Category / Parties + Holidays

December was my month to host book club. It’s my very favorite month to host because A) you’re guaranteed a good turn-out (no one ever misses the annual white elephant exchange) and B) the holiday decor and theme is so much fun to play with. Major photo-taking fail on my part (I only grabbed a couple) but hopefully the links below help you get the full picture.

I’m always on the hunt for new party food ideas that can work ANY time of year (and have been tried and loved by someone firsthand), but I included a couple the other night that were a bit more specific to the season. Here’s a rundown of the couple iPhone pics I managed to snap, and links to where I found the recipes – I would make all of these things again!

Cranberry Brie Bites – I loved how festive these looked! The red and green and the snow-like sugared cranberries made these so pretty to set out! Recipe can be found here. I love her entertaining/food mantra of, “we eat with our eyes first!”. Wise words!

Crock Pot Hot Chocolate – This might have been the best hot chocolate I’ve ever had. And for good reason – condensed milk, 1% milk, and heavy cream…um yeah, this was thick and rich and amazing! Plus, I love anything that my Crock Pot can manage for me. I added some marshmallows on candy canes as stir sticks, and Bailey’s minis for those who wanted an extra stir-in. The recipe can be found here.

Spinach and Cheese Croissants – I didn’t have time to get a pic of these, but there are some great ones if you follow the link to the original recipe here. These were a super-easy thing to prep ahead of time, and who doesn’t love a warm, flaky crescent roll?

Tortellini Skewers – I don’t have a link or a photo for these, because they’re so simple. I pre-cooked some cheese tortellini (the red and green kind to be festive!) and skewered them onto sticks with black and green olives, slices of pepperoni, and grape tomatoes. Another colorful red and green option for a holiday app!

Cranberry Water – Yet another photo fail, because this SIMPLE idea is so pretty! I used a clear beverage dispenser and filled it with water, added a splash of cranberry juice to tint it light pink, and floated a bag of cranberries on top. Instantly fancy and festive, but still refreshing and oh-so-simple.

Hope everyone is enjoying their last few days before the holiday…bon apetit!

We spend a good amount of time on the upper level of our home, so it made sense to me that it be decorated for the season as well.

I kept it simple with a little silver tinsel tree in our bedroom. This is the only tree I did this year that is “colorless” although I could see adding some fun chartreuse ornaments later on to match our throw pillows.

For now, a set of silver/gold balls and my “calendar” ornaments hang on this tree. I started collecting this ornament from Crate & Barrel the year we were married and have made a point to purchase one each year since and include a wallet-sized photo from that year. I hope they don’t stop making these any time soon, but I figure if and when they do, I can switch to a new style and mix and match.

For Page’s office, a funky green frame of he and his best friend and both dads taken at Christmas in 2006 is one of the fun xmas things to break out. Page had been asking for a skier nutcracker for years and I finally found a reasonable one last Christmas so Page was excited when I pulled him out of the box.

No office is complete without a tree. I love how these ornaments are so very Page, from skis and dirty martinis to golf balls and gambling. 🙂

I’ve never been a huge fan of blue Christmas ornaments, and maybe I’ve never paid attention before, but it seemed the deep blue hue was everywhere this season. Who knew Wal Mart was on to the Manolo blue craze? 😉

Love, love, love my blue bows!

Thanks for stopping by!

I have had so much fun decorating for the holidays this year!

To keep this from being too lengthy, I broke it up into two parts. Welcome to our home for the holidays…

For me, it all starts with the entry! I want guests to feel warmly welcomed and festive when they come to our home during the holidays. To begin, I took advantage of a seventy-degree day in November (whaaat?!) to hang our outdoor lights.

New construction doesn’t give us much to string on, but between the pillar and our baby landscaping, I tried to make it work. I added a potted tree next to the bench and embellished the “S” wreath I’d bought with a few picks before adding it to the door.

Won’t you come in?!

On the inside of our entry, I swapped out the glass vase with some wintery white branches, mixed in some blingy branches I found at Pier 1. I love this new jingle bell doorknob swag – the ribbon matches our wall color perfectly.

