Today I’m excited to share with y’all a fun tutorial for a fabric project I created with HGTV’s new fabric line. You can find out more about the fabric (and get a coupon for it!) right here.



Boom. A fakesies roman shade.

As you guys saw in the tour of my kitchen at our rental house, we’re working with a bright, neutral box. David and I decided not to paint the room, so I had to use my noggin when it came to figuring out a way to inject color into the space. One of my ideas was to add curtains to the window over the sink, the window over the stove and the door that leads outside. Lots of spaces that are the perfect candidates for… (drumroll please)… roman shades! Duh. You can read the title of this post.

Because I’m not a normal human, I decided to make my own curtains instead of buying some. I loosely followed Sherry’s tutorial on creating a faux roman shade.

Here are my quick four steps on how to create a fakesies roman shade curtain.

First step. Measure the fabric. Oy. If you remember my DIY black-out nursery curtain escapades, you’ll know that measuring fabric is literally my worst nightmare. Me and a tape measure and exact measurements don’t get along. I’m more of an approximate kind of girl, which doesn’t always work when it comes to sewing! Luckily, David’s grandfather passed on to me his grandmother’s sewing measuring board, so this thing makes my life a whoooole lot easier!

Measure your window and then add two inches to the width (for hemming) and about twelve inches to the length (two inches for hemming and ten inches for adding two five inch loops).

Step two. Hem them suckers. If you’re fancy, use your sewing machine. If you’re me, use hem tape. Hem all four sides of your fabric panel with a one inch hem.

Step three. Cut a 1x2 piece of wood to match the width of your hemmed panel. I picked up some wood at Home Depot and had it cut there. Easy peasy. Then I used heavy-duty double stick tape to attach the wood to the fabric. Hopefully that will hold… only time will tell. It’s still hanging now, so far, so good!

Step four. Pin your fabric back in five inch loops. I was pretty happy I was working with a geometric fabric because that made this step so much easier for me. But even with the ability to line up the patterned fabric to ensure it was matching as I pinned the fold, it was tough. So don’t get discouraged if this step takes you awhile. Them loops gotta be looking right? Right?!

And that’s it, friends. Pretty simple, right? Like Sherry, I didn’t see any need to sew the loops up. In fact, it kind of scared me that thread might pucker the fabric and mess up the whole look. You really can’t see the pins from the front of the curtain, so it works for me.

I attached the wooden piece to the wall with the same double-sided tape that I used to attach the wood to the fabric. Again, hopefully that holds. And hopefully it doesn’t peel the paint off the wall…! Let’s cross that bridge when we get to it, shall we? : )

Before the roman shade…

…and after the roman shade.

As you can see, these pictures are a little wonky. It poured rain all day Sunday, so I never had a good opportunity to snap some daylight pictures of the new shade. And I need to show you the other roman shades that I created for the kitchen, as well as a few other tweaks I’ve made to the room. I'’ll get on that as soon as the weather clears up. Geez, doesn’t Mother Nature know she needs to cooperate when it comes time to get some blogging done?!

Have you ever made fakesies roman shades before? Any additional tips?!

Hi friends! Happy Friday! 

What do you have on the agenda for this weekend? It's supposed to be a beautiful one here in the A. I've got fun plans for a dinner date with one of my bestest girls, my favorite local festival with my boys and a brunch date with my girlfriends. Should be a fun weekend! I'm also excited to be finishing up a fun project this weekend with this adorbs fabric from HGTV's new fabric line.

I'll be sure to share more about the project on Monday. Have a great weekend.

When I shared my chevron painted bookshelf DIY last week, the piece wasn't quite ready to style and prep for it's blog-worthy Glamor Shot photos. It actually wasn't allowed inside yet since I let the spray paint cure for almost a week. Guess what? Now it's inside and set up in HDawg's nursery!

The shelf sits along a blank wall in between his nightstand/dresser and crib.

I am still so in love with the rocking chair my grandmother passed down to him and I painted navy and white!

It's kind of funny because once I added his favorite books, puzzle, wooden blocks, wooden trucks and elephant ball popper toy (totally the formal name for that thing), you can't even really see the chevron stripe anymore! Ah, well. We all know it's there, right? ; ) 

[if not, the original post with naked bookshelf photos is here!]

Now that little man is crawling, I plan to anchor the shelf to the wall. In fact, David and I have a wholllle lot of baby proofing to do around our house. I promise to share our tips as we go!

