Autumn Craft Day 2012

This past September 29 I hosted my third annual Autumn Craft Day. The first one was in September 2010 and it was sort of impromptu with Blair and Stacey. I asked them to come over and help me get into the fall mood and brainstorm creative fall decor ideas to incorporate into my wedding. We had a lot of fun! I didn’t quite have an organized craft day in 2011, but I had friends, especially Blair and Stacey and my mom, at my house plenty of times to help me with all of the decorations and favors that I ended up crafting for my wedding. I suppose my wedding day was the ultimate celebration of autumn crafts! Since I love fall and crafts, I decided to continue the tradition of autumn craft day again this year with some of my crafty gal pals.

I made my trusty butternut squash soup recipe to accompany a make-you-own panini station for lunch. I also mulled some wine and cider. Stacey brought a crazy delicious pumpkin fluff mousse type dip that we all eventually just decided to eat with a spoon. Devon brought a yummy autumn inspired cake. Here are some sugar cookies I made to show off my autumn leaf sprinkles!

After eating lunch we dove right into craft time.

Here Devon proudly shows off her newly decorated cinnamon broom.

Devon also made this candle holder, pin, and hair clips. All of the rosettes were made by twisting strips of fabric that were left over from decorating my wedding favors last year. Devon received some hot glue blisters of honor during this process!

Tiffany and Stacey each made one of these block calendars for the autumn months, which Stacey brought the supplies for. This one pictured was Tiffany’s, and I heard the hair clips were a hit with her daughter and niece! Tiff also made some fun little trees out of cinnamon sticks and fake flowers for her two year old daughter to play with.

Here Tiff poses with her other most recent craft, her second novel! She was nice enough to give me a signed copy.

Aside from her block calendar, Stacey also made a wreath, a rosette pin, a t-shirt necklace, and the hair clip that she models below.

Here Nichole shows off her t-shirt necklace and rosette pin.

Blair was able to make an entire quilt square at Autumn Craft Day!

Ilya took this shot of the whole group together, showing off my latest in-progress craft, a bun in the oven! On this day I was 18 weeks pregnant.

It was also around the time of this party that I started thinking that I wanted to try to take crafting more seriously and try to sell my items in an online shop as a hobby after the baby comes. I still love baking and would love to sell baked goods, but I thought non-food items would be a lot easier since I could work on them whenever I had time, and sell them without any time constraints. I asked the girls to help me think of a name for my online shop, since Angie’s Oven wouldn’t really make sense as a name for a company selling non-food items. And thus, Angie’s Fancies was born. I have a facebook page and an etsy shop for my business. So far my etsy shop has sold one item, and I also have sold a few items to supportive friends and at a craft show which I did about 3 weeks after this party. I will post some pictures of that event. After the craft show, I cleaned up my supplies to get ready for Thanksgiving, and I haven’t done much since. Things have been busy around here with the holidays and baby preparations, but I definitely plan to continue to try to expand my “business” and create more items in the next year!

June 2012 Birthdays

Both of Ilya’s parents along with my mom were all born in June of 1952. Which means that all 3 of them turned 60 that month! Ilya’s parents had a big bash in a restaurant for family and friends. Here is a pic of Ilya’s parents on the dance floor:



And Ilya and his cousin Boris with their grandparents:



The next day, for my mom’s birthday, we had my Aunt Nancy and Cousin Michelle, and my cousin’s two kids Gavin and Ava to our house for dinner to celebrate.



We did a lot of running around with the kids and had a dance party, complete with fist pumping.






Ava, after an outfit change, couldn’t get enough of walking around in Aunt Nancy’s shoes.







I love her pink toenails!

We had a lot of fun seeing everyone to celebrate our parents’ birthdays that weekend.

2012 Garden Follow-up

Since I posted such an enthusiastic prequel post to my garden this year, I feel like I must post an update for completion. Well, my roses and clematis were featured in the Mother’s Day post. They were beautiful. I don’t quite know how or why, but the roses are still continuing to bloom. I have pretty roses on my bush right now, on October 6!

