In The Kitchen

Week of July 26 through August 1

As my best friend's wedding draws near, wedding festivities are becoming the main focus around our house. I've been spending my time planning parties, attending parties and crafting things to take to parties. It seems that every weekend until the wedding we will be celebrating in some way or another. So fun! I think every single-person I know should get married immediately so that I can continue to enjoy this party-girl lifestyle. With crafting. If Martha Stewart and Paris Hilton had a child, I would be her right now.

This weekend, my mom and I hosted a Kitchen Shower for the bride-to-be. Even better, it was a Pampered Chef kitchen shower. Melissa could not have chosen a shower we would have had more fun giving. My mom loves the kitchen gadgets (and could sell Pampered Chef products to Julia Child simply because her excitement over them is infectious) and I love to plan parties.

As soon as we knew what kind of shower Melissa wanted, I started hunting for invitations. I knew I wanted them to be aqua and brown (the wedding colors) and I knew I wanted them to have a detachable recipe card. Kind of a tall order, and I was totally prepared to design something myself, because I just knew I wouldn't find anything that fit my vision. Which was why I was so excited when I found the perfect invitations at the hardware store. Yes. The hardware store. With hardware.


You know that really awkward time at a party, when everyone is arriving and no one really knows what to do until the festivities start? Yeah, I hate that too. To break the ice as people started to arrive, we asked the guests to identify fifteen spices by scent alone. As people made their guesses, it sounded like we were having a convention for allergy sufferers in our kitchen. There was much sniffing and snorting to be heard, following by lots of laughing at the sniffing and snorting. Using the invitation as the basis for all of the party goods, I made coordinating answer cards and spice tags for the spice game.


To add a little splash of color to the party, and to coordinate with the perfect invitations, we added green to Melissa's aqua and brown color palette. I spiffed-up a store-bought brown tablecloth with a band of aqua-and-green floral fabric and a stripe of aqua rick-rack. I also made napkins from the floral fabric, and from a coordinating striped fabric. We wanted the party to look fresh and a little mod, and I think the combination of fabrics and colors worked really well.


Since we were hostessing a Kitchen Shower, my mom attached a miniature bamboo spoon to a lily (the bride's favorite flower) to make a corsage. For centerpieces, my mom arranged white flowers in large Pampered Chef batter bowls. Then, to add to the kitchen-kitsch, she added Pampered Chef scrapers and bamboo spoons to the arrangements. Each piece we used for the centerpieces was a kitchen tool that Melissa had registered for, and they made our arrangements so much more interesting and fun!


The best part about hostessing a Pampered Chef Kitchen Shower, was that I got to watch my mom in action doing what she loves to do. She's been a Pampered Chef consultant for more than ten years and she's so entertaining and fun and so great at it because she really loves the products. She did a cooking demonstration to show off some of the tools that Melissa registered for, and while the demo results were in the oven, we played another fun shower game. Mostly to keep the guests from gnawing on their own arms in anticipation of the deliciousness we were cooking, but also because there is an unwritten rule about bridal showers and games here in the South. If a hostess doesn't slightly embarrass the bride-to-be, then she isn't doing her job.

Shower embarrassment can come in many forms, from the slightly silly tiara-wearing ritual, to the all-out mortifying raunchy game of wedding night bingo with your grandmother in the room. The level of embarrassment inflicted by the hostess is inversely proportional to the number of hours said hostess has spent volunteering for the Junior League Charity Ball. Also related, whether or not the hostess owns any monogrammed panties.

To embarrass Melissa we asked her to model an apron covered in kitchen tools. We are really good at this hostess job. We then asked the guests to remember as many gadgets as they could after only viewing the bride's ensemble for one minute. I made the apron from the same floral and striped fabrics I used for the table linens, and an adorable retro apron pattern from McCalls (M5643, view C).


The winners of our shower games were awarded with kitchen towels that I embellished with bands of our party fabrics.


Guests then had the opportunity to choose a gift to order for the bride-to-be from her registry. To prevent duplicate gifts, and to make their selections easier, I made a tag for each item Melissa registered for and hung them on a small wire tree. Of course, the tags coordinated with the invitations, and with the other paper goods for the party. I'm very meticulous and detail oriented, and my head practically exploded from all the fun The Crazy was having making everything match.


As guests began leaving, we handed out sweet party favors. I made small fabric bags from aqua striped seersucker and my mom filled them with the dry ingredients for a sugar cookie recipe. We tied the bags with brown and aqua polka dotted ribbon and attached a heart shaped cookie cutter and a recipe card for "Cookie-ing" up a Lifetime of Love. So cheesy, but they looked really cute, especially since the recipe card also coordinated with the invitation. Of course it did.


