12 Goals by AND in 2012

A lot of people are doing "12 before '12" which translates to...12 goals to complete before 2012 arrives.  The year 2012 is very close...about two months away.  The goals I will set to be completed by 2012's start will be small, quick, easy, and simple goals that I will very easily be able to complete by the deadline.

The second list are 12 BIG goals to complete in the year of 2012.  Got it?  Make sense?  12  goals to complete in 2 months.  AND THEN 12 more goals to complete in the year 2012.  Ok..here we go.

12 By 2012.
I will complete the following 12 goals before the year 2012.

1. Vacuum our house.  (We have been living in our house since September 18th and it has not been vacuumed since we've been there.  Gross.  Don't tell my mom.)
2. Put away all of the gifts we received as wedding presents.  
3. Have my craft room set up to be organized, functional, & adorable. <-- This is a constant task, but I've done it!  
4. Try to make homemade marshmallows! epic. fail.
5. Bring a new outfit into the bedroom ;)
6. Pull off a BLACK Christmas tree in a way that is still plenty festive!
7. Create a Christmas Journal we use every year.
8. Also...create a Birthday Journal we use every year!
9. AND I really want a cook book of the recipes I made during our first year of marriage!
10. Order out Wedding Photo Book!
11. Send out Christmas Cards with photos of us on or in them.
12. Buy or Make a really cool apron! 

12 In 2012.
I will complete the following 12 goals in the year 2012.

1. Make a quilt
2. Complete 10 things I have in my "crafts" to-do folder!
3. Post a really impressive & difficult cooking tutorial, complete with TONS of pictures!  :)
4. Make a table for the inside of our house.  Check this out... http://www.joyeverafter.com/blog/2011/7/13/outdoor-pallet-table-diy.html
5. Spruce up the Laundry Room!
6. Have at least ONE eclectic piece in EVERY room.
7. I should try a DIY Vinyl Wall Art project... http://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-Vinyl-Wall-Art/#step1
8. Go stay at the B&B we went to on our wedding night.
9. Get another tattoo.  Maybe of The Little Mermaid?! Maybe a tattoo of this scene?
10. Finish up our eclectic den!
11. Take my husband on a surprise vacation!  
12. Buy SEVERAL vintage dress forms.

And there we are!  A list of 24 different things...it took longer than I thought it would to make this list.  I could really use your encouragement in the upcoming months...and then again in the upcoming year.  :)  XO's!

"25 Ways to Wear a Scarf" Video!

I came across this You Tube video and just had to share!  This lady, "Wendy," is adorable and this a great (and quick!) tutorial!  Usually, I stick to wearing my scarves in two different ways so this gives me some great new ideas!  I hope you'll check it out!  Enjoy!  

And here is a link to it:
25 Ways to Wear a Scarf in 4.5 Minutes!

Weekend Synopsis

Happy Monday & Happy Halloween!  It's a pretty dreary day here.  The type of day that makes me want to throw this coffee mug out the window and crawl back into bed.  I pretty much have no desire to be awake.  Also, Hubs & I had a pretty eventful weekend and we were both exhausted when we woke up this morning.  I've already drank two cups of coffee in vein, so I've decided I will try to write a great blog post and hopefully that will wake me up!  :)

Like I said, we had a pretty eventful weekend & I hope all of you reading had a good weekend as well.  Friday, after work, was just a normal night in.  Pork chops for dinner, we watched Game 7, and went to bed because he had to work Saturday morning.  After he got off work Saturday afternoon we started getting ready to go up to his parents house.  They live about two hours away and threw us a party Saturday.  They wanted to have a Meet-&-Greet party so that their friends who weren't invited to our small wedding could meet me.  Before we left, we got into a little squabble that turned into something bigger.  I'd made him angry without realizing it, but he didn't want to talk about it.  He said "let's just go ahead to my parents house and get this little charade over with."

Ouch.  Charade?