For the kitchen, I set out a few of my favorite things. The vintage apron hanging on the pantry door is a gift from my bestie…

…and the hand-painted twelve days of Christmas ornaments are one of my very favorite things to unpack each year. Page’s only decorating request as I dragged in one tub after another was that after the lit pumpkin had been on the island all fall, he wanted something else there that would still light up and we could leave on at night. Check…done!

To finish up in the kitchen, I strung some ornaments on fishing line in the window and finally got my hands on some Mrs. Meyers “Iowa Pine” hand soap. It smells like Christmas every time I wash my hands. 🙂

As you might know by now, our kitchen/dining area/living room is all one big room, so you turn around…

…and you see the dining area…

…still working on doing something new and different for the table….

One of my favorite details that is new this year is the swap-out for this “Yes, Virginia…” print. EDITED: I finally found the link to this and other Christmas prints by this artist – check it out here!

A few more details…

I wrapped the canvases I painted in gift wrap for the season. This was a whole big thing – I had about three other ideas that didn’t pan out…sometimes you just have to settle for Plan D. 🙂

Thanks for taking a peek – back tomorrow with the second floor!

I recently had a question from a reader asking how the first floor of our home is laid out. In particular, she was interested as to where our cubby and bench area was in relation to everything else. I agree, it’s hard to show in photos sometimes how things “flow” around here, so I’ll attempt to give a better glimpse. For starters, here is our floor plan. (Ignore the fact that the room labels are backwards, I had to flip the image of the plan so that it is like ours, with the garage on the right side.)

Now, ignore the crazy colors here and my not-so-drawn-to-scale skills, and here is a snapshot of the first floor when I was virtually arranging furniture in a floor planning program, prior to the move-in. (Do you like how it shows that we have two kitchen sinks? Not true haha…just a very unskilled user putting this together!)

So now, I’ll try and take you on a virtual walk-through. Come on in…(no, that wreath really isn’t there right now, but this was the last shot I had on hand – from December – of the front door entry).

When you walk in the front door, you can head one of two directions. The first is straight down the hallway (past our photo wall)…

…and into the kitchen/living area which is all one room and makes up our first floor.

With no formally created dining space, we opted to float our table and chairs in the open space between kitchen and living area. To the left of the table, out of the previous shot, is our kitchen…

…and to the far right, on the other side of the table is our living area….

(again, not a recent photo of the living room, here it is, in all its post-bookcase glory)

I didn’t know that it was worth a photo, but to the right of that chair that Page is sitting in (and trying to ignore my camera) is a coat closet, and just around the corner from that is the door to our garage. You would pass it before you walk back down the hallway to the front door. And you would remember to be awesome.

As for that cubby space, it’s along the front wall of our house, to the left when you walk in the front door, before you head upstairs to the second level…

This built-in was one of my favorite details about the house when we first walked through a spec version…I’m all for ANY bonus storage spots, and so many times we or our guests perch on that bench to get shoes on or off. If you were to turn away from this wall unit, you’d see our beloved rap lyric decal on the opposite wall before heading upstairs.

So there you have it, our first level. You can see why we’re anxious to add some more living square footage space in the basement sooner than later, and we do spend a good bit of our time upstairs where there’s a little more room to sprawl out. But all in all, I do love how well this first floor seems to fit us right now.

Thanks for taking the tour – despite the hodge podge of photos from different seasons and times of day! 😉 You can view more in-depth posts about specific areas in our house by viewing our “house tour” posts. Thanks for stopping by!

Since it was all anyone could talk about, our book club decided to read the infamous Fifty Shades of Grey. For me, the jury’s still out on the book – it was certainly intriguing and I was turning the pages trying to find out more about the mystery man, Christian Grey’s, past. I didn’t think the writing was all that wonderful, and some of the elements of the book were repeated ad nauseam to the point where it got a little annoying. All in all though, I had to give the author props for a very different storyline from anything else I’ve been reading, and the story certainly kept me reading.

At the very least, the book sets a great stage for a themed party!

