad recently visited an antique car show, and my Mom had the brilliant idea of taking pictures of numbers on the cars and turning it into a framed piece of artwork with our wedding anniversary date. Now, not only was this genius because it gave her something to do at a car show, but also because it made the perfect gift for my brother, sister and I, all of whom are recently married. You may have seen the trend of architectural letters to spell out names, etc. (which I love as well) but trying to DIY it and find letters hidden in shrubbery and buildings is a bit on the difficult side. Numbers, on the other hand, are everywhere! You could take pictures of unique house numbers, road signs, etc. and plop them into a frame to commemorate any special date. This would be a perfect wedding gift or a gift for new parents with their babe’s birthdate, or even a housewarming gift to new homeowners with their house numbers displayed. The possibilities are endless and the cost is basically at a minimum.

Our wedding date does a nice job of completing our gallery wall in the den, don’t you think? Did any of you receive any super creative/thoughtful gifts that you’d love to share? Sound off!

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Christmas Eye Candy

Merry Christmas, blogland! In honor all things Christmas, and DIY, I’m here to share the explosion of Christmas decorations that is my parents’ house. My mom is the master of all things Christmas and her decorations are really a sight to behold. So, I’ll keep the commentary to a minimum and let you nice people enjoy an eyeful of Christmastime goodness. Enjoy and have a happy holiday!

Look who’s peeping into the frame… Christmas Charlie! And…. I’m lame.

These Christmas card displays were simply made with ribbon and cute little gift tags, courtesy of TomKat studios. Just stick a thumbtack on either side of your door (or bulletin board, etc) and use little binder clips to attach each card or picture.

Glittery coral and garland, shiny birds and pops of lime green really liven up this dining room tree. Oh yes, you may have noticed that there is more than one tree in my parents’ house. There are actually a total of nine trees in this house. NINE. Let’s recap and see how many trees I have in my house? One. Ouch.

Use ribbon to attach your ornaments and fill up some space on a barren tree. Genius, right?

Handmade stockings, with some red velvet fabric, vintage doilies and buttons, and handwritten name tags on simple muslin.

Happy holidays to you and yours! See you on the flip side!

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Christmastime is here!

Did the holidays sneak up on anyone else besides me this year? I had the best intentions of making the abode into a winter wonderland for the holidays, but then I turned around and Christmas was a week away. D’oh! I have to admit, with coordinating travel and immense amounts of gift buying, I haven’t had much time to get my creative juices flowing this season. I desperately want to do a post on some garland and wreath ideas that are sneaking into my noggin, but those will have to wait for another year. Note to self: begin holiday decorations next July.

Regardless of our sparse Christmas decor, we still managed to bring a bit of holiday cheer into our house, starting with a fresh Fraser fir and matching wreath, handmade by the lovely people at our local Christmas tree outpost. I’ve always considered investing in a faux tree, but I just can’t bring myself to do it. The dropping needles and constant watering are all worth the wonderful smell a real tree brings into a home. A fake tree is like having eggnog without the splash of rum – it’s just not right!

I couldn’t decide which ridiculous picture to post of my husband decorating the tree, so I decided to include both. :) Below is the aforementioned handmade wreath made from leftover tree limbs. I can’t help but buy one of these every year since it’s such a great use of (essentially) trash and the yummy smell greets me every time I walk in the door.

Another note: yes, next year I will spruce up this standard wreath with something amazing that will blow your socks off. Just let that be a little something to keep you coming around until next year. :)

We’re definitely rocking the silver and red theme this year – it’s hard to avoid the classics. I do like to mix up my gift wrapping, though. I love all things paper and ribbon, so I can’t stick to one kind of wrapping paper for my gifts. This year I brought in some standard shipping paper in a natural brown tone, and accented it with green and red raffia for a rustic look…

… or used a simple brown box tied with some classic brick-a-brack ribbon for a simple, fresh look.

I continued the criss-crossing of the raffia on some more graphic wrapping papers that I was gifted from a wallcovering rep (love free stuff!). I love a good, graphic pattern on anything, especially a Christmas gift.

I even brought in a punchy, lime green ribbon to keep up with the bold pattern of this fun wrapping paper. Sure all of my gifts don’t match, but they’re keeping in the same color scheme, with varying scales of pattern, so it makes an interesting display under the tree.

Yes, I’m not the first person ever to decorate with glass ornaments (gasp!) but I just can’t help myself. The way the Christmas lights play off of their reflective surfaces is just perfect for holiday decor. Plus, we have an abundance of glass vases that we received as wedding gifts, so they’re the perfect vessel to hold these little balls of colored light.

We even took a bit of leftover wrapping paper and popped it in a frame to bring the whole red and silver theme to fruition. Genius, right? Yeah, I know it’s nothing new, but I wanted to share my holiday decor with all of you nice people so you can get a taste of how holidays are in the H household. Any holiday decor ideas you’d love to share? Do it do it!

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Fall Decor Dunce

My mom and I were chatting the other day about the blog (naturally) and she asked “why don’t you do a post on fall decor”?  to which I simply replied “I don’t think that’s my thing”. But that got me to thinking: how could I, queen of home decor and lover of arts and crafts, not be into kitschy home accents? For some reason, I can’t seem to get on board with tablescapes and vases filled with candy corn and fall chotchkies. Don’t get me wrong, they look fabulous and I admire anyone who can throw together a smattering of objects and make it look like a masterpiece. So what can I add to the fall decor world, if I don’t have anything to draw from?

Enter, my wedding. It’s the one (awesome) event that I actually had a part in planning and luckily for you, it was a fall extravaganza. My mom (along with my somewhat helpful suggestions) pulled together this rocking fall centerpiece that can easily be whipped up for your fall tablescape in an afternoon. Maybe I’ll even pull a Martha and make some seasonal centerpieces for my home after this post. Just maybe.

These wheat and ribbon centerpieces were the perfect addition to our wedding reception, but they could easily be incorporated into your own home. Heck, my aunt-in-law swiped the leftovers from our wedding and still uses them as decoration to this day. My mom whipped these up with a few simple items: a woven charger, a small terra cotta pot, a dowel, some floral wire, dried wheat, hot glue and some ribbon. Basically, we knew the wheat would need a good base to stand up to the elements during our outdoor reception, so we used the terra cotta pot (turned upside down) with a dowel through the middle and attached these with floral wire to the center of the woven charger (getting the picture?). This essentially created a triangle shape (smaller at the top and larger at the bottom) for our wheat to be attached to. We (meaning my uber creative Mom) then arranged the wheat in a cluster around the pot/dowel base, and used some hot glue to attached the bottoms of the wheat stalks to the terra cotta pot. After those were set, she tied a simple ribbon around the middle, and boom! a centerpiece was made.

Now, I’m sure most of you don’t have 25 dining tables to adorn with these little lovelies, but if you do happen to throw a holiday party, a few of these centerpieces will really dress up your card tables to give the whole room some fall goodness. Plus, this centerpiece is simple and understated, and will leave lots of room on your table for the most important part of entertaining – food. Yumm. Any easy fall decorations you’re dying to share? Obviously I need some ideas!

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