I also realized, after looking at these pictures, that the books looked a little top-heavy on the top shelf. Rest assure, I already switched up the books and they're on the bottom shelf. You can see the new configuration in the background of this baby H action shot. 

Nom, nom, wooden blocks.

So HDawg loves his new shelf! Do you?!

Y'all. I might have found the world's easiest, best-est recipe.

If you follow my recipe board on Pinterest, you saw that I pinned this recipe a few days ago. And I haven't been able to stop thinking about it! Even though it's probably best suited as a breakfast recipe, I decided to whip it up for supper last night. I mean, who doesn't love breakfast for supper?

I'm not sure why I'm surprised... combining three of my favorite food elements into one dish is clearly going to be a winner... but this dish is ah-maz-ing. And did I mention easy? Here's how easy it is!

INGREDIENTS

(for one serving)

-whole avocado

-two eggs

-two strips of bacon

DIRECTIONS

1. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

2. Slice the avocado in half  and remove the seed. Scoop out some of the avocado meat to create a "nest" on each half. Eat all of the yummy avocado you scooped out while you're standing there. Wait, that might just be me and my utter lack of self-control when it comes to food! : )

3. Crack an egg into each avocado nest. Some of the egg whites may overflow out of the avocado nest, so make sure you take this step after the avocados are already resting in a baking dish.

4. Chop up the bacon strips and sprinkle on top of the egg and avocado. I use regular, pre-cooked bacon instead of turkey bacon for a host of reasons (even though it's lower in fat, I'm not a big fan of how processed the turkey bacon meat is, even though it's clear regular bacon is horrible for you too!).

5. Bake the entire dish for about 20-25 minutes, depending on the consistency you'd like your egg cooked.

I served the dish up with some whole wheat toast and a dash or two of Tabasco sauce. Scrumptious! I love that this recipe uses fresh (minus the bacon!), whole food ingredients. No processed crap here!

Bon appetite!

There's a new sheriff in town in my master bedroom.

Wait... that sounds all kinds of wrong. Get your minds out of the gutter!

There's a new decor-related sheriff in town in my master bedroom. Better?

Ta-da! A new full-length mirror. Shazam. Since we moved into our rental house, David and I haven't had a full-length mirror to use. The one we had in our old house's master bathroom was screwed into the wall, so we decided to leave it. Living without a full-length mirror basically meant that I had no clue if my shoes matched my outfit for the last two or so months. And it meant that I had nowhere to take selfie shots of my #ootd for Instagram. Totally kidding... kind of.

The mirror, which is from Kirkland's (you can find it here!), is black with a slightly rustic/worn sanded finish. We have so many light white pieces in our bedroom, I thought it was high time we brought in some black for some extra drama.

But, wait. There's more.

Oh yeah, this bad boy opens up to a jewelry armoire! This is kind of like ever renter/small-space-liver's dream, right?! When you live in a small space, combining function and decor is key. Especially with larger pieces like this, which take up a whole corner of a room. The key is to find furniture that meets more than one need in your life, like a side table with drawers or shelves for ample storage, a wall shelf that you can set items on top of and hang items below, a desk you can store items underneath. Decor pieces that can serve double-duty are almost necessary if you're a small-space dweller like me!

Clearly I don't have the world's most baller jewelry collection, but it's sooo nice to be able to see what accessories I'm working with. My jewelry organization approach before was to dump all of it in a basket and pick through it each morning. No bueno. I've found that I'm actually wearing more jewelry now that I can see all of my options!

And my previous jewelry dump-station basket is now the perfect resting spot for only the jewelry that I wear every day.

Whoever thought up this mirror + jewelry storage combo is the bomb.com. I love it!

And now for the obligatory "I'm-taking-pictures-of-a-mirror-so-here-I-am" shot.

And I literally have no clue why my husband's golf clubs are in my bedroom. No clue. Choose your battles.

Have you found any amazing double-duty functioning decor pieces lately?!

Psst! Thanks to all of you who have weighed in on my skin care/makeup questions. I am literally taking notes and hope to report back to y'all on my findings soon. If you haven't shared your two cents, please head over to the post and let me know what you think!

Hi friends! Happy Friday. As you know from my proclamation here, I've made it my personal quest in 2013 to better my personal appearance. That sounds totally superficial, but after spending 2012 growing and delivering a baby, I thought I'd treat my body to looking fab in 2013.