All of my herbs did well as they usually do, but sadly the vegetables that I planted did not live up to my bountiful hopes. I think part of the problem was that the tomatoes that I gave up on last year, and allowed to rot and die at the end of the season, were now enthusiastically volunteering to come up in all the pots where a seed had fallen, which included where I planted the green beans and snap peas. I think the tomatoes outcompeted them. I didn’t mind much, because all the flowers stole the show this year. For the first time in 3 summers I thought to put some flowers out front instead of just on the deck. Petunias love my front yard. They did really well. It was so nice to come home to a nice splash of color every evening. Here are a few pictures I took of the front of our house in late June:



We mulched! That was also a first in our 3 summers at this house. I can’t believe it took this long for me to think to make the front yard pretty, but I love it. The two little plants in front of the big window on the right are hydrangeas! I am so excited about those. I’ve always wanted hydrangeas to call my own. My mom helped me rip out the bushes that were previously in that spot. They were big and ugly and partially dead because there used to be a big tree blocking them for many years (the tree was cut down due to storm damage shortly before we moved in). Not only do I love that I am now the proud owner of hydrangeas, Jackie-cat loves her newly enhanced, shrub-free view of the great outdoors. I can’t wait to document how much bigger the hydrangeas get year after year. In front of them, to the right, is a perennial that my mom gave us this year. It was past its prime by the time I took this picture, but it’s really pretty with purple and yellow flowers. Here is a closer shot of my happy petunias, with a few marigolds too:



Here is a close-up shot of a tiny sunflower bloom. I planted 9 sunflowers out front. Only 3 made it to be super tall. The rest either got eaten by creatures or broken by the wind or just from getting too heavy for their own good and falling over and snapping. You can also see the “Dusty Miller” plant in the background. It was there when we moved in, and it’s not my favorite type of plant, and I almost ripped it out. But, I’m glad I didn’t because it started really thriving this year and gave me lots of happy little yellow flowers. 



Overall I think it was a pretty successful year in gardening!

June 2012 Whirlwind Weekend

June 2012 was a pretty packed month for us. We had Nick and Steph’s wedding in North Carolina, and Blair’s baby shower the very next day in NJ. I planned to take the 1 hour flight from NC to Philadelphia the morning after the wedding in order to make it to the shower on time. If that wasn’t hectic enough, we found out the night before the wedding, in our hotel room in Greensboro, that we were expecting our first baby!!! Probably the most eventful 3 day period thus far in my life. And what happy events they all were.

Here is a nice picture that Kyle instagrammed of us at the rehearsal dinner. This was about two hours after we got the news (it was still a secret, of course).

Here is a great shot of “the guys” at the rehearsal dinner:

and a nice shot from the wedding:

The wedding was beautiful and a lot of fun. Congrats to Nick and Steph!

After about 4 or 5 hours of sleep it was time for Ilya to drop me off at the airport, as the rest of our group would be doing the 9 hour drive home. The one hour flight was incredible when compared to that drive on the way down. Oh the luxuries of modern life! My mom picked me up at the airport and we were on our way to the baby shower. I am excited to share some pictures of the decor that I made for the shower. The theme of the shower was the children’s book The Little Prince. I made the favors out of heart shaped lollipops with a quote about the heart from the book attached:


I also made this banner to go along with the theme. This was my first ever attempt at making a banner, and I was pretty excited with how it turned out!


and  I also made this banner with elephants to match the baby’s nursery theme:


Finally, I put together this little wishing tree for the baby. The one pictured here was just an example of the final product. I also brought a bunch of blank leaves, on which people wrote their wishes for the baby. Later on, I crafted those wishes into another similar tree full of everyone’s sentiments.


I know these aren’t the greatest quality pictures. By the time I arrived at the shower, my head was spinning so fast from the whirlwind of a weekend, and I was so antsy about seeing Blair arrive surprised, that I just did the best I could with capturing my crafty efforts. The shower was wonderful, and Blair was certainly surprised. Baby Abram was born just over a month later, right on time and perfectly healthy. He’s super precious and squishy. Congrats Blair and Brady!

Mother's Day 2012

This year we had Dom and Kelly visiting over Mother’s Day weekend. We had a really nice time! Together with Dom and Kelly, we made Lavender Lemon Bars from Joy the Baker, using culinary lavender that my mom bought for me. 



We also had a lot of fun decorating the house before my mom’s arrival for brunch with flowers from my front and back yards. I had 3 big beautiful rose blooms that I brought in, and my clematis was also in peak bloom and I brought a few flowers inside as a little centerpiece.







After a nice brunch, we headed out on my back deck for some official Mother’s Day portraits with my mom and her progeny, which Kelly did a great job taking for us. 



I am going to include the other two solo shots because they showcase my 2012 clematis, and also because everyone looks great and I love all the spring colors.







We had a very nice Mother’s Day brunch with my mom, Dom, and Kelly. Later in the day, Ilya and I had dinner with Ilya’s family and welcomed home our nephew, as pictured in the previous post.

Welcome Baby Nathan!

