Centerpieces and/or flower arrangements can be quite costly this time of year.  With Thanksgiving over and Christmas right around the corner it seemed like the perfect time to share the DIY rose and cranberry center pieces we make every Thanksgiving.  My mom got the idea when walking through the flower section in Whole Foods a few years ago.  My mother use to be in charge of making the arrangements, but then my sister took over.  Check out our pretty Thanksgiving table will all the yummy food!!

My sister was kind enough to let me document the process of the center piece creation this year.  So here we go!

What you need:

  • ~27 Yellow Roses
  • 6 bags of whole cranberries
  • 3 square vases
  • water

Place the cranberries in the square vases and add water (but not all the way to the top).

Remove the leaves from the rose stems and hold it up to the vase to determine how much stem to cut off.  Cut off the stem.

Push the rose into the vase between the cranberries.  Then rinse and repeat!!  Each vase will hold about 9 roses depending on the size of the vase.

After you’ve put in all the roses add additional cranberries and water as needed so they are almost to the very top of the vase.  In this end this is what you get.

As you can see we miss counted the yellow roses this year and had to through in a few red ones. I think it still looks pretty cute!

Happy Holidays and DIY!

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With Thanksgiving right around the corner I thought this would be the perfect time to share one of my favorite recipes for the holiday.  This recipe was originally posted back in March, but I felt it was throwback worthy.  By the way I’ve never been a pumpkin pie, bread, etc lover, but this pumpkin bread recipe was a serious game changer!!!  Below is the original post for throwback Thursday.  Enjoy! 

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My sister and I found this recipe for pumpkin bread one fall afternoon when trying to decide what to make that wasn’t chocolate chip cookies. :) Cookies are our go to hang out and watch a movie snack.  We ate nearly a whole loaf in one sitting (or really standing in the kitchen over the loaf of bread) it was THAT good!  It’s now a must have item in our family for Thanksgiving dinner.

Besides the canned pumpkin most items are staples and you probably already have the ingredients in your kitchen.

Ingredients:
2 cups canned pumpkin (or homemade pumpkin puree)
3 cups sugar
1 cup water
1 cup vegetable oil
4 eggs
3 1/3 cups all purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon nutmeg
¾ teaspoon ground cloves

Pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees.

In a separate bowl sift the flour into a bowl.  On your last cup of flour add the baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon, salt, nutmeg and cloves and sift together.

Combine pumpkin, sugar, water, oil and eggs in a bowl and beat together until mixed well.

Mix the dry ingredients with the wet ingredients slowly and beat until smooth.  Unlike chocolate chip batter this batter does NOT taste good. My sister and I made the mistake of trying the batter and thought the bread was going to be terrible.  But it’s is amazing once it is cooked, promise. So just hold off on any tasting. :)

Grease two 9 x 5 inch loaf pans with Pam or any nonstick spray. For easy clean up I recommend putting tin foil in the bottom of the pans first.  Pour the batter into the 2 loaf pans and try to evenly dividing the batter between the two.

Bake at 350 degrees for 60-70 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.  Get ready for your house/apartment to smells OH so YUMMY as the loafs cook! Remove from oven and allow loafs to cool before cutting.

Cut and server!  And watch out because you will without a doubt eat more than one slice. :)

Happy Cooking!!

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Recipe from the Kitchen of: BlogChef.net

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Before the husband and I first moved in together we decided we wanted three black and white photos for our bedroom.  We narrowed our personal photos down to a picture from the cherry blossom festival, a trip to mexico and one we took while in New York on the Brooklyn bridge.  My friend helped me use PhotoShop to make modify the color pictures to black and white.  I uploaded them to Shutterfly, clicked purchased and we were in business!

These are the pictures we chose …

The husband and I went to a couple of framing stores to get quotes on getting the pictures matted and framed.  We were looking at ~$200+ per picture for custom framing … WAY too much!  The three pictures then spent the next 2 years in a photo album.  From time to time we would revisit the idea of having the pictures framed, but never made any actual progress.  Last week we found a new location for our pictures … the hallway!  I found this post on Young House Love and was inspired.  Although I am not ready to take on the whole wall I do love pictures and have some other items that would work for a wall collage.

