Easter at the Petersen Family Farm

We started Easter celebrations a little early since on achal Easter Sunday we'll *hopefully* be in the hospital with little Lincoln.  

Brittany tagged me in a post on FB from Petersen Family Farms, announcing an Easter egg hunt at their farm. We kind of tried an Easter egg hunt last year with Liv but she had no clue what was going on.. She was only 10 months old though haha. 

So today we met up at the farm and it was way packed! The Petersen Farm sold out their Easter egg hunt tickets and I can see why.. It was only $3 a person and it included the hunt, petting bunnies & chicks, decorating cookies, live music, a little corn area to play around in (we didn't let the kiddos do that.. corn in every nook and cranny... no thank you!), pictures with the Easter bunny, face painting, hay & pony rides! Seriously SO much fun for all ages. Only $3! Love it. 

Livi and Karter are at the perfect age to really enjoy a lot of the activities.. Not including sitting on Easter bunny's lap though.. That terrified Liv & then made Karter way nervous!

I seriously couldn't stop laughing, poor girl is going to hate me later in life for making her pose with creepy holiday characters (like Santa). 

We got there with a few minutes to spare which is SHOCKING for Britt & me... We're both wired the same unfortunately: late to everything. 🙈 So we took some pics on their tractors and then let the kiddos play with some chicks and bunnies before lining up for the hunt. 

Cool man Karter with his shades haha! Livi was hating the wind in her face. 

Livi was trying to figure out how she could get away with kidnapping this big beauty. I was too. 😳

She looooved it!

We made our way over to the egg hunt area just in time for them to count down from 10 (it was a big deal!) and let the kiddos loose. 

Micah picked up Liv to hurry past the "competition" haha!

Scoping out her score. 

We pushed K and O together to take a quick pic and this amazing exchange happened...

Karter saw Liv's basket:

Made a grab for her eggs:

Stole a coveted lime green egg:

Olive was NOT cool with that..

So she decided to steal it back:

And then guarded her basket way more closely:

I was dying!

They wanted kiddos to cut off at 12 eggs each so that there was plenty for everyone (Liv accidentally grabbed 15.. Oops!) so once we reached what we thought our cap was, we headed back to the main area.

Another line directed everyone to trade in their eggs for candy and toys, so fun! Liv scored some pretty worthless treats but she was stoked. 

We wandered for a little bit, took some pics with the Easter bunny (here's another gem!)

Then took a couple of quick family pics and headed out. 

Yep I'm a blimp! Scheduled to have my little man in 6 days. Yes please!

This was such a fun and cheap little idea, it will definitely be a new family tradition!

xoxo

Mandi

Lincoln's Room

Transforming Olive's old color scheme to a boyish setting was really fun! Busy and time consuming and at times super frustrating, but all in all really fun!

First, here's the finished product!

Here's how it used to look:

Ever since we found out we were expecting a boy, the nautical theme just sort of popped out to me. 

The simple stuff:

I recovered the foot rest/ottoman with a fun geometric navy print, made a red pillow for the couch, and decorated the nursery with some poppy nautical decor. The lamp is from Ethan Allen, when my parents were first married. It's amazing. Micah has a love/hate relationship with it, but it's such a great childhood love of mine, I'm totally stoked to have it in my house again. My sister-in-law Cara made the adorable whale pillow on my rocking chair & the navy striped pillow with the L in his crib. Serious talent!

The hard stuff:

After hunting for the right color of navy blue, Micah and I set to painting. 

To make a long story short, the whole process was soooo time consuming and frustrating because of minor set backs...

We first sanded down the edges of the coral stripes & taped off the walls. That wasn't the bad part of the whole process..

Our first can of paint was too glossy, so after painting the whole wall twice we realized we had to switch it out for a more matte finish.. Awesome. 

One silver lining: Micah has a lot of contacts at Home Depot (thru work) and one of them happened to be working in the paint department when he went in to get the matte finish paint.. He gave us the whole can for free! Love it. 

So we get halfway through painting the wall with the correct paint finish and for some strange reason, the paint starts to peel off as we are painting... Yep. Our rollers were just some crappy quality and they were actually sticking to the paint and pulling it off, clumping it all over. Awesome. 

Back to the store I went, picked up our hopefully last can of navy, and went home with new rollers as well. 

That was the trick & the whole wall looked perfect. My next mistake/idea was to paint a stencil on the wall. I really wanted to do a wallpaper from the very beginning, something with a fun geometric print, but couldn't find anything that was perfectly what I wanted. So stencils seemed like my next best option. I found our stencil on http://www.royaldesignstudio.com and was totally optimistic about it. 

We picked up some white paint and set to work on the stencil. 