As I mentioned in my last post, our nephew Nathan was born on May 9 while we were on our trip. We got to meet him the next day, and he was a super precious little perfect and squirmy baby. Here are a few pictures of him on Mother’s Day, the day he came home from the hospital.

Here’s one of us that really shows how tiny he was by comparison.

He has already grown and changed so much. Pretty soon he will be doubled in size! We can’t wait to see him keep growing, learning, and changing into his own little person.

Trip to Florida

This May we took a short, two-part vacation to Florida. The first part was a 3 night cruise to the Bahamas leaving from Port Canaveral, Florida. It was a Royal Caribbean cruise on their “Monarch of the Seas” ship. We flew to Orlando early on a Friday morning and boarded the ship in the afternoon. It took a little bit of convincing for Ilya to get me to agree to go on a cruise. Our first cruise together was my first cruise ever. It was in 2009 and was from NJ to Canada in late August. We were relatively close to a hurricane, which made the ship really rocky, and I got pretty sick. It was also 5 nights, and I got pretty bored, especially since it was too chilly to swim or do any typical cruisey outdoor activities. We decided that a shorter, fun and sun oriented cruise would probably suit us better. So that’s what we did! It was definitely a much better experience, with no sea sickness or boredom. We took almost no pictures on this vacation. It was a little freeing after our trip to Italy, where we felt the need to document a lot of stuff, to just have fun and not worry about that aspect of it. Here is one shot of us waiting for the “Meet the Captain” reception to start on the fancy night.


We had lots of fun relaxing, people-watching, eating, drinking, and swimming on the cruise. The food was pretty good, and the entertainment was OK. We saw some kooky juggler/comedians one night and a kinda funny stand-up comic. Ilya won a decent amount of money on the ship’s casino, which helped us not feel guilty buying a few non-included beverages here and there. My least favorite part of any vacation is...sunscreen. I really, really hate sunscreen. The way it smells and feels are both incredibly unpleasant for me. Also the fact that it makes sand stick everywhere is another downside. Each morning I stomped and threw a little hissyfit when it was time to apply. But we never skipped it, and neither of us got burned, and I know a burn is much worse than feeling goopy. 

As we exited the port to make way to our next stop, we noticed a sign that said that persons wearing Crocs style shoes were not permitted to ride the escalator. This was complete with a guard watching everyone board the escalator, who we presumed was the Crocs Police. We had a giggle about this and wondered what possible repeated incident was happening with Crocs on escalators. We soon got in our rental car and drove to Orlando for part two of our trip: the excitement excursion! We were pretty non-stop doing stuff and going on all sorts of rides and seeing lots of shows on this part of the trip. This post is going to be a general overview, but I think Ilya may write a post documenting all the attractions we did, with some comments, just for historical accuracy.

On the first day in Orlando, we visited Universal Studios and Islands of Adventure. We had lunch on Harry Potter Island and drank butterbeer. As two people who have never read a Harry Potter book or seen a single movie, we knew enough about the story to get a kick out of that “Island” in particular. It looks very much like a very old, enchanted magical village. We got dinner at Margaritaville in Universal City Walk. As we were leaving Universal studios and entering the parking garage, the escalator up to our level of the garage was at a standstill, and we had to take the stairs. We had a very “full-circle moment” at the top when we saw what had caused the escalator to stop: an abandoned pair of Crocs stuck between the top step and the ground! Now it all made sense!

From here we checked into our hotel at almost 10PM and pretty much went straight to bed to rest up for another full day. On our second day in Orlando we visited Animal Kingdom and Epcot. We made a reservation days in advance to eat at a nice restaurant in “France” to make up for my high school senior trip when my friends and I did not make a reservation and had to eat in Norway, which was not the most appetizing option. We saw some goofy improv ladies and yet another juggler perform in “Italy”. We made sure to stick around for the Epcot fireworks show, which was great. Once again we didn’t get back to our hotel until around 10PM.

On our last day in Orlando, we got up early and as I was begrudgingly applying sunscreen to my face, Ilya checked his email on his Blackberry. That’s when we got the news that his sister had her baby, Nathan, early that same morning! We were now first-time aunt and uncle and couldn’t be happier for the whole family. And we were excited that our trip was ending that night, just in time to meet Nathan the next day. More on that little cutesie later! We checked out of the hotel and went straight to Magic Kingdom and then Hollywood Studios. Around 4PM, we left to head to the airport for our 7PM flight back home. Jackie-kitty was happy to have us back home, and we were glad to be back, too. All in all, we had a really fun trip!