Merry Christmas! *photo heavy*

I’m sure you all can agree that it’s been a busy holiday season. At first I was excited about Christmas being on a Sunday… but now it just seems really inconvenient as far as trying to get everything ready by a Friday.

I tried to give myself a break this year and not beat myself up about doing everything that I wanted to, and one of those things that did not get done was our Christmas card. We just never had a good time to get pictures done, and ended up having my friend Gennifer take them on the fly. There was still time to get them printed and sent, but with our travel schedule, it did just not work out… so our card this year is an e-card delivered via my blog, facebook, and email. So really we are just super “green” right? So in lieu of a card in the mail, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

The decorating mostly got done – I couldn’t slack on this since its our first year in the house and I was excited to see how my existing decorations fit the new house. I still need a bit of filler since the house is so much bigger than our apartment, but I can pick some of that up on clearance on Monday! Here are a few snapshots that I took of our decorations this year:

(the iphone 4s takes THE BEST night-time christmas tree photos)

I saw the ruffled tree skirt tutorial that was floating around pinterest. I got everything ready and started to glue all of those ruffles, but only made it a few inches and decided it would be MUCH MUCH easier to just sew the ruffles on (actually my mom was visiting and she sewed them on for me – which is why this is even finished BEFORE Christmas). And trust me, if you do this, SEW the dang ruffles on, you will save your fingers and yourself from going crazy.

I totally need two more cream stockings from pottery barn! And extra points for anyone who spots the baby!

One other exciting thing that happened this week was that our back splash tile went in the kitchen! It looks amazing and I’ll share it very soon!

I hope you all have a wonderful and relaxing holiday weekend!

The Holiday Planner – How will you use it? *Free Download

I will use my Holiday Planner to keep myself organized this Holiday season. I have big plans for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Thanksgiving dinner will be served at our house this year. So I will be including a shopping list and menu. I will also start collecting any recipes I think I might want to use. This way I can find it all in one place and have them available when I am shopping. How will you use your planner?

Here is a Free Downloadable Shopping List + Menu from Jen Allyson for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and general Holiday that you can put in your Holiday Planner.

Click on the images below to download the PDF files.

Before I can get too excited about the menu, here at the Lake house we are starting a new project…. We need a new wall oven. This means we get to pull out the old one, demo some sheet rock and cut a new hole. After 23 years, wall ovens have changed in size. Lucky for me, Jen posted the most wonderful Project Master List and Project Notes for free download.

And when that new oven is installed, here is a fall family favorite recipe my Grandma Norma always made for us kids.

Boo! Halloween Banner + free .SVG download

I have been wanting to do a quick and cute Halloween craft, and I thought a banner would be fun. I love the subtle Halloween feel of Robyn Meierotto’s Not So Freaky Digital Mini Kit at DHD:

So I started out by printing a few of her papers in the banner shape that I wanted.

You can print and hand-cut these shapes, but I cut mine out with my Cricut using Sure Cuts A lot and my laptop.

Then using black cardstock, I cut out a ghost, and BOO! If you have a program that allows you to cut SVG Files, I have a free download link at the end of this post.

I inked all the pieces with some gold pigment ink to just make it look a little more antiqued and slightly finished.

Next, I made “lollipops” (what do you call them?) out of tracing paper. You could use crepe paper, tissue paper, or just regular paper. I really liked how the tracing paper was a little bit see-through, but still really stiff.

To get a pointy lollipop, once you fold your paper strip, you’ll want to cut one edge diagonal like this:

Then glue them in a circle and add a little ink to dirty them up a bit.

Then I just glued everything together with a hot glue gun, and for the finishing touches, tied all the panels together with some cute orange ribbon.Voila! A quick and cute Halloween banner, that isn’t too scary to hang in your house.

Banner .SVG Download

Boo .SVG Download

Free Kids Valentine Cards

I posted a week or so ago about the Card Nirvana free valentine’s, but I wanted to share some of Carina’s photos of her daughter making the Valentine’s to take to preschool. You have one more day – and if you haven’t bought any at the store yet, don’t go! They will only have super lame ones at this point.

Just go to Card Nirvana and download the free valentines, print, cut, sign, add candy. Done! And oh so cute!

Valentine Cookies – Jam Filled Hearts

There is this great little grocery store just a few blocks from my apartment. Everytime I go there, I look at their amazing bakery and see these fabulous jam-filled heart cookies. But of course I never buy them, and if I did, they would probably be like 3 dollars a piece. So I decided in honor of valentines day, I would make some myself! They were so easy, and exceptionally good! You should definitely try them. 

I just moved and have barely any kitchen stuff, so baking presents quite the challenge. For these cookies you will need:

1. A Rolling Pin

2. 2 nesting heart-shapped cookie cutters (I found mine for $1 a piece)

3. Sugar cookie dough recipe + ingredients – or pre-made sugar cookie dough (I totally cheated!).

3b. Extra flour & powdered sugar

4. Red jam

5. Cookie Sheet

First step is to make the dough – or  pretend you made the dough. When I use pre-made dough, I always add just a little bit of flour so it doesn’t stick to everything. 

Next you’ll need to roll it out. I recommend 3/16″ (just a little less than a quarter of an inch) because you’ll be putting together two cookies in the end, so it gets a bit bulky. This also depends on how much your dough rises. 

Once you’ve rolled out your dough, go ahead and use the cookie cutters to cut the big hearts in the dough. At this point you’ll want to cut little hearts in HALF of the big hearts. 

I just made a few cookies because I didn’t want to eat a dozen or so. If you are going to make a lot of these, I would recommend making your own dough, that pre-made stuff is expensive.  But if you really need to save time, it only took me about 20 min from start to finish to make these awesome cookies. 

Next you’ll want to bake the cookies. Just follow the instructions on your recipe. The hardest part of this whole thing was transferring the dough to the baking sheet without ruining the shape. Here are the cookies after they were baked. I also baked the little inner hearts, but had to do it on a second sheet. 

I let the cookies cool for about a minute on the pan, then they are easy to move to a paper towel or cooling rack. The assembly of the final cookies is pretty easy. I had the cut-out hearts on one side and dusted them with powdered sugar. Then the whole hearts I covered with a thin layer of jam – a bit thicker towards the center.  

The final assembly consisted of placing the dusted hearts on the jammed hearts. Viola! Beautiful jam filled heart cookies! These were so so yummy, I’m going to make a big batch for Mr. Project to take to work on valentine’s day!

If you are wanting to make the dough from scratch, I found this super easy recipe online:
Raspberry Sandwich Heart Cookies

Happy Valentine Baking!