We talked about that a little... he brought up how we never talked about or resolved any of our issues.  We just pretended like they didn't happen.  He told me a lot about the way I had been making him feel...and it really broke my heart.  I had no idea I made him feel so...BAD sometimes.  It really opened my eyes and I am glad he shared with me, even though it was hard to hear some of his feelings.  I do encourage you all to ask your husbands some hard questions this week...questions you don't really want to know the answers to.  I feel like it really helped our marriage for him to confess how badly I can hurt him sometimes, and for me to sincerely apologize.  I can already tell a significant difference in our relationship and it's only been two days since this talk.  I cried, I was emotional, but I had HURT my HUSBAND.  I had caused my soul mate pain...what a horrible feeling.  I had disappointed him and I resented myself.  But, without that knowledge I can't fix my actions.  We went to the party as planned, but I was really beating myself up.  I wanted our marriage to be perfect again!  What an unrealistic expectation.. But...it's still what I want.  My husband said some very true words during our talk.

The party....it was tough at first, to put on my party face and smile like everything is perfect.  Pretending to be in the honeymoon phase is pretty difficult when you are many, many miles away from the honeymoon.  It's not only difficult, it's very sad.  Everyone was asking, "how's married life?!"  They only wanted to hear the good things.

Eventually, the "charade" became easier and easier.  And then it became real affection.  It was almost like he accepted that I was trying, I accepted that he was trying.  We accepted that we are going to "try" in different ways.  We had a nice time at the party.  We escaped for a few minutes to take a bathroom break & warm up inside his parent's house.  We talked for a few minutes.  I was feeling very anxious, but during our little sneak-away chat he comforted me and promised that he loves me always and that we will always be together.  It was like hot chocolate for my soul.  It warmed me from the inside out and was exactly what I needed to hear in that moment.

We snuggled that night and fell asleep.  We made an improvement.

Sunday, we went to church together at the church we went to when we dated & lived in the city.  Then, we ate lunch together at Ruby Tuesday, where we first met and fell in love.       

THEN, we went to Wal-Mart and bought some stuff for our Halloween costumes.  And made it home just in time to get ready for the Night Service at our church...which just happened to be our final shower!  :D  No more wedding showers for us!  While we loved the gifts and all of the love & support, we are both tired of writing thank you notes and unpacking!

I guess the short version of this story would have been..."we're okay."  I love my husband, he loves me, & we are getting better and better at marriage with each passing day!  Not to say that marriage is easy, and our marriage is nowhere close to being perfect.  But we value each other, we value our love, and we are really starting to learn that if this is going to work we are going to have to not just love each other every day.  We have to MARRY each other each day.  We have to try and try and try.  Trying once is not enough.  Our love is not enough.  Love is pretty flimsy stuff in terms of being a foundation for marriage.  It's a learning process and a growing process.

If

• If I were to get pregnant I would be so upset.  We haven't even been married for two months yet!  Neither of us want children, we don't feel like we are settled enough, and our life is super hectic.  I would be pretty bummed.
• If I could have any job in the world I would be an eclectic, DIY genius and blog about it all day.  
• If I had a day to myself I would probably be in my craft room all day long.  :)  Or snuggling on the sofa watching chick flicks with my dog.  
• If I could get married all over again I would probably have a destination wedding.  Maybe people would not have gotten their feelings hurt about not being invited if only 10 people were at the wedding & it was far away.
• If I could live anywhere in the US it would be - I live where I want to live already! :) 
• If I could have any talent in the world I would want to be able to to paint and draw.  I am very creative, but not artistic.  I wish I was more artistic.
• If you met me in real life I think you would find that I like to make people laugh.
• If I could go back to school and get a degree it would be in business or marketing.   I work in the family business and I think a degree would be quite helpful.
• If money were not an object I'd love to go ahead and buy the home we are living in for free at the moment, repaint the house, go ahead and get a handful of more tattoos for me & my husband, go on a trip to India with my husband, get tons of new clothes, give more money to the church, help out my coworker who has a real need...
• If I could shop at one store for the rest of my life It'd be Wal-Mart and/or Anthropolige
• If we get another pet I would want another Chihuahua.  But I know my husband really wants a Pitbull...so I would get a PitBull for him.
• If I could go on a trip RIGHT NOW, I'd want to go anywhere with my husband.  Maybe the mountains?  I hear they are beautiful this time of year.
• If I had to chose between a house cleaner and a personal chef I'd pick the house cleaner. I would stay in the kitchen and cook all day long.  I hate a mess...but I hate cleaning up even more.  I have begged my husband to let us hire a house cleaner.  I. hate. cleaning.  
• If I had the option of plastic surgery I'd get some kind of surgery that makes my boobs stand up and be perkier!  I hate wearing bras and I would want my boobs to always look like they are in a bra but they NEVER will be.  :)

