Bridal Shower Eats!

Asking my friend Eleanor to cater my bridal shower last weekend was such a good decision. Believe me, nothing that came out of my kitchen would have been this tasty or this beautiful! (And no, I'm not just being modest :) Check out these awesome eats!

These awesome wedding cookies are from the Signal Mountain Cookie Lady. So cute and so tasty! Thanks to my mother-in-law Rhonda for bringing them up from Chattanooga. By the way, the bride-to-be Geneva took most of these awesome photos!

Tissue Paper Pom Poms

Image found here.

For those of you who were wondering how to make tissue paper pom poms like the ones I made for my bridal shower, Martha Stewart has the simplest tutorial I've seen here.

Bridal Shower Luncheon

I hosted my first bridal shower on Saturday afternoon. We spent the day celebrating Geneva Evans, the most fabulous girl I know. Everything turned out almost as beautiful as the bride-to-be! I did my best to stretch every penny to get the most bang for my buck. That meant lots of hand-made decorations, discount roses, and clearance finds. 

One key to success, in my opinion, is to delegate the things I'm not so good at to the experts! Specifically the cake and the food. I know my weaknesses in that department so I was sure to enlist the help of my friend Brandi who's a pastry chef to make an awesome cake, and Eleanor, who catered everything.

The color scheme was pink, navy and grey. Why pink? Because my beautiful china that belonged to my great-grandmother is covered with pink flowers! The china was my jumping off point for everything else. Here are a few of my favorite details!

And here's one of the beautiful bride! I'll post more tomorrow. So what do you think?

Missoni for Target Pumps

I didn't really jump onto the whole "Missoni for Target" band wagon. Mainly because I couldn't have stood in line on a weekday morning even if I wanted to. :) But, I had a happy stroke of luck this week when I was in Target after all of the madness, and they happened to have two pairs of these beauties left. One of which was my size! $39 later I have my new black pumps for Fall. I'm pretty excited about it.

Book Reviews: Two in One

I've read two books recently by local Nashville author Ann Patchett that I want to tell you about. The first is The Patron Saint of Liars. It's about an unhappily married woman named Rose who finds out she's pregnant and runs away to a home for unwed mothers. Did I mention it's set in the 1960s? The characters are fantastic, from the young mothers to the old nuns who look after them...but the story itself wasn't so interesting. It ended up being a little disappointing in the end. All in all, I wouldn't recommend it because I know that if you're as busy as I am you'll want to spend your time reading only the best!

Images here.

The second Ann Patchett book is The Magician's Assistant. It follows Sabine (the magician's assistant) right after the death of her husband. She quickly finds out that there were events and people from her husband's past that she knew nothing about. This book was fantastic from start to finish, as Sabine meets her husbands family and travels to the small town where he was from. I give it two thumbs up! It's worth your valuable time. :)

It's rainy and dreary here in Nashville tonight, and it's been a looong day. I hope that you're all cozying in for the night with the people you care about!

I Love a Good Paper Chain

I haven't made one of these in forever and somehow I ended up making two of them this weekend as decorations for two different parties. They're so easy and they're a great way to use the seemingly endless supply of scrapbook paper so many of us have!

Hope you all got as much rest this weekend as I did. It's amazing how much better you feel after a couple of full nights of sleep!

Guest Bedroom Before and After

Next up in before and afters: the guest bedroom. We went from way-to-bright yellow walls to calm grey. I've said it a million times but it is truly amazing what a coat of paint can do. And be sure to check out the major stains in the middle of the hardwood floors.
Here's the guest bedroom before.

And here's the after! This room is the catch-all for all of the items that we've had forever. Old bed, reading lamps and bedding from New York, Relax sign, green chair, and outlet curtain panels from college. You can't beat free. :) The only new item in the room is the drum shade ceiling light from Lowes, which cost about $95.

I'm on the hunt for an area rug and some big statement art, and then I'll call it done!

By the way...our episode of My First Place is going to air as part of the 2012 season, sometime next Spring! That's all I know for now, but I'll give you more info when it gets closer to time. 

Dining Room Redesign

I think it's finally time I show you all another room in the house. Not finished yet, but a million times better than what we started with. This was our dining room when we bought the house. Nasty ugly green walls, wierdly stained hardwood floors, typical cheap-o brass chandelier.

And this is where we stand with the dining room now!

The floors have been stained ebony. My Aunt Karen came down from Kentucky for a weekend and painted the walls Benjamin Moore Grey Owl for us. I'm so pleased with the high contrast between the dark floors and light grey walls. The ceilings and new baseboards have a fresh coat of Benjamin Moore Decorator's White.

This room is full of hand-me-down furniture, with a little bit of Ikea and West Elm clearance mixed in. I think that once I have white slipcovers made for the chair forms they'll be fantastic!

Don't you love Ikea? My favorite Ikea item that I've bought for the house so far is this white metal shade fixture that replaced the brass chandelier. What's your favorite Ikea purchase?

Mmmm...S'mores.

We put our new firepit to good use this evening! Who doesn't love s'mores. Now that the weather is cooling off and Fall is coming, we're going to be spending a whole lot of time eating these babies.

Kane and I are officially finished filming our episode of "My First Place." It was a lot of fun and I'm glad we did it. But I'm so glad to be done! Now we can pause and let our batteries recharge...at least for a few days. :)

New Dining Chairs

I'm not quite ready to show you my dining room yet, but I want to show my new chairs! By a stroke of luck, I called the Nashville West Elm today to ask about the Porter Slipcovered Dining Chair for a "budget" client of mine. Turns out they were clearancing them all out asap. Well, they wouldn't work for my client, but they worked for me! The muslin chair forms were only $59.50 each. They only had ugly green slipcovers left, on clearance for $29.99. So I decided to buy one to use as a pattern and have 6 made at a later date in the fabric of my choice. For now, I'm going to use them as they are.

Porter Dining Chairs found here.

My Porter Armless Chairs sans slipcovers.

I bought a pair of fun turquoise Allegra Hicks pillows as well. They won't actually live in the dining chairs, but I just thought I'd show you.

Have a good night everybody.

Stress!

Well, hello everybody. I hope you all had a restful Labor Day weekend. I had a busy day today. I got to spend some time in the Vanderbilt ER. I definitely passed out at my office this morning. Apparently I need to spend more time eating/sleeping/relaxing and less time working/renovating a house all hours of the day and night/blogging/entertaining/stressing in general about everything. Whew! Tall order, but I'm working on it starting tonight.

Any relaxation suggestions? :) I'm going to start by going to bed...now.