In any event we decide these three black and white photos were a good place to start with hallway decorations.  Since Amazon Prime is like my favorite thing I decided to see if there were any nice 8×10 matted frames on Amazon before going to Michael’s or a custom framing store.  I quickly found these picture frames and $17-18 per frame was totally justifiable and the wallet was way more comfortable with it as well!!!

After preparing for Hurricane Sandy Sunday (filling the cars with gas, getting food/water, laundry, dishes, charging every electronic we have and all that good stuff) we took some time out to hang our photos in the hallway.  It took a few tries (three to be exact) but eventually we got the two lower pictures level with each other.

It’s nice to see the hallway starting to come together.  Whether or not we decide to pursue the whole collage look for the hallway is still TBD, but at least there is something on the wall for now :)

Next up is to purchase a runner for the hallway!!

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After painting the guest bath, master bedroom and the living/dining room the only thing left to paint was the master bathroom.  We had agreed to leave the builder grade paint in the guest room until we decide exactly what we plan to do with that room.  The guest room is pretty much a landing zone or storage room at the minutes, which clearly isn’t ideal.  Anyways, similar to the living/dining room choosing a color for the master bath wasn’t easy.  We ending up going with a color that’s a shade darker than our living/dining room after putting couple different samples on the wall.

Once we were pretty sure we wanted the color we put a big color swatch on the wall.  Do you see my reflection in the shower?  Hahaha I was attempting to document the process.

After painting the guest bath we knew that the correct paint to buy was semi-gloss.  We “assumed” the guest and master bath were approximately the same size we purchase 1 quart of paint.  We were well, WRONG!  The master bath is slightly bigger so we really needed two quarts of paint.  Back to the store I went to pick up the extra quart.  Then something disastrous happened.  We started painting the remaining wall and somehow the color just was NOT the same. I really don’t know what happened … the husband and I stood there looking at the wall and then at each other and we were seriously PERPLEXED.  In any event it was unanimous that we needed another quart of this paint in an effort to resolve the issue.

Back to Sherwin Williams we went to purchase our THIRD quart of this paint.  We were so excited to get home and make that final wall match all the rest that we  pulled out all the painting supplies and got to work.  Clearly this damn bathroom just didn’t want to be painted … I’m not sure how it happened by the roller started shedding and the wall started to look all textured.  At this point we were so perplexed I didn’t even think to break out the camera to document the disaster that was unfolding.  We attempted to wipe the wall down with paper towels and start over, but that was an epic fail leading to an empty paint can and a textured wall.

After letting the wall dry and sanding it back to “normal town” we were ready to being painting the dreaded wall again.  SOOOOO back to the paint store we went for a fourth and final time.  The husband goes in to buy the paint and when he got back to the car he looked a little defeated …

Me – “What’s wrong?”

Husband – “The just asked me if I was aware of how many quarts of the same colored paint we’ve purchased.”

Me – “Too many … but it wasn’t our fault there were so many issues.  Didn’t you tell him all the issues we had.”

Husband – “Nope.  Just told him I was aware we should have purchased a gallon at the start of this project.”

Me – “Oh okay then.”

My poor husband was so horrified that we had to purchase so many quarts that he wouldn’t own up to the issues we encountered when the sales man pointed out we purchased incorrectly. :)

After the fourth quart of paint we were FINALLY able to fix the remaining wall and put a little extra paint on the other walls. Unfortunately I haven’t master the process of having paint colors show up correctly in pictures when there is zero natural light.  Therefore there is no great “after shot”.   Sorry :(.   It was SO nice to call that project a wrap after four tries LOL.  Overall I love the color of the bathroom.  Now I am on the hunt for a new bathroom mat and accessories.  Somehow the to-do list never seems to dwindle!

Happy home improvements!

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This picture was taken just a few weeks back.  We had just purchased these pillows from Crate & Barrel and Sophi took a liking to them immediately.  She started by squeezing herself in between the arm of the couch and the pillow.  My puppy is such a cutie!!

The husband thinks we will have a mutiny on our hands if we ever get rid of these pillows hahaha.  I mean look how sad she is when I pulled the pillow away from her  ….

Happy Friday!

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