A Hello Kitty Birthday Party...not just for young girls!

January 7th, 2011 was an important day in our family!

Our youngest daughter turned 14 years old!

We had a birthday party for her with 4 of her friends. I surprised her with the "theme". I was going to do a sock monkey theme, but changed the theme to "hello kitty" when I was at the store shopping for her party decor.

Kids go through these phases where hello kitty and such is considered babyish, then they hit the teen years when it becomes "cool" again. Have you noticed that?

So instead of buying the typical hello kitty party supplies I just did a light pink & zebra print decor and hello kitty was the accent. She loved it!

I made the cupcakes and they were DELISH!!

The Hello Kitty Cake Pops were a HIT! The kids loved eating Hello Kitty's head...I know, kinda wierd. LOL

These were fun to make!

and...this is the sock monkey I ordered for table decor when the theme was going to be sock monkey. This was her Favorite present! Oh and the highlights/lowlights and haircut she got the day before.

Happy 14th Birthday my Beautiful Daughter!

I Love You!

A New Year's Proposal

On 1-1-11 our oldest daughter got engaged! Her boyfriend (now fiance) took her geocaching and he had the geocache box set up for her. When she opened it she found a ring pop which she was thrilled with (she loves ring pops) LOL Then when she turned around to show him the ring pop he was knelt down on one kneee with the engagement ring and asked her to marry him....and in between crying she said, "YES"




We are all very excited for her! Oh and here's the beautiful ring...blessed girl!!

Both of them will be graduating this may with degrees in Registered Nursing.


They are planning on a rustic garden September wedding. I'm excited to decorate! I'll be sure and show you what we come up with here, but if you all have any ideas or inspiration pics...please let me know!!

Look what I made!

Hope you all had a fabulous Christmas! We sure did!

I wanted to show you all something hubby & I made for our daughter for Christmas. It is for her apartment when she moves out this May. It is to hold anything from bills, photos, recipes, love notes, etc.....

But we presented the gift to her with one of her favorite sayings as a little girl (from all the Disney movies she watched)

And this is what it looked like when we started..........

She bought this at a garage sale for $1. She intended to make it into a chalk board, but found a larger frame for the chalk board instead. So......... had to find a purpose for this frame and this is what I came up with.

Took the ugly picture out and trashed it. Then spray painted the frame and hubby added the chicken wire and my younger daughter and I decoupaged the clothes pins with scrapbook paper to make them prettier and Voila!

By the way.....she LOVED it!

Happy Birthday Jesus & Merry Christmas!

Just wanted to tell all of my friends that follow Our Creative Life blog....

Merry Christmas!!

From all of us to all of you! May God continue to bless you!

Master Bedroom Makeover REVEAL!!

Our master bedroom is done...well 95% done. Still waiting on some black & white photos to get here for a photo wall I'm doing, but other than that it's DONE!! YAY!!

Here is the awful & dated bedroom before.....(sorry that's all the photos I could find of the before)
It was BAD, AWFUL...I KNOW!! So the first thing we did was sold all that golden oak aka orangy oak furniture. Bought new furniture...but made a few changes to the new furniture.

The new bed came like this.... with a brown faux leather padded inset in the headboard.

UGH...made the bed too dark in my opinion. So bought some linen fabric and reupholstered it. Now it's PERFECT!

Next, hubby scrapped the popcorn (acoustic stuff) off the ceiling. Yay, was I glad to get rid of that! But, wait the drywall tape marks are showing now that the popcorn is off...YUCK! Guess whoever drywalled the ceiling didn't care about smoothing the tape lines out since they were covering it with popcorn. UGH! So I tell hubby that we should just cover the ceiling with beadboard. I said, "It will be easier than you having to patch and sand to smooth out those tape lines." Well long story short......it was not easier.....but Oh so much better!!! It adds so much charm and architectural interest to the ceiling!!




(I would have preferred a capiz shell chandelier, but our bedroom is on the 2nd level and gets really hot up there so we really had to have a fan...so I chose this one by Hunter and really like it.

Oh and of course I have to mention the paint color on the walls which we love! It is Sherwin Williams called Utterly Beige and it is Utterly Fabulous in my opinion. No peachy or pink undertones like some beige/tan paint colors...it's just a perfect, cozy color!

Well as most of you know we are custom rug manufacturers so of course we had to have a custom rug in our bedroom, right?! I deceided I wanted just a touch of some animal print in the bedroom, so I designed a brown & white zebra rug to go under the bed and just peak out a little bit. This was not a quick rug to make as every zebra stripe was all hand cut and all inlaid by hand. All in all it took 12 hours to make, but it was worth it! What do ya think?
Ok, so without further ado......let me show you our new bedroom, follow me.

How do ya like my little touch of Christmas with the ice skate pillow? It was actually a stocking but it had all the colors of our room so I stuffed it and liquid sewed to top to make a pillow.

(I planned on painting these nightstands a creamy white, but now I'm not sure. Kind of like them black...what do ya think??) I'm thinking they will work since I'll have black frames for the black and white photos & the tv is black.


Took the blinds and drapes all the way to the ceiling to visually make the window appear larger.

I LOVE the colors in our room...so calming & relaxing!

Well hello Kitty!

Can't wait for my paperwhites to bloom! But for now, have some petunias in an aqua ball jar.

Just look at that lovely beadboard ceiling and crown molding! Thanks hubby!

Look at the feature hubby did.....yes, there are lights under the bed. So we have a bed that glows at night with the touch of a button. Pretty cool, huh?!

Antique mirror we bought from a garage sale.

Ok, so that's the tour. I'll show you the photo wall when I get it done. Now, I'm going to go enjoy my bedroom.

Take Care!
Darlene

Beadboard on the Ceiling...are you serious?

We scraped the popcorn off our master bedroom ceiling last week. I mean hubby scraped it off...I watched. He then primed the ceiling and told me that the dry wall tape was showing. UGH...I hate when that happens. Well, I said, "We should just cover the ceiling with beadboard." "Are you serious?" hubby replied. I said, "it will be easier than trying to smooth out those dry wall tape marks and it will look so good!" So........hubby agreed and off to Lowe's to pick up 4 beadboard panels.

We began putting Liquid Nails on the ceiling and then we tried holding the beadboard up to the ceiling all while hubby used his nail gun to secure it to the ceiling studs. Well, let me tell ya...that was like a I Love Lucy scene...pretty comical! The nails were not holding it and we couldn't hold the beadboard up very long. UGH!


So my hubby told me this was a bad idea. I told him other people had beadboard on their ceilings so obviously it was doable. He then put on his thinking cap and decided to go back to Lowe's to buy 2x4's to create T-stands to hold up the beadboard and some finish nails. It was a lot of work, but oh so worth it!!! We LOVE our beadboard ceiling! Added so much interest & charm to our bedroom.

Thanks hubby for doing this for me! I knew it would be GREAT! Come back soon to see pics of the whole bedroom makeover....it's looking FABULOUS!