We decided to combine our monthly book club gathering with my friend, Christine’s, 28th birthday, invite a few extra guests, and really have a par-tay!

It worked out well that Page was out of town, so the ladies came to my house this weekend for a silly and fun get-together that involved good eats, sweets, cocktails, and some PG-13 entertainment thanks to a fabulous consultant.

The color scheme was of course, shades of grey, except for the occasional “red” (room of pain!) goodie…

…and of course some coy nods to details from the book. I was floored by Christine’s idea to skewer “Forbidden Fruit” on zip ties. 😉

To get the party started, we offered some non-alc Ana cocktail (sparkling water and cranberry juice) and two renditions of a summer cocktail that I’ve heard referred to as both “strip and go naked” and “summer brew”. The pink on the left ( we named it “Twitchy Hand Cocktail”) is vodka, lemonade concentrate, and beer. The gold on the left (labeled “Lip Biter Cocktail”) is tequila, limeade concentrate, and beer. You can make much smaller batches of either than what you see here – for every cup of liquor, use one can of concentrate and four 12-0z cans of beer. (I tripled this for each of the cocktails.) It was a cost-effective way to keep the drinks flowing for 17 ladies well into the night!

You know it’s a fun night when you forget to take pics once your guests arrive. Thanks to my friend, Julie, for managing to snap a quick hostess pic…I’ll have to snag some “people photos” from other guests!

Whether it’s your turn to host book club, or you’re just looking for a fun reason to get the girls together, encourage your guests to read the book, stock up on all grey party supplies, pour everyone a cocktail, and let the laughter and girl talk begin!

Cheers! 🙂

It was so fun to host a girls’ night Oscar viewing party, and this year, in our new house.

While I had hoped that my 52″ blow-up statuette could greet guests outside, the wind just wasn’t working with me. So in he came to the front hall…

…along with this wreath that was flapping in the wind and falling apart…it ended up on the bathroom doorknob. 🙂 Weather annoyances aside, I was happy with how the glittery girlyness came together.

To drink, I made “silver screen punch”, a recipe I found on the official Academy Awards website. It’s champagne-based, with some raspberry vodka, pineapple juice and blended frozen strawberries. It went down pretty easily and straws made it disappear that much faster! I love these little stripey straws – you can find them all over Etsy. I bought some gold washi tape to make little flags for them and busted out my recycled frappucino bottles for serving.

I am still perfecting the jello shot…for the Super Bowl we made a couple batches and I used more Knox. They were almost chewy they were so stiff, but it made for easy cubing and pretty presentation. I backed off on the extra gelatin this time – but almost too much – after sitting out a bit, they were too soft. Note for next time – one and a HALF packets of Knox for the perfect consistency! I was trying to work in gold and shimmer anywhere I could…I remembered powdered food coloring from a cake class I took at Michaels forever ago. I dry-brushed some on the shots with a tiny paint brush to “class up” the jello shot to be Oscar-appropriate hehe.

A party is no good without sweets and I made sure there were plenty. Pink cotton candy, gold buttercream mints, pink rock candy and gumballs, and “popcorn” cupcakes (vanilla with yellow-tinted marshmallows) in pink striped popcorn-style cupcake liners. Julie even took a picture of the table and the hostess. 🙂

While they are somewhat time consuming, these “popcorn cupcakes” are super easy to make – I used a boxed mix (Duncan Hines French Vanilla – what else?) and a canned vanilla frosting. Tear mini marshmallows in half and stick them back together at weird angles – twist them and pinch them as you go – to create “kernels”. Roll the frosted cupcake tops in the marshmallow kernels and then use a small paintbrush and a few drops of yellow food coloring in water to brush on a little “buttered” tint. And if you must add bling (duh!) brush a little gold glitter food coloring on top for extra sparkle…it’s hard to capture in a photo, but the “popcorn” on these was festive and shimmery!

To balance out the sweet was the salty…pink popcorn boxes with buttered popcorn and some take and bake pizza to round out the “movie night” menu.

Let’s not forget some Oscar bingo and our own ballots!

And the winner is….