From the monthly archives: July 2011
I am so excited! Sherry at Oh So Lovely is teaming up with her friend Jennifer and hosting a 30 day photo challenge. The goal is to take a picture every day in August that meets the day’s challenge.
Looks pretty fun, right? You can check out Sherry’s original post here. She has some neat ideas of how to take the pictures and how to display them.
This is a challenge for other bloggers. I signed up to join and noticed that a lot of other bloggers did too! I can’t wait to visit new blogs and see how they interpret this challenge.
I’ve been wanting to join something like this for awhile yet had never made the commitment. But with Timothy’s new DSLR camera, I think this is just what I need to learn how to use it! Some of the pictures may be poorly taken, but hopefully by the end of August I’ll understand a bit more about DSLRs. ;)
So if any of you readers have a blog of your own, you should definitely check out Sherry’s post and sign up! And if you don’t have a blog of your own, I think it would still be fun for you to get involved.
I’d love for you guys to join me in this! My idea is that you can look at the schedule of photo challenges, take some pictures, and e-mail your picture to me before the day it’s due! For instance, if you want to get in on Day 4′s “Favorite Color” challenge because you’re obsessed with the color pink, just take a picture involving pink, and e-mail it to me by August 2nd or 3rd. Or if you have some rockin’ shoes you want to share, just send me a picture of them a few days before August 15th to meet the “Day 15: My Shoes challenge”. You can e-mail me at [email protected] Or if you’re taking mobile pictures, you can text it to me. Just e-mail me for my cell phone number.
I’ll post all the pictures you guys send me here on the ol’ blog. Oh, and the pictures don’t have to be super fancy. The point of the game is to have fun and be creative. (I have to put that in there because I’m not a fancy photographer. Ha!)
What do you think? I’d love to see how you guys interpret the challenge. And the more the merrier! I think this will be a lot of fun!
~Whitney
In part one of the “Wonderfully Wonderful Week of Wonder” I showed you all some of the shopping and eating we did in Chicago. My two favorite activities. We spent an entire day on the Magnificient Mile. The other day, we explored other areas of Chicago and went to the Navy Pier.
We took a skyline boat tour off Navy Pier and it was one of my family’s favorite activities! The lake is so big that you can’t see the other side. It’s gorgeous! And the city looks absolutely beautiful from the water. Jodie (a dear, dear reader!) is the one who recommended we do this, and she was right. It’s a must see!
We loved it!
Inside the building at the Navy Pier was this really amazing courtyard. It was a welcome relief from the 100+ temperature and was just a really relaxing environment. Timothy took a lot of pictures in there, including this one of my brother and I. He’s officially taller than me. Sad days.
This was actually in a little suburb outside of Chicago – but I love this picture so much I had to include it. We were laughing at the absurd LARGE painting of Abraham Lincoln and his followers and Timothy captured this image of Mom. Isn’t she beautiful?
One of the things I was most looking forward to seeing in Chicago was the Bean. When I found out we were going to Chicago in the first place I squealed “the Bean! the Bean!” a few times and my dad and husband looked at me like I was crazy. I guess it’s not that exciting to some. Humph.
It was pretty much amazing. It’s located in Millenium Park – when we walked in they were playing live music. Flowers were everywhere. Sculptures. Pretty amazing stuff.
We took fifty zillion pictures at the Bean. And by “we” I mean that I asked Timothy sixty zillion times and he started rolling his eyes after the fifty zillion mark.
After a while, I just took the camera and clicked away. There’s just something mesmerizing about that Bean!
My handsome muscle man!!
Chicago, how I love you. To anyone planning a trip, I couldn’t recommend this city more. The parking was ridiculously expensive, but thankfully once you park you can walk and see pretty much everything. We weren’t able to see everything we wanted, but that just means we have to go back again soon!
~~~
I hope you all have a lovely weekend! Spend it with the ones you love most. :)
~Whitney
So, as you may or may not know, we went on vacation last week! Shocker, I know. Anyway, so many of you were helpful in giving us some amazing ideas of what to do in Chicago, and I wanted to let you all know what we did. Chicago may be my new favorite city.
We stayed at a resort outside of Chicago that was amazing. It featured a lot of sports stuff so the boys were really happy.
Timothy, Dad, and David played a lot of basketball. Some high school basketball players were staying at the resort at the same time and kept on challenging them. Oh yeah. The Gothra/Gills showed them who was boss.
During this time, my Mom and I watched girly movies and crocheted and knit/knitted/knat. I almost put on my tennis shoes once and played with them, but quickly realized that vacation is not vacation if there’s sweat involved.
We went into downtown Chicago two days. It was so amazing I don’t even have the right words. Timothy and I have decided we have city blood. The love of loudness, busyness, tall buildings, weird smells, delicious smells, and metropolitan areas flows through our veins.
We visited two of my favorite stores. They both had three stories packed with pure amazingness. I almost cried. Let me just say, The Magnificent Mile is all it’s cracked up to be. There were stores to fit every budget, restaurants, beautiful buildings, and a Godiva. Oh yeahhhh.
This store was what I looked forward to the most. I went in both days we visited downtown. Just because I could. Mm mm good.
Timothy also got to go in his favorite store. Five times. I just asked him to verify. Five times total. Yup. He was like a little boy in a lego store. He probably even drooled.
We ate some delicious tapas and drank some bubble tea as I told you about in a previous post. But what would a Chicago trip be without Chicago-style pizza? Nothing, that’s what.
Here’s my cutie parents with the mega pizza. That pizza was like four inches thick and AMAZING. I ate one slice and was full for most of the day. Until we saw the bubble tea store again. I had room for that.