I truly hope that Melissa had as much fun at her party as we had preparing for it. I'm never happier than when I have a reason to plan a party and spend hours-on-end in my craft room. To be spending that time on a wedding shower for my best friend made it even more enjoyable. I really loved putting this shower together for her, and I hope I was able to create something special and memorable in her honor.

Below are a few more pictures from the party. Enjoy.

All Around Our House Next Week: Creative Cards

With Silver Bells and Cockle Shells

Week of April 5 through 11

Our garden is thriving! Everything is growing steadily and becoming so lush.


We've seen even more tomato blooms appear this week, so it won't be long now before we see some tomatoes. The tomato plants seem to like their expertly crafted cages - and Gizmo likes the tomatoes. At least she's laying in the garden instead of pooping in it. The cats seem to think we built them a 6x6 foot litter box, just because we love them that much.


Growing up, my dad always planted 5 or 6 squash plants, and each plant would produce at least six squash. We would eat squash for weeks. Squash casserole, squash pancakes, squash stir fry, buttered squash - you name it, my mom could add squash to it. I don't dislike squash, but I don't like it enough to include it in every meal. I was excited to see the first squash blossom this week, but that bloom also gave me a sense of foreboding about what my diet will consist of when it turns into a big yellow crookneck. And I don't know how to make squash cupcakes.


My grandparents have a huge garden with an entire row dedicated to blackberries. When we would go to visit, we would spend hours in the hot sun, amongst the fire ants, picking buckets of berries. Well, picking and eating. Pick one, eat three, because we couldn't resist them right off the vine - plump and delicious with just the right combination of tart and sweet. They were black gold, and we always wanted to hoard as many as we could in the freezer so we could have blackberry pie all year round. When we decided that we wanted blackberries in our garden, I knew that the plants had to come from my grandparent's garden. My dad cut some canes from their plants, and while The Parents were here for Easter weekend, he planted them for us in our backyard. (I put him to work again, trimming our trees and pruning our azaleas, he's never going to want to come visit if he has to work for his room and board!) We won't get any berries this year, but they will definitely be worth the wait.


The herbs are also coming along. I'm dreaming of the day when I can make a caprese salad with basil and tomatoes from my own garden. All I need is a cow to milk so I can make some mozzarella. Maybe next year.


Around Our House next week: While the Husband's Away The Wife Will Play (in the craft room!)

A Gardening Hootenanny and a Flower Bed

Week of March 8 through 14

The Parents came into town for a visit this weekend and we had so much fun! We originally planned for their visit knowing that my mom would be coming to town for a bridal shower. But, when we realized that our parents could be coerced into manual labor, we knew that this weekend would also be the perfect time to build our garden.

My dad has the greenest thumb. He inherited it from my grandparents, who have the biggest garden plot I've ever seen. Sadly, I think the emerald-phalange genetics skipped me, though I did inherit the crazy. Having a backyard garden was inspired by my dad's natural ability to coax vegetation from the earth. Growing up, we always had squash and tomatoes and blackberries from the backyard plot that my dad lovingly tended. It seemed only natural to me that when The Husband and I finally had a yard of our own, we would plant our own garden.

For the last month we have been in the final, serious, planning and preparation stages for the installation of our garden in our backyard. We've done our research: picking out the best location, the best plant varieties and the best soil for our area. We also spent a day driving around our neighborhood to determine what kind of retaining walls we liked, and what kind we didn't (ahem...the lip on those concrete landscaping bricks is supposed to go down). After determining that we liked the rock wall look (and why wouldn't we, since it was the most expensive option) we chose a pallet of moss rock at our local landscaping supplier and arranged to have it delivered. We were all set for our Gardening Hootenanny (with free labor!)... then it started raining.

Since the beginning of the year our area had gotten a total of 2 inches of rain, over 8 inches behind the average for this time of year. As the weekend approached, the skies darkened, the temperature dropped and the meteorologists began predicting drizzle and rain for the entire weekend. And over the weekend we had carefully and thoughtfully set aside for our garden, no less! Still, we were not going to allow this to deter the hootenanny-ness of our hootenanny.

The 1.5 tons of stone we ordered was delivered via bobcat to our driveway on Saturday morning. I asked the delivery driver if he wouldn't mind just driving it on back into our backyard for us and he just grinned. I think maybe he had heard that a few times before. Meanwhile, The Husband drove off into the rain with a trailer to pick up 2 cubic yards of some kind of special soil.

