Happy 27th Birthday to My Fave Guy!

If our future babies look half as cute as you did

in this 1985 Olan Mills photo (does everyone remember Olan Mills?), I will be a lucky woman.

Love, Your Wife

P.S. Thanks for proposing to me on this day three years ago.  Can't believe it's been so long since then!

P.P.S. Since we will be embarking on a nine-hour roadtrip when this post goes live, I guess I should drive during and let you listen to the US versus Algeria World Cup game with nary a complaint.  It is your birthday, after all.

How to Tie a Knot

There are many things I love about this image, but most of all is this rope knots tea towel*.

Elle Decor via Small Place Style

I must have this! I have tracked it down here**, and I may just have to splurge on it, even though navy doesn't really go in my kitchen. (However, this one and this one would. I think they would look awesome framed and hung together. Maybe I could do that with the knots one and use it in another room until I have my someday-all-white-with-blue-accents kitchen. Problem is, I actually need some tea / dish towels, and these are so much more interesting than your Plain Jane ones.)

* Curious as to the origin of the name tea towel, which I seem to see more of now as opposed to calling it a kitchen or dish towel (yes, I actually think about these things), I found this on Wikipedia:

In 18th century England, a tea towel was a special linen drying cloth used by the mistress of the house to dry her precious and expensive china tea things. Servants were considered too ham-fisted to be trusted with such a delicate job, although housemaids were charged with hand-hemming the woven linen when their main duties were completed. Mass-produced tea towels were produced during the Industrial Revolution. Today pictorial tea towels make charming and collectible souvenirs.

What pictorial tea towel do you use to dry your precious and expensive china tea things?

How Do You Display Your Photos?

One Kings Lane* is offering gift certificates for gallery wrap canvas prints from Chic Canvas for quite the discount right now.  I shopped around some other websites and found it to be a really good price.  (I did find one site where the 20x24 wasn't that much more expensive.)

One of the problems is that I don't know which photo I'd pick, so I'm having trouble deciding the dimensions for the one I'd buy! We have our high-res digital negatives of our beautiful wedding photos, and I haven't yet had any portraits printed, partly because I don't know if we really need to have something so large of us on display.  (I already feel like a 16x20 of one of our awesome engagement photos is a bit much, even though we're a smaller part of the photo, standing inside this sculpture.  I ended up putting it in our bedroom.) 

Now if it was just of some cute kiddos like this, or a great landscape shot from a vacation, I think it would look great as a big statement piece. But I'm just not so sure I want to see myself so large, or if our houseguests want to see us in a canoodling wedding photo. Also, I recently picked up a ton of silve frames matted to 11x14 that were on clearance at Target, and I've started to collect the ever-popular IKEA Ribba frame as well, with the idea to eventually have a gallery wall of favorite photographs, but without it being wedding or couple overload.

  

So I turn to you, my helpful readers. Should I buy it? (I can always save it for later, there's just that question of which size.) Are you going to buy it?  What would should I have made with it, or what would you make?

Do you think once you start decorating with gallery wraps, that future portrait-worthy prints should get the same treatment as well for consistency in your home?

* Let me know if you want an invite and I'll email you the link!

Packing Success!

Can you believe this is all I'm taking on a four-day trip?

Compare mutant toy poodle to tell the scale of my bags

All my life, I have not been skilled in the art of packing.  (I need lots of back-up clothing options, you see, which equals a lot of stuff.)

But determined not to pay to check a bag (totally ridic), I resolved to fit it all into one carry-on and one personal item.  (And I told J he better do the same!)

And I did!

We are leaving the house at 5:30 am (!) tomorrow morning for a wedding in Michigan.

I packed:

2 wrap dresses for dinners Thursday and Friday

1 cocktail dress for the wedding Saturday

1 casual dress for brunch Sunday

1 white skirt

1 pair of white jeans

4 tops (there should be 2 extra)

1 jean jacket in case it gets cold

2 pairs of heels

1 pair of ballet flats

1 pair of flip-flops

+ jewelry, toiletries, hair straightener, et al.

I am finally a packing success! (I rolled everything reallly tightly.  I'm crossing my fingers I can get it all back in later!)

I'm excited - J booked his ticket on points and gets first class on the way there. Guess who gets the seat on the longer leg of the flight?  Ooh ooh!

I've never been to Michigan.  We'll be in a small town outside of Detroit, and I'm expecting it to be really beautiful there. They've reserved bikes at the hotel, so I think that's what I'll be doing while J golfs Friday.

Have a great weekend, blog friends!