Friday, January 10, 2014

New Year's Eve

We began 2014 with friends. Just eight of us gathered at Carrie and Abe's house on New Year's Eve, and it was a delightfully small party. We played Apples to Apples and then Settlers of Catan as we welcomed 2014. We munched on appetizery foods and I made a little makeshift photo booth for the occasion. It was fun to spend the time with people we loved meeting in 2013! 












Ah yes, and Brooke and I took our annual year picture.

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Burlap Pillow Cover

Something I'd like to do, particularly in these miserable colder months, is to keep myself busy with projects. I decided to do a project every week this year and post about it. I might have some lame little projects, and might have some a little better, some that work and some that fail, but I thought it would be a fun thing to do to keep my mind off of how gray it is outside. 

--

In Spokane, we owned the ugliest chair in the universe. And for some reason, we  moved without the chair but took the pillows. They're scratchy polyester and nothing we'll use. 
That's basically an invitation to make pillow covers. 

I gathered:
burlap
other fabric to put under the burlap that you'll never see
patterned fabric for the back of the pillow
scissors
old pillow to cover
pins


First I measured my pillow and cut my backing fabric accordingly, with a 1/2 inch of leeway all the way around.

I cut the burlap into strips about 2.5 inches wide. I didn't hem the edges but I did stitch along the sides to hopefully limit fraying.

Then I lined 'em up like this and pinned them in place. NOTE: What I would do if I were doing this again would be to sew them to the pillow one by one. But I didn't so I did it by hand later. Lesson learned.

Once pinned, I grabbed my backing fabric, cut it in half and hemmed each side to make an envelope pillow. Then I put both right sides together and sewed all the way around.

I flipped it right side out (thanks to the envelope, I didn't have to leave room)

And stuffed my pillow inside.

And there she is. I don't know why I don't try to make them look pretty before I take the pictures.

I took my pictures before sewing my strips totally in place. Looks better after that.

Wednesday, January 1, 2014

Here's to 2014!

Welcome, January!

2013 was a year of getting settled, with the strange knowledge that being settled probably wouldn't last long. It was by far a far more relaxing year than 2012 was, with all the moving and life changes that happened. It was nice to have a year like 2013, with fun adventures exploring Cleveland, getting to see family more times in one year than we have since we got married and definitely the comfort of having people we actually KNOW in the city.

I'm not sure that 2014 is going to be exactly like 2012 but there will likely be a little more crazy added to the mix. In the next couple of months, we should know where we'll be going next; in May Carson will graduate with a Masters in Theology and Religious Studies; we will likely move to an as-yet-unknown city in the summer... and that's all we really know. We'll be working on a few last things on our Cleveland bucket list over the next few months and saying farewell to the city we still barely know!

The second half of 2014 will involve finding a place to live, searching for a church home, getting to know people in our new area, creating a new bucket list of places to see and things to do in that place, and settling into the place where we plan to live for four or five years.

A lot is up in the air this year, which is actually becoming normal. In 2012 we had this exact same feeling of unknown, and currently I'm feeling very at peace with that, since I sort of know what to expect. A year from now, I could very well look back on this post and laugh, seeing then what I cannot see now, and in some ways I think I expect to. It's hard to have expectations about the next twelve months without any real sense of what they're going to look like.

Come what may, 2014, we raise our glasses to you!

(picture taken Jan 1, 2012)

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

2013 in Review

January 
- Lindsay spent a weekend in DC and Northern VA with Emily and Jillian
- We went to Taco Bell for our yearly trip

February
- We lived in Cleveland for six months
- We celebrated Valentine's Day

 March
- We celebrated Easter (wasn't it strange that it was in March?)

April
- Not much happened. There was a warm day and we took this picture but beyond that there was a ton of snow.

May
- We had a fun Cinco de Mayo with friends

June

- We went to Port Clinton, Ohio for our backup anniversary trip
- We went to Niagara Falls
- We attended a couple of weddings

July
- We met the cat that has since tried to adopt us 

August
- Four years since we got engaged
- Carson went to a Browns game

- We visited Amish Country
- We went to the Drive-In 

October
- We went to a corn maze with our Community Group

November
- We met up with the Bennetts in Columbus
- We hosted Friendsgiving for our Community Group

- Traveled to Pennsylvania for Christmas
- We celebrated Christmas on Christmas Eve
- We traveled to Pennsylvania 

We traveled quite a bit:
New England
Washington, DC
Port Clinton
Niagara Falls
Beaufort (three times!)
Grand Rapids
Pennsylvania (two times!)

We crossed some things off our Cleveland list, including:

Highlights for us were:
Trips we took
A great first year (and first semester of second year) for Carson's grad school
Starting a community group
Seeing family several times this year!
Getting more involved in our church community 

Monday, December 30, 2013

Pennsylvania Christmas

We headed over to Pennsylvania after I worked on Christmas Day. It was a six hour drive (it's shorter if you take the toll roads but we are not about that) to the Lancaster area where Carson's brother lives. 

We spent Wednesday-Sunday there, spending lots of time with our five beautiful and hilarious and incredibly energetic nieces. Carson and Trent did some brother bonding over manly movies, Checkers and shooting little girls with Nerf guns. Erin and I did some sister bonding over shopping, which included great deals and a lot of walking. We worked in a trip to the park, a first birthday party, a ceremonial taking-down-of-the-Christmas-tree and several cases of flu-like sickness (now a Bay Family tradition - we all got a 24-hour bug when we visited for Christmas 2 years ago, but that bug was way worse). It was a fun little trip, crazy to see how much the girls have grown since our last visit (too long ago - March), and to think about how nice it will be to get together again once we're all warm and well. 

Now, pictures.











Sunday, December 29, 2013

Chagrin Falls Christmas


The Sunday after Carson's birthday, we got the chance to hang out with some great friends. After church, we met the Storey family for lunch at Melt. After a couple hours of conversation there, we divided and then headed into Chagrin Falls. For Carson's birthday last year, we went to see the Hobbit with John and Rachel, so to keep tradition going, I invited John and Rachel, and Heather and Evan to join us, plus Evan and Rachel's brother Elliot. We ladies ditched the guys (I didn't like the books and really didn't like the last movie) and saw Saving Mr. Banks instead, the movie about the making of Mary Poppins. I'd say we made the best choice. It was a GREAT movie.

 The Hobbit was 45 minutes longer than ours so we took this excellent picture in the movie theater lobby and then went into Chagrin Falls.


It's lovely this time of year.


The guys met up with us after getting drinks at Starbucks. I took this picture of them through the window.






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