Creative Bedroom Decor!

When we were engaged, Mr. Robinson and I registered ourselves for a bedroom ensemble.  And we registered for an AMAZING one that we both fell in love with at first sight.  Since we are living in the completely furnished house I grew up in, we've run into a problem.  There are a lot of decorations in the house that aren't our taste.  So we can either take them down and look at empty walls with nails and holes or we can deal with the decor we don't like.

We sleep in the master bedroom, which was my parents' room.  We put our own bedding on the bed, but the decor that hung over the bed matched their bedroom set.  The flowers above the bed (pictured below) didn't match our bedroom ensemble and it wasn't really our style...but we had nothing else to hang in it's place.  So it stayed.

We also got curtains to go with our bedroom set, but those didn't get hung immediately.  We  finally hung them up on a Saturday before we went and got our matching tattoos (I'll post more on this later!).  Check out the curtains in our dimly lit bedroom..

See the flowers in the middle?  Let me explain where they come from.  Mr. Robinson spent some time in India before we met.  He was there for 6 weeks on a mission trip and really fell in love with the culture.  A traditional Indian wedding has marigold curtains.  Well, marigolds die too quickly so our florist strung together tons of artificial marigolds and made curtains for us anyway!  Here is a picture where you can see some of the strands hanging from the beautiful oak tree that provided shade for the outdoor ceremony.  :)  Also, take note of the aisle runner.  That will come up again in this post.

Since the flowers are artificial and have sentimental meaning (and were quite expensive) they ended up making a curtain over a door we never use.  My mom actually did this while we were on our honeymoon...they completely trashed our house!  Maybe I'll post picture of that later... Anyway.  They are just tossed over the valance rod.  I think it looks pretty cool :)

We also received a matching valance as a wedding gift.  But we didn't want to take the flowers down...and we didn't want to guy buy new valance rods since the existing valance rods were too wide for the valance.  Also, there was a glitch in our wedding registry and apparently we only registered for ONE valance, so whatever we did we were going to need to spend money.  So...this is what we came up with!

We hung up a 97 cent curtain rod to cover up the holes in the wall where my mom's floral arrangement was.  Hung the valance on the rod.. The orange fabric is some left-over aisle cloth (remember?!!).  I just twisted it and laid it on top of the curtain rod.  And we had a smaller strand of flowers from the curtains that had broken off, so instead of throwing it away I put it up on top to incorporate all of the colors and textures of the room.  :)

My handsome husband, on our love bed, under my creative way to use a valance!  Job well done if I do say so myself!

To be perfectly honest, I wish the furniture wasn't so matchy.  I long for an eclectic home... but it is a work in progress!  I wonder if it is possible to have expensive, upscale furniture AND eclectic DIY furniture all in the same space.  We'll see!  :)

DIY Mustache Pillow

My husband loves mustaches and beards!  Don't ask me why, he just does.  So, in a search for eclectic throw pillows I came a cross a black mustache pillow that I *LOVED*.  I obsessed over it and seriously debated spending $55 + shipping on a throw pillow because it was shaped like misplaced pubic hair - er - uh - I mean a mustache!  :)  Once I remembered that my frugal husband would cut up my beloved debit card if I spent that much money on a pillow (even it is was for him), I started thinking of ways to "DIY."