Drizzle, drizzle, drizzle...

The Parents and I ventured into the backyard, and after much deliberation, staked out the plot for our garden. It so happens that the spot in our yard posing the least grass resistance was also located between the two sad, lonely and haphazardly positioned plants that existed in our yard when we moved in. While my dad tried to rescue the few lone patches of grass that would soon be covered by our garden (to fill in the bare patches in our poor, sad lawn), my mom and I loaded up the wheelbarrow with stones and started shuttling them from the front to the back of the house.


Sprinkle, drizzle, sprinkle...

My dad, expert stone stacker that he is, had the front wall built three courses high by the time I loosened my mom's shackles and allowed her to stop toiling long enough to get ready for her shower. I continued to move stone, and Dad kept stacking, and occasionally breaking, stone (think: chain gang in a old prison movie). I think he enjoyed breaking the stone with the sledgehammer a little bit too much. In his defense, though, some of the stones did need to be broken in order to make a stable stack, but the determination of which stones those were was a bit willy-nilly. Soon, The Husband's Parents arrived to lend a hand (and some tools) and shortly after that, we had all four walls of the garden built.


Sprinkle, rain, rain...

The Husband returned with the soil just as we were finishing the walls in the backyard. Thanks to The Husband's Parents, we had an extra shovel, an extra wheelbarrow and two extra people to help us haul the stinky, compost rich soil to the garden. Little by little, The Husband, my MIL, FIL and I filled the wheelbarrows and then the menfolk hauled them into the backyard and dumped them into the garden.


Rain, rain, pour...

When the garden was full, we still had about a quarter of a trailer full of soil. We also had some left over stones. Even though we were all wet and tired, and the rain had really started coming down, we decided to take on the front flower bed. (Bonus project! Order now and we'll include some rain absolutely free!) We laid out a garden hose to mark the shape of the bed, and then my dad and MIL dug out a shallow trench while The Husband and I followed behind, filling it in with stones.

One would think this would be a much easier task, since it was certainly smaller. But, I'm an organized, anal retentive, methodical planner, who needs to think things out before making a decision, and since I hadn't even considered the possibility of tackling the flower bed, my crazy started showing. As the project progressed, all of our lovely assistants were thoughtfully asking me if I liked how it was looking. I think this might have been because at one point during the construction of the garden, when my dad asked The Husband if he was happy with the progress thus far, I said, "He doesn't care what it looks like, as long as it grows tomatoes, I'm the one who approves aesthetics around here." Thus, my approval was needed on the front flower bed, quickly, before everyone gave up and went inside where it was dry. And my head nearly exploded from the power/unplanned disorder of it all.

No sooner had we placed the last rock, than it started raining in sheets. Thankfully, we were finished, sadly, everyone would later die of pneumonia.


The next morning, we visited our local nursery to pick out vegetables for our garden and plants for our front bed. We still needed expert advice on plant selection, though, so we requested that the king of all things agricultural help us. Of course, it was still raining, and the nursery is not covered. In true royal style, my dad stood under the only dry overhang at the nursery, while we ran out into the rain and grabbed flats of different plant varieties for his perusal. The king then decreed which plants were the best specimens, all the while staying perfectly dry.

Drizzle, rain, drizzle...

We spent the afternoon ducking in and out of the house, avoiding the downpours, and planting our garden and flower bed in the drizzle. We planted tomatoes, bell peppers, yellow squash and beans in the back. Then we designed our front flower bed with shrubs, begonias and impatiens. We got dirty, and wet, and we got some invaluable garden advice from my dad. And we finally got our garden finished. Over the weekend of our Gardening Hootenanny, our area received 2.5 inches of rain. We got more rain while we were outside working in the yard than we had previously gotten all year!


We are so excited about how everything turned out. It is more than what we were even hoping for. We can see our garden when we wake up every morning, and we love it. We can't wait for our first harvest!


We truly could not have accomplished what we did without the help of our families. We are so grateful that they live close by, and that they were willing to give up their weekend to stand in the rain and deliberate over each and every stone placement with us. Everyone worked so hard, and we are so appreciative of the effort and energy they put in to help turn our dreams of a garden into a reality.

When we were looking for a house, we knew that we wanted something with a lot of space and an open kitchen so that there would always be room for company. We really enjoy having all of our family together at our house, and we wanted to have a comfortable gathering place for everyone. This weekend was one of those times when we felt so grateful for what have. Our family, all together, cozy in front of the fire, spending peaceful time together in our happy home. Perfect.

All Around Our House Next Week: Transplanting our Herb Garden and Bikes