Yeah, that's just me being SUPER pregnant last August.

Sometimes it's not that easy to stick with this resolution. After all, HDawg prefers spit up on all of my clothes, isn't a big fan of waiting for me to get ready and generally prefers my hair like this.

But, when I can, I try to make an effort. So far, I've worked on sprucing up my hot momma fashion and I got a new hair style. Now I'm ready to up my game when it comes to makeup and skin care. There's just one problem. I totally suck at makeup and skin care. Like, I'm clueless. I realized the other day that I've been using the same Clinique foundation product that I started using when I was 15. Um, yeah. Time to update my makeup routine for this almost thirty year old!

Speaking of being almost thirty, I also need to work on my skincare routine. I have zero clue where to even begin at my age to treat and prevent aging on my skin. 

Here is where you guys come in. I would love to do some research, test some products and come back to all of you with the results. And the inner hippie in me would really like to try and stay away from chemical-ridden products and stick with the more natural stuff that is out there. But where do I start? Do you have any ideas about products you've seen out there that you've been wanting to try? Any tips or suggestions about products you use religiously? Have you seen any blog posts or magazine articles lately that have inspired you or been informative about makeup or skin care? Please feel free to email me or leave some ideas or links in the comments if you've got any insight. I'd really appreciate if you could help me get started on this makeup and skin care journey!

Last week, I ran across this beautiful hand towel at Target. Of course, I snatched it up and threw it in my cart quicker than you can say boom-shacka-lacka. Yeah, I just said boom-shacka-lacka. So, I'd kind of forgotten about the hand towel since we were out of town in Hilton Head last weekend, but I found it yesterday and hung it up in our master bathroom. I totally dig the way it works with our new bath mat and shower curtain and the other master bathroom updates I shared here.

 

In the midst of another crazy busy week, it's the little things like this fabulous hand towel that make me smile.

 

What little things are inspiring you this week?

What the whaaaat? Michelle actually did a home project? Yay-uh, you can virtually raise the roof with me, folks. I told you last week that I was feeling inspired to get creative. This girl don't play around- I've got a few fun projects up my sleeve! Including this chevron painted bookshelf that I just finished.

 I can thank my friends over at Wayfair for lighting the fire under me for this project. They (along with the contest's sponsor, Hometalk) invited me to participate in a blogger DIY challenge. So fun, right? All I had to do was pick an item from Wayfair and then make it over according to one of the following themes: black and white, geometric pattern or rope. Even though the rest of the design world is kind of over it, I'm still totally in love with chevron and decided to use it as my geometric pattern.

Here's the basic wooden bookshelf before I got started.

I spray painted the shelf with a coat of glossy white and then used Frog Tape to tape chevron stripes along each shelf. At first, I tried to measure out the zig zags so that they were even, but I can't do math it never looked right. I didn't want the stripes to be too narrow. So I sort of winged it and ended up with some of the chevron stripes ending in the middle of the shelf instead of the top, if that makes sense. Works for me! I just cut the excess tape off with an Exacto knife.

Next up, I spray painted the entire shelf a fun spring green. I typically don't spray paint furniture, but it really is the easiest way to avoid major brush strokes. You just have to be sure to do maaaany (in my case, like 12) light coats of paint to avoid drips. And don't forget to spray in the cracks and crannies of whatever piece you're painting. Ha, I said cracks and crannies.

I chose the spring green because I want to use this shelf in HDawg's nursery. Annnd I just realized I haven't shown you guys pictures of that room in our new rental house yet! It looks substantially like his nursery at the old house, but with khaki colored walls instead of blue walls. I thought about painting the piece a firey orange-red like this, but the room really needs some cool tones since the khaki walls and yellow rug make things very warm-colored up in there. He's already got a ton of blue in the space, so green it was.

I expected the green spray paint to bleed under the tape a lot worse than it actually did. I even bought white paint to touch up the white chevron stripes just in case the bleed-through was bad. Luckily, I didn't have to worry about that! Way to be, Frog Tape.

I'm going to let the bookshelf and it's snazzy new paint cure for awhile (5-7 days?) before I put it in baby H's nursery. I can't wait to see it loaded up with his books and toys!