To say it didn't work would be SUCH an understatement. We started along the baseboard, to get it in an even straight line. 

What the picture doesn't show up close is the fact that the lines aren't crisp and even.. The paint leaked thru the edges so they are wavy and rough looking. Totally NOT the look I wanted!! We were using a tiny roller for the first several stencils and realized that it wasn't going to work. So I bought a sponge so we could try a different approach aaaaaand it still looked like crap. Also for some weird reason the paint looked like it was crackling (like that nail polish that was super popular for a bit where you paint it over the top of a different color and it crackles thru). 

My last idea for the wall was to paint a highlight white stripe on the navy and to put Linc's name in red vinyl and be done. 

We started painting the white and quickly realized the white paint had something really wrong with it. It was crackling along the stripe too, not just an accident with the stencil. It was also drying weird and getting clumpy, leaving these huge globs of paint on the wall. Awesome. 

So I wiped off the thick crap and we gave up for the night. So freakin annoying!!

Micah returned the crap paint for a free new can of paint (thank you Home Depot!) and we sanded down the stripe as well as the stencil fence haha. 

After a lot of taping and reprinting, it finally finally FINALLY is done! The only thing we had left to do to the wall was to add a red vinyl to his stripe. Of course this has issues too.. I bought window cling vinyl accidentally.. Not the "proper" type of vinyl unfortunately, which I didn't know wouldn't stick to the wall until after Brittany came over with her silhouette machine & we spent forever going over fonts and sizing it up just perfect..  Awesome. 

So after hunting down the correct vinyl, we recut it and Micah and I then pressed it to the wall. 

Now I just need my little man to make his debut and we'll be set!

xoxo

Mandi

Project: Quilting

I need to preface this post: I've never made a quilt before. I love to sew and try new things but this project definitely tried my patience. 

Here's the finished product and her completed room:

Here's my inspiration for the quilt:

Thank you Pinterest  :)

So to begin I sought advice. My friend's mother in law is a master quilter and she recommended that I cut 7 inch squares, pair a black square with a white one, draw a line diagonally across the white, then sew the two squares together on either side of the diagonal line with a 1/4 inch seam. Whew. 

I cut out all the squares first.. Which took forever. 

Then began the process of pairing up a piece of white with black & drawing a line down the middle. 

The dotted line is the drawn line and the solid lines are the sewing lines. 

Once I'd sewn the lines I cut along the drawn line and had two squares, with 1/2 being a black triangle, the other 1/2 a white triangle. 

I wanted the blanket to be as big as her toddler/twin bed is but not much bigger. Who knows what style or colors she'll want in her next room. I didn't want to kill myself over a huge quilt to have her only use it for a year. 

With all the squares cut and sewn and then cut again, I worked on my LEAST favorite chore with them... Ironing. 

Unfortunately this was a necessary step. I had to iron the seam open so that the fabric would actually lay flat once it was all sewn together. My ironing board is in the basement, super dusty, so my parents were nice enough to let me borrow theirs while we were at their house for Sunday dinner. And my mom was a rock star and finished ironing a few for me when I was tired of standing and swollen. 

Next I laid out my pattern. My sister in law Cara just barely made this *exact* same quilt and she recommended that I lay out the whole quilt before pinning or sewing anything together. I'm soooo glad she said that because I got turned around so many times, even with it all laid out!

I worked in squares.. So two squares across and the two squares above them too. This process surprisingly went really fast... Except it was a nightmare for my OCD. I had to rip out seams on several of the squares... Lining up the corners and triangles exactly was really tough, I'm not gonna lie. But it did go quickly, despite having to fix lots of mistakes. 

Once I worked through all of my squares, I was left with 4 strips of two by six squares. I had a tough time again making sure all of the corners met up correctly, but I didn't have to rip any seams out to fix them. I just went really slowly and had a mini aneurism during the process haha. 

With the whole thing then sewn together, I laid it out on top of the backing fabric, a fun bright mint minky. 

I pulled the herringbone side to the edges of the minky and cut it to size. I then sewed the whole thing together wrong sides together. The edge is supposed to be raw (not sewing right sides together then flipping inside out) but will be covered by the binding. 

After picking Cara's mind for the millionth time, she directed me to a super helpful tutorial on finishing quilts off with the binding.  (Here's the link: http://youtu.be/xWh90tXr7g4 )

I had to watch it a few times before I actually understood what they were even saying... But the end result was exactly what I was looking for!

It's definitely not perfect, I took some shortcuts and didn't do things exactly how I'm sure I should've, but it's my first quilt, made with love for my sweet little Liv and I couldn't be happier with it!

My next quilting attempt will be for my couch or master bedroom, but that won't be for a long time. 

xoxo

Mandi