{Spontaneous Saturday}

So as most of you know we live in Northern California in the foot hills of the Sierra Nevada’s. We are close to so many things that us east coasters see as novelties! Like Lake Tahoe. The drive is a little less than two hours. If you know what our drive to the grocery store is, then you will agree with me that it’s practically in our back yard!

On Friday, we decided with some friends, to go skiing and find a place to stay for the night in Tahoe. It’s really hard for me to be spontaneous and just go with no real plans, but I did it and I’m glad I did! We left around 8am on Saturday morning and we were on the slopes by 11! Here are some pictures from our day.

I forgot to mention it was about at least 55 degrees and the snow was perfect! First, we stopped about half way to Tahoe in a town called Grass Valley to go to one of our favorite coffee shops. Love this place and it always reminds me of one of my best friends 'Caroline'!

We skied at North Star, it's an awesome resort it's like a little tiny city in the middle of nowhere!

When we got to the mountain we immediately got on a gondola to take us to the top. We didn't go all the way back to the bottom until the end of the day! Here are a few pictures of us on the gondola.

Here we are at the top. Below is a pretty awesome view of Lake Tahoe.

We always have to have a goofy picture to go with a good one.

In living and working in Ministry you end up meeting a lot of people. Turns out someone who is a Friends of Woodleaf's is a manager at the Hyatt in Tahoe. We felt so blessed to be staying in such a nice place, even if it was only for a night.

Take a look at this place, Hyatt Regency it was pretty awesome! Here is the view from our room.

The pools are warm pools, you get in inside the building so you never have to get out in the cold! So Smart!

 After a quick 24 hours we are on out way home! As always with some sort of caffeine in hand!

Bathroom break.

Some people took naps :-)

It is a huge blessing to feel cared for by people you barely even know! We really experinced that this weekend. I am thankful.

{Ambition}

I debating on posting this because I'm not much of a process person, I'm all about the finished product. I'm learning the process can actually be more important than the finished product. So here it goes, I'm going to give you a glimpse into the imperfectness of the process.

We bought a kiln.

An ambitious purchase, a hopeful purchase, we bought it in hopes of opening an Etsy shop for me to do something I love and make a little extra money. As most of you know I have a bachelors degree in art education, and for the 4 years I was in college I had to take pretty much every art class known to man! Some of my favorite classes were printmaking, ceramics and oil painting; what I’m doing now is putting them all together! I am print making on ceramics. My training is minimal in all of these different fields of art, at this point I’m still experimenting! Here are some pictures from my first round of glazing…


The bottles you see next to the plates are under glaze, underglaze fires so much brighter then it looks when you paint (or print) it on the plate! All of the underglaze and plates came with our kiln, we got a really great deal from some freinds of ours when they were moving. At this point it's a gamble to know what these colors will look like after they are fired.

  I used premade screen prints for the crab and background design. I repeated it on four plates. After firing, I realized I should have used different colors on all the plates so I can get an idea what the different colors will look like after they are fired.

 If only I could make ceramics that look like my 'Anthropology" mug!

I thought it would fun to monogram using block printing. I like how this plate turned out I just wish I would have used a few more coats of the light blue so it would have turned out a little darker.

The bright green, is the glaze it’s what makes the plates shiny when fired. It fires completely clear and shiny, it’s tinted green so you can make sure you have covered the plate completely. While I was covering all of my newly painted plates with this crazy color Mikie was looking over my shoulder saying, 'i hope you know what you're doing'. I didn't let him know, but at the time I was thinking ‘I hope I know what I’m doing’. I'm happy to say that they came out of the kiln green free, and very shiny!

 I'm hoping one day to have a company name to brand all of my cermaics, but right now my initials will do!

 This crab plate turned out to be my favorite!

I already fired all of these plates, and because it was my first time they did not turn out as well as I would have liked them to. I'm sure with a little bit of practice I will get better! I will be sure to post some 'after pictures'!

[Dirty Hands, Happy Heart]

With our new house we inherited a sweet recycled window greenhouse. The family 'The Gardners'  that lived in the house before us made it with a bunch of old windows that they found. Here is a blog post about the construction of the greenhouse from the Gardners blog. Along with the greenhouse we inherited two large raised gardens and a chicken coop. Right now we are taking full advantage of the greenhouse and gardens. Our awesome neighbors The Dunn’s have teamed up with us to fill the large beds with tons of veggies and herbs. I don’t think I’m brave enough to conquer the whole chicken thing yet.

The greenhouse has been so great because we don’t have to wait until the last frost in April to begin planting. We can plant now which means we will get an earlier crop. We have planted seeds for lettuce, spinach, tomatoes, chives, basil,  and sugar snap peas. Almost all of them have already sprouted and we were able to move the lettuce, spinach and sugar snap peas to garden because as I found out, with a ton of research, they are cold weather plants. They should be planted between February and April. Jess (our neighbor) and I, have been doing a lot of research, and we just decided to go for it! We are trying to have a spring crop and fall crop of things like lettuce, spinach, and peas; I’m not really sure what’s going to happen.  I'll take all the advice I can get! Here are some pictures of what has been going on for the past few weekends around here…

Here is the inside...

Here is one of the beds and Mikie, Grant, and Micah getting it ready for the spring! Grant is so sweet and such a great helper in the garden. We have been blessed with some really great neighbors!

This is Jess planting our sugar snap peas, we read in the 'Farmer’s Almanac' to use toilet paper to make sure your rows are straight when planting seeds. Then we just buried the toilet paper with the seeds. I think it worked :-)

I'm sure there will be a lot more to come about our gardening adventure!

{My new Baby Blue}

Things have been super busy around here! Warm weather has brought tons of projects I can finally cross off my 'to do' list. During winter I found this unfinished sofa table off of Amazon. I had been looking everywhere for tables to go behind our couch and could not find anything I liked that was a reasonable price. I finally found this online and the shipping was free. I knew I could make it look exactly how I wanted to. I had big plans to paint and distress it, but after I put a coat of paint on it I really liked it and decided not to distress. Here is the before and after. The paint is Valspar and the color is called "Sparkle"

It was really hard to choose this minty blue. I stared at the blues in Lowes for a long time, and with some encouragement from my patient husband I finally chose my color. Now I want to paint everything this color!