Pin of the Week

Hi everyone, I hope your all excited its the Friday! I know I am. My Pin of the Week is about cupcakes! Seems fitting right, since Avery's first birthday party is Saturday afternoon and I'm baking over 48 cupcakes! We are praying for mild weather in the high 70's very low 80's that would be nice right, since its 95 degrees today, a girl can dream right :) It's supposed to be 89 and we'll take that of 95 any day :) 


Just a quick reminder, I'm officially back posting two times on Fridays. My first post of the day is all about what's been going on around our house that way, I don't forget all the little details that happened.  If you missed this mornings post, you can check it out here, chalked full of two weeks of what's be going on around our house + sneak peaks on projects that haven't been blogged about (yet)

Pin of the Week: Cupcakes! 

{via Pinterest}

Happy Pinning and see you next week! If your on Pinterest follow me here

This Week & Last

Whew! it's been a busy two weeks around our casa, and I have so much to share! After I'm write this post up, I'll be working on several posts for next week and beyond, ya know things that are currently happening around here and I didn't have time to blog about. Back in April I decided I wanted to start sharing a quick week recap of the weeks events, so I don't forget the small special (and not so special) moments that happened during our week. Well this week I'm sharing two weeks full of what's been going on around our Casa including sneak peeks at projects that we are working on and life. 

The whole family pitched in doing yard work, Avery supervised. I love putting this small gently used travel play pen in our yard while I'm doing yard work, it makes yard work more fun and Avery loves watching. When he's two, I'll have to my buy a kiddie tool set :)

Tabari is officially a middle schooler, deep sighs and holding in my tears my munchkin is growing up into this handsome creative independent caring responsible (very) young man. He makes me so proud.

Adding string to the banners for Avery's first birthday, too many emotions for this momma so many milestones this week. His birthday party is on Saturday! I will share all the deets next week. Love that Hasani can multi-task while helping, lol

Time to say good buy to this oh-so-not-us fabric on our vintage outdoor sofa (well sofa we are transforming into an outdoor one!)

Saying good bye also happened this week. My BFF moved across the pond permanently to England to start her new married life with her husband! So lots of tears, the past few weeks { happy, sad & nostalgic }  Once she gets settled in, she promises to give is a virtually house tour of her new home, its an amazing cottage in the English countryside. I'm visiting her there next year!

I just discovered the show Felicity on Netflix Instant. Loved Season 1, I'm trying my best to get though Season 2, maybe her haircut is distracting me? lol Crazy when the show was on the air, I never watched. I love discovered new to me TV :) Thanks Netflix! And nope, I wasn't paid to say that, although if they are asking, I would so want to have that conversation with them! lol 

I've made yummy vanilla whipped cream frosting, love the pretty peaks my mixer makes.

Labels, I've made lots of pretty cute labels for Avery's birthday party. Here's how the drink labels looked. I made them using Publisher. Again, I'll share all the deets next week :) 

So that's what's been happening around our house, lots of me getting emotional because my boys are getting bigger. Lots of yard work, birthday projects, sewing and more. 

How was your week? Did you watch the show Felicity? Any old shows, I should check out?

Stack of Cushions

I'm so excited to share this update! Do you remember the vintage sofa I found at our local Salvation Army last month on my B-day no less? Do you remember I even even got in on sale, love that Thrift Stores have sales! Do you remember how ugly the fabric was? I know lots of questions, lol. If you do remember, then you know I was planning transforming the vintage sofa into outdoor sofa with the help of paint and new outdoor fabric. Of course we plan on storing the sofa in our garage during the cold / raining season, we wouldn't want to ruin all our of hard work. I'm here to share a portion of the updated vintage sofa! Right now Hasani and I are working on the re-doing the body of the sofa ( upholstering & painting ) and I wanted to share what has been completed! The cushions have been recovered & they look amazing. Here's a quick reminder of how the old cushions looked, decked out in old vintage fabric that was actually in perfect condition (just fugly) 

After looking ALL over the Internet for a good deal on indoor / outdoor fabric, I ordered two fabric samples from Warehouse Fabric both neutrals. We ended up loving the indoor outdoor fabric color Toast, its the perfect neutral backdrop for the array of colorful pillows I'm sewing for the vintage sofa and our outdoor dining furniture. I ended up buying 13 yards total of indoor fabric! Lemme tell you 13 yards is a lot of fabric!! I love when I order fabric and I receive it on a bolt, it makes cutting the fabric for sewing much easier. Anyways, I forgot to mention the insane deal I got on the fabric for, per yard I paid 6.98! That's an insane deal, because outdoor fabric is p-r-i-c-e-y. I love the texture of the fabric stiff but also soft, i prefer stiff fabric since we'll be using the sofa outdoors. The color is much light in person, the perfect soft beige, which you'll see in the pictures below. 