Chicago had some gorgeous architecture. We saw the Trump building, but Mr. Trump wasn’t there. So I did my best impression of him. That’s my “you’re fired” face with my hand acting as his fab toupee. Pretty legit impression if I say so myself.
I can rock a mean Trump face, but Timothy wins it all with his Superman stance. Ha! We had so much fun with Timothy’s new camera and took a lot of time out to practice taking pictures. Obviously I took this one because the building is in perfect focus and my handsome man is fuzzy. Alas, I need practice.
And I totally wasn’t prepared for Chicago to have an Anthropologie. It was the largest one I’ve ever seen. After I hugged everything in the store, David and I did some modeling in the window. I think he’s pulling a Superman too.
~~~
Well, that was an infinitesimal speck of the pictures we took on our trip. I’ll share a few more tomorrow! Some of them are of my favorite Chicago attraction – THE BEAN!!!
~Whitney
Awhile back my mom let me raid her material stash and take home a few yards. Yes, best mom ever, right? When I spotted some white and some black material, this picture from Pinterest came to mind. The original source of the photo is Street Style Aesthetic.
Pretty, right? I absolutely love the silhouette. So I attempted to make my own. Remember my polka dot dress? I love that bodice pattern, but I had to do some SERIOUS work to make the top fit.
I traced the pattern on some tissue paper and made my changes that I thought would help. And what do you know … it was a total disaster. I didn’t leave enough room for seam allowances and I basically just messed it up. Really badly. So I bought some new fabric for $4 from Wal-Mart the next time I went grocery shopping. Don’t hate me because I’m so glamorous.
After over a month of trial and error, this is what I came up with! It doesn’t even look like my inspiration picture up there, which may be my favorite part about it. DIY is all about taking things and making them your own, right?
The bodice still doesn’t fit like I’d like it too. The darts go up too high and I had to redo the sleeves fourteen gazillion times to bring in the extra material around the neckline. But maybe no one would notice that unless I said something? Which I just did? Ha!
I squared the neckline, and I’m really happy with how it turned out. And the sleeves were a happy accident. I just rolled them up to see where I wanted to hem them and happened to like the look as is. So the sleeves aren’t even hemmed at all. I’m not sure how official that is, but I’m going to go with very. Very official.
I decided to do a bow instead of a ruffle. Right now it’s pinned on to the dress in case I want to take it off. So far I like the bow on there.
For the skirt, I just made it up as I went along. Not in one those I’m-so-talented-I-can-just-sew-whatever-is-in-my-head kind of ways. More of those I-don’t-have-the-patience-to-find-a-pattern-or-figure-out-how-to-do-this-the-right-way kind of methods. The waistband of this skirt is very scary. If you could only look on the inside of this dress, you would be appalled.
But hey, it’s not what’s on the inside that counts, right?
For the skirt portion, I just took the entire width of the material, gathered it, and sewed it into my scary waistband. This was the one event of the dressmaking process that went smoothly.
All in all, I love my dress. It was definitely a huge learning adventure. I’ll probably make more skirts this way – it was super easy! Except I’ll find out how to make a proper waistband. As for the bodice, I’m done trying to alter that silly pattern. I’m going to go buy it in the smaller size. The pattern I have only goes down to size 12 and I think I need an 8 or something.
So what about you guys? Anyone done any sewing lately? Any experimenting with altering patterns? Any successful experimenting? Ha!
~Whitney
We simply had the best time on vacation! Yet I was reminded today that it is officially over. We went back to work (which was actually fun – we love our jobs). My house is a mess from post-vacation laziness. I have a pile of laundry. And crickets and bull frogs have replaced the traffic and people sounds from Chicago. But the ultimate kicker was my trip to Wal-Mart.
See, on our vacation, we had some delicious food. Simply amazing.
Timothy and I found an amazing Spanish tapas restaurant. Neither of us had ever been to one before, but somehow we managed to order the most delicious things on the menu! If they weren’t the most delicious, then the rest of the food must be unbelievable.
Yum. I want to lick the screen! We also ate some delectable Chicago-style pizza and yummy Indian food. Ahh, the cuisines of the city. No McDonald’s for us!
Surprisingly, my favorite food item of the trip wasn’t food but a beverage. Bubble tea! So good, it’d make you want to hug your momma.
And make handsome swoony faces. (This is his model face if you can’t tell.)
I first had bubble tea (also called boba tea) in Taiwan. At first it totally caught me off guard. Tea that you drink and chew? Weird. But after the second sip I was hooked. I didn’t think I’d be able to find it in America, but apparently several places sell it! My mom even found a recipe online for bubble tea.
We were happy folks.
So today I went to the grocery store, aka Wal-Mart, to pick up some food. We’re already missing the city so I thought I’d surprise Timothy and bring the city to him by attempting Indian food. I found a really scrumptious looking recipe for Indian Butter Chicken and took it with me so I’d be sure to get all the right ingredients.
But Wal-Mart only had one out of the five Indian spices that I needed. Bummer.
So then I thought I’d look up the bubble tea recipe my mom sent me. Thank goodness for iPhones and the ability to look online while grocery shopping. Wal-Mart had all the necessary ingredients but one … which was the one ingredient necessary for the bubbles. Bubble tea without bubbles just makes tea. And that’s not exciting.
I guess we’re officially back. Vacation is over. And I’m now eating McDonald’s and drinking regular tea. And listening to frogs.
But there’s no place I’d rather be. :)
~Whitney
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I'm honored that you took time to stop by my blog! My name is Whitney, and I'm a diy loving, piano playing, sewing obsessed, thrifty, non-house cleaning, crafty newlywed. I love God, my husband, and life as a wife. If you'd like to know more, just check out my About Me page. Much love!
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