Thanks again to Wayfair for asking me to participate in this challenge. It's been fun! If you want to check out more of the other blogger's projects, you can find them on this Pinterest board.

Whatcha think about my chevron bookshelf?! Have you made over any furniture lately?

If you follow me on Instagram (@tenjuneblog), you'll know that David, HDawg and I snuck away on Thursday night to enjoy some R&R over the weekend in Hilton Head, South Carolina. As a College of Charleston grad and a previous Charleston resident, my heart belongs in the South Carolina Lowcountry. Combine my love of the beach with a desperate need for a vacation plus an adorable baby who was enamoured by the ocean and sand along with my hottie husband and I'd say I had a good time! To tell you the truth, I was in heaven!

 



The weather was slightly overcast on Friday morning, but we still enjoyed the beach anyways. HDawg loved crunching the sand between his toes.

 

 

Thank goodness, it quickly warmed up in just enough time for us to enjoy some sun and lunch by the pool. Fish tacos... get in mah belly.

 

 

Friday night we ate at an adorable restaurant fronting the marsh along the north side of the island. Did I mention how much I adore the Lowcountry? Beautiful.

 

 

HDawg was pretty thrilled for some summer-like weather so he could finally sport his mustache-print baby boat shoes. So fly.

 

 

The sun came out in full force on Saturday and we enjoyed every minute of it. H absolutely loved rolling around in his new beach tent and playing with his beach toys.

 

 

I know, he's beyond adorbs, right? He was the hit of Hilton Head beach, that's for sure : )

 

I had such an amazing weekend with my boys, it's hard to get back into the swing of things on this Monday morning. But if I close my eyes I can almost smell the sunscreen and picture fat baby feet kicking around in the sand...! So tell me, friends, what'd you do this weekend?!

Last weekend was one of those bigger than life moments for my family. My little sister, Tori, got engaged to her boyfriend, Jason! Jason just so happens to be one of David's closest friends... he grew up with David and I and we've known him forever. Even though Tori and Jason had met through us a few times (they were both in our wedding!), things didn't get romantic until a mutual friend suggested they date. And the rest is history. These two goofy souls were made for each other!

And I'm really excited because Tori and Jason said I could share their engagement story with all of you! It's such a sweet story, so put your romantic game face on : )

A long time ago, Tori had a dream that she went to the Braves baseball game. Typically, Turner Field will pass out a bobble head, foam tomahawk or something fun like that to all of the patrons as a game souvenir. In Tori's dream, the stadium was passing out yellow roses (her favorite flower) as the game souvenir. As she walked through the stadium and everyone in the crowd held yellow roses, she was proposed to. Great dream, right?

Guess what? Jason made her dream come true. For realz.

When they walked in the stadium together, the usher handed Tori a bouquet of yellow roses with a note tied around it that said "dreams do come true!" My other sister, Callie, and I were secretly hiding and capturing every moment on video and film.

As Tori and Jason walked into the stadium, strangers held yellow roses. We had passed out about six dozen roses to strangers and asked that they just hold the roses as she walked by, but as soon as Tori walked in and they saw her with her bouquet of roses, the crowd each held up their yellow rose for her to see. I got chill bumps, y'all. It was amazing!

They also decided to pass her the roses as she walked by, which was so sweet. Then Tori (who still had no clue what was going on!) and Jason walked to a special room that he had reserved. My parents were standing in front of the room, waiting to give her a rose and a hug.

Tori and Jason then went into the room, where he proposed to her. We had it all decorated with more yellow roses and pictures of them. It was beautiful!

Both our family and Jason's family were all secretly at the game. As he proposed, we all sat outside the room and waited for her to come out. And prayed she said yes! Ha, only kidding. HDawg was so excited for his aunt Towwie, he fell asleep.

Don't worry... she said yes!

She was shocked, needless to say!

Look at this happy couple! :)

It was so fun to celebrate with all of our family. Here I am with my parents and sisters.

And here is the rest of the crew. I'm so excited these families are coming together! 

You know how they say "you can choose your friends but you can't choose your family?" Well, we kind of did get to choose Jason! He's such a sweet, humble, God-loving, friendly guy. And he'll make a great husband for Tori! They are lucky to have each other. I am so excited for my little sister : )

You can expect to hear more about this wedding as we get to planning it. My sister has always wanted a fall wedding, so this shindig may be just around the corner!

Congratulations, Tori and Jason! We love y'all!