The vintage sofa has six cushions all together with piping and the thought of doing all that working left me feeling exhausted, I prefer sewing curtains and pillows. The last cushion I sewed for Avery's vintage ottoman was so much work and tiring, the flashbacks were stressing me out, so I decided to have a seamstress do the work for me. I'm really glad I made the choice to have that portion of the project done by someone else. These days with a little one crawling around and me just wanting to love on him, it was nice to hand-off the fabric and in return receive new cushions! In the past I've had really good luck finding vendors on Craigslist: our Wedding Photographer, Hair Stylist, Landscaper/Gardner to install our sprinklers in our front yard. So again I turned to Craigslist and found amazing seamstress, she's very talented which made me even more excited to have her sew the cushions for me. We agreed ed on a flat price for the sewing, I provided the fabrics three cushions & old covers to get the fit exact and zippers. Here are my new cushions, pretty perfect! I really like box cushions and I'm glad I decided to keep the look of the piping. For me piping adds a crisp look on cushions { my next sofa indoor one, most likely will have piping :) }

I also love how she did the zippers, they wrap nicely around the cushions making it super simple to take the cushions on and off. I bought three 30 inch zippers for the top cushions and three 36 inch zippers for the bottom. I just measured the old zippers to get the right size. 

I'll do a complete cost breakdown on re-doing the vintage sofa once its done! We plan on finishing up the sofa this week and then I'll be able to share next week? I'm hoping! :) 


What do you think so far?? Can you see my vision coming together? 

Grassy Update

Back in mid April, I shared that we over seeded our backyard in a couple of steps in hopes of having pretty green grass and less weeds for Summer. A quick reminder of the steps we took: 

1. Raked up all the thatch on our yard & pulled larger weeds
2. Hasani used a power Aerator to loosed up our soil 
3. Hasani used a large lawn spreader to apply the seed evenly to our yard
4. Next we used 1 bale of weed free to hay and spread it over our lawn to help the grass grow and keep moisture in.
5. Lastly we watered watered and watered our seeds and grass like crazy

Before I show you the current state of our backyard, here's a reminder of how it looked right after we Aerated our lawn. Yup, very dry and patchy weedy grass and lots and lots of overgrown bushes.


Mid April 

Here's the current state of our backyard. Much better! Look at all the green grass! I'm very happy, the ratio of weeds to grass is so much better. I'd say 75% grass and 25% weeds much better that our previous ratio of 90% weeds and 10% grass. Gone are all the huge weeds, were left we smaller patches of weeds and as of right now I'm OK with that. We have one area closest to our patio that's a little dry, that maybe how the sprinkler is hitting that area and its not getting enough water. Here's our grass progress, big difference over last month huh.  


Mid May Progress

We still want more green grass, to mimic our pretty sod in our front yard. I'm thinking we will mostly likely to another round of re-seeding our lawn in September just before fall. Since are Summers are so HOT in Northern California 100+ it will be best to wait. 

Mid April

Mid May Progress

In the meantime there is still more more work to be done! We will need to weed and feed our backyard if its not already to late before Summer really hits. This week and over the weekend we have a lot of bush pulling up that needs to be done. See the row of bushes forming along our fence line, yeah we have no idea where they came from they just appeared and started growing. 


Mid May Progress

After those funky bushes are pulled up we plan on laying down weed blocker and covering the area up a lot of the area underneath the trees up with mulch. We are hoping it gives a more clean semi landscaped appearance. I also want to cut done that funky dead looking pine tree 9not sure when that will happen) I seriously hate that thing, its all wrong + I hate pine needles. Oh and we need to trim back lots of the bushes and trees that are becoming overgrown and Hasani needs to edge our grass (get those tight spots the lawn mower can't reach)


I also to need to re-paint our old terra cotta pots (that have been hanging on the tree house way to long) and add some pretty flowers and move them onto our patio. Avery's first birthday party is in a few weeks, so I have just enough time to add some more pretty to our backyard. Parties = motivation to get stuff done!

What you think of our progress? Are you working on any grassy updates? Or are you prettying up your backyard too?


We welcome all lawn care tips, to keep our grass bright and green over the Summer and though the Fall/winter!! :)