I ordered this off of Etsy for about 2 bucks, total:

At Walmart, I purchased a pillow from the sales bin for about $7:

I simply ironed-on the patch and it took about 10 glorious seconds!  Finished product:

Mustache pillow!  :D  I love it, it's adorable!  My husband is SUPER proud of me for finding a more thrifty way to fulfill our need for a mustache pillow.  Everyone was happy!  :)  This was the most simply DIY project I've done YET!    

DIY Fancy Chalkboard

I worked on this project for what felt like a long time, but I am so pleased with the final outcome!  There are tons of tutorials on the world wide web for painting things with chalkboard paint, so I am aware that this is nothing "new" or "exclusive."  However, I consider my craft to be a FANCY CHALKBOARD and that is a little different from the norm.  :)  This mirror has been around for years.... my parents had it hanging in their living room.  They remodeled their home and this gorgeous mirror got stuck in the garage.  So, when I moved out of their house and into an apartment, the mirror came with me and thus began our travels.  We shared several homes together and it was the focal point of every living room I've ever had.  However, my new husband and I are living in the house I grew up in because my parents have moved into a smaller home.  So...back to square one:  beautiful mirror, but because of the remodeling my parents did several years back, there is nowhere for it to hang.  I decided that if I turned it into a chalk board it would be more versatile and could go pretty much anywhere.  So, that's what I did.

Start out by cleaning your mirror.  

I used Rust-oleum chalk board paint.

Make sure to stir your paint really well!  I forgot to get a paint stick, so I just used a cheap wooden spoon I had around.  :)  I am painting a mirror that has a bordering frame, so I started painting the borders using a small paint brush.  The mirror was attached to the frame and there was no way of separating them.  It got a little messy, so I'd encourage anybody doing a similar project to use something that has a removable frame.

Even though I didn't "stay inside the lines," the finished product looks perfectly imperfect.  It worked out.  :)

After I painted all of the boarders

After you've used a smaller brush to get close to the frame, fill in the rest with chalk board paint by using a much larger brush.  Luckily my husband helped me, because it took forever.  We needed four coats of paint to cover the mirror completely, and I later learned that we should have sanded down the mirror first.

• It takes four days for the paint to dry completely and be used as a chalk board
• The back of the pain can said to drag a piece of chalk across the finished chalkboard before writing it on.  Erase the chalk, and now your chalkboard is ready!

Below is a picture of the FINISHED PRODUCT!  and I even got it done in time to use it at our "Sweetest Day" dinner party!

We had it out on the porch for our guests to see as they arrived and it was such a nice touch!  Everyone was impressed and I think it really dressed up the chalk board!  Now, I have it sitting in the foyer by the front door, as pictured below:

P.S.  God Gave Me You was our wedding song.  I ran out of ideas of stuff to write on the board that day.  But, it is very versatile and I love it!  :)  It makes me smile every time I see it and I hope that if you choose to make a Fancy Chalkboard, you'll enjoy yours as well! 

The First Post

Hey.  I'm Mrs. Robinson and I married my mister on 09-10-11.  Yep, brand spankin' newlyweds.  I want to document the foods I cook, the crafts I make, the feelings I experience, and everything attached to being a newlywed.  I've been trying out a few blogs but none of them have stuck.  Hopefully this is my last move.

Uh..my husband and I have no children, so if you are looking for baby pictures, please keep looking.  You won't find it here.  We do not have baby fever...do not want baby fever...we are more than happy with just us and our one Chihuahua named Zombie.  :)

I hope that I can get some followers even though my blog is pretty plain right now... I promise I will spruce it up (today!) and I promise to post some really interesting things... I'll be real about it all and you'll get the full scoop on our newlywed life.  I also will post plenty of recipes and diy projects that I've completed!  :)  Perhaps I'll just be white noise, there are tons of blogs out there about this kind of stuff....we'll see.  Adios!