Entertaining

Decor

The Great Outdoors

Alisa + me + babies | Our newly redecorated backyard

The fact that I love our house is a bit of a lucky surprise – purchasing a home that you’ve only seen on a FaceTime video is…well, a questionable decision, at best. But I do! I totally love it.

The one thing about our place that I wasn’t quite sure about when we decided to buy it: its size. It’s about the same square footage as the house we moved out of, which had been starting to feel a bit cramped for our growing family. And yet this house feels way more expansive to me – partially, I think, because it’s all on one level, but mostly because of our outdoor space.

Entertaining

Easy Greens

how to make an easy centerpiece using greens bought at the supermarket

{ Vintage Glasses (similar) | Noritake Cher Blanc Platter }

Reason Number 2,457,244 why Trader Joe's is the best thing that has ever happened to life, ever: they have beautiful fresh flower arrangements that are actually affordable, and also seem to be preternaturally long-lasting. Which is wonderful, because spending twenty bucks on a grocery-store bouquet that falls to pieces within 24 hours is both the worst and something I tend to not do (because it literally feels like ripping up a twenty-dollar bill and throwing it out of my car window). And while the idea of being one of those people who trots off to the florist for some lovely fresh blooms has its appeal...I mean, lol.

But I do a lot of entertaining, and also take a lot of photographs of said entertaining, and I've discovered that having a few fresh flowers laying around is kind of huge in terms of making your table (and home, generally) feel lovely and fresh and inviting. And they're really useful for adding texture and color to images, if you too are a table-photographer (see this post for evidence).

Entertaining

Holiday Cocktail: The Paloma

Paloma cocktail with grapefruit juice and tequila

You know what's fun about Palomas (besides everything)? They're light and fruity - so you'd imagine they'd be a strictly-for-summer cocktail - but the deep pink color and snowy (or, to be specific, sugary-salty) rim and general fabulousness make them perfect for the holidays.

(MAN that sugar-salt rim is good. I've never tried doing this before, and for real: you have to give it a shot.)

Tequila hasn't really been my beverage of choice for...oh, maybe a decade now (due in large part to a couple of tequila-inclusive incidents during my college years that turned me off the stuff for awhile), but I've recently rediscovered it. Not the bottom-shelf swill that we used to drink straight from the bottle during our dorm room dance parties - ohhhh god, I get a headache just thinking about that - but rather the good (or at least pretty good) stuff. When it comes to tequila, it's always worth spending a little extra money, because bad tequila is a bad time. And good tequila? Whee.

DIY Projects

Odd (But Strangely Useful) Little Idea: DIY Wine Charms

skull glass with rope and berry wine charm

You know those little charms that you can hook onto your wineglass so that everyone at a party can tell which glass is theirs? I've always thought they sounded like a nice idea, but there are two problems with this: 1) Most of the charms I've seen around are a little on the cheesy side (although these are kind of cute); and 2) I usually use tumblers for wine instead of traditional glasses, and wine charms are made to hook around the stem of a glass.

Those aren't the biggest problem, though; the biggest problem is that owning something like wine charms requires forethought, and forethought is not something that I typically possess. The only times that it has ever occurred to me that I might like to own some wine charms has been when I am mid-party and suddenly discover that I have no idea which glass is mine. Over Thanksgiving weekend, this is exactly what happened, and so do you know what I did?

Broke out my crafting box, of course. A little twine, some jewelry clasps that I have hanging around from a bracelet project I did with Michael's, and a few fake berry branches leftover from a photo shoot, and BOOM. For real, if you have some string (twine, Christmas ribbon, cooking string, etc) laying around, you can do this...and you can use anything as an identifier - a couple of beads, a dried flower, a leaf, whatever. It's totally something you can do in five seconds. And it's fun. And free.