Mother's Day Saturday

We spent this past Saturday with my family (the Pfotenhauer's) for Mother's Day.  My mother has recently taken up miniature gardening as a hobby.  She has a few pots that are about a foot diameter that she has been working with.  I designed and built a 3' by 1.5' trough for her to do a larger mini-garden in (pictured below).  It sits on wheels and is about waist height.  Elise and I also used a wood burner to personalize the sides; Elise was able to etch floral patterns and I burned out "Pfotenhauer Gardens".  I have also included a picture of one of my mother's mini-gardens and a few other shots of the afternoon.

Blizzard in the real garden.

Toasting our Mint Julep's that my brother brewed.

An owl from us and some gnomes my brother gave to my mom to start decorating
with some of her other supplies.

One of my mother's current mini gardens.

Bananas Foster

Last night we made one of our favorite desserts: bananas foster.  I believe this is our third home attempt and I think it was the best so far.  Here are some pictures showing the process, fun and end product.  Enjoy!!

Cook 3 bananas in melted mixture of 1/3 cup each of butter and brown sugar.

Cooking bananas while readying 1/4 cup rum.

Add 2 tablespoons of creme de cacao and sprinkle cinnamon to cooked bananas.

After simmering, ignite the rum.

Pour blazing rum into banana mixture.

Pour bananas on top of vanilla ice cream.

Enjoy dessert!

Project Revealed

Well we are finally done with our little project. The wait is finally over and you can now see what we have been up to the past couple of days.

Here are a couple of photos of the finished product. We plan to hang it in our office when we move at the end of May.

The how to:
First we painted our wood with a gel medium

Next we put the images we wanted face down on the wood. We choose a black and white picture of an old airplane, a spitfire, Alex's favorite airplane.

After the gel medium had dried we wet the paper and rubbed it off (this took a long time)

One panel after we had rubbed off the paper

painting on the mod podge to seal the picture to the wood. 

Our inspiration came from this piece from Pottery Barn. It cost $299, the total cost for making our project was $45.23!

Here is another picture we made with the leftover wood:

Inspired Crafting

This afternoon I (Elise) was flipping through one of my favorite home furnishing store's magazine and saw something I really liked, then I looked at the price. Needless to say Alex and I decided we could not/would not spend that much money on it. Then Alex says, "we could make that." My initial reaction was "yeah right." But then I started thinking about different blog posts I'd seen of people being creative, which gave me some ideas. That's when I started to figure out how we could make it happen.

Now, I'm being pretty vague about all of this so far. That is because we are going to do two blog posts. This first one we are not going to tell you what this thing is we are creating. See if you can figure it out. Once we are finished we will post the second part of this blog and then we can get more detailed.
So without further ado here is our inspired crafting thus far:

Here are some of the supplies:

After the wood pieces were cut into various sizes:

Laying out the pieces into a pattern we like:

Clamping the wood together to keep it in place:

Alex hard at work screwing in the supports:

Supports to hold the pieces all together:

All the pieces connected at last:

Where are we going with this piece next? Any guesses? We would love to hear what you think! Excited to continue creating this and excited to show you the finished product!