things I've enjoyed recently

1// Last weekend, a friend invited me an essential oils blends DIY, where we made some goodies to take home, like a calming face mist, roller for sore muscles, and detox bath salts. I've been curious about essential oils for a while, so this was a fun and informative introduction to it.

2// I'm in the middle of reading Jancee Dunn's How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids, and so far, it's equal parts helpful and humorous. I love that she includes lots of of actual published data and advice from real marital counselors, but she's kind of my new hero for trying out the techniques she's learning on her own marriage. For the most part, the relationship between my husband and I is pretty solid, even post-twins, but there's definitely areas where we could improve. So this book is pretty eye-opening for me right now. (Bonus: even if you don't have kids, this book is filled with gems of relationship advice and holy-shit-that-is-so-us moments. If you live with your significant other and tend to fight a lot, you should read this!)

3// Catfight was soo good!

4// Suck it, People-Who-Think-Cats-Are-Assholes.

5// HBO's Big Little Lies was a slow burn for me, but so worth it.

6// This made me laugh!

7// My marriage recently turned 14 years old! Yay us! We went out for a much-deserved date night, and right before heading out, I asked my dear friend, who was babysitting the twins, if she would take this photo of us. I love that if you look closely, you can spot both loinfruits pressed up against the screen door, making Very Loud Noises because they wanted to be outside with us too. I'm so lucky to have these three people in my life :)

things I've enjoyed recently

1// Evening stroller walks with the babes. My husband and I were fortunate to have two separate strollers given to us for free from friends who no longer needed them, so we've been using those for our walks around the neighborhood. And just in time too, because my boy is already two inches(!) away from outgrowing his infant car seat.

2// Children are velociraptors.

3// Lisa Hanawalt's new book, Hot Dog Taste Test, is kooky and hilarious and strangely comforting.

4// I went to First Thursday at the Lafayette last night, and designed a mini planter to take home. Because you can never have enough succulent planters.

5// My friend Jennie and her husband have started an amazing podcast called Breaking Español, which you should follow and listen if you've ever wanted to not just learn a second language, but immerse yourself in it and try to live it every day. Even after living in Spain for three years, my Spanish is only so-so, so I really admire Jennie for doing this and sharing her journey.

6// I put a little mixtape together for Tiger + Ox's Monday Tuna a few weeks ago. I finally got to meet up with Leah (who runs the blog with her husband Cruz) in person here in San Diego, and it was so great, and I feel like I genuinely made a new friend. Not to mention we both have cats named Cleo and tattoos done by the same tattoo artist :)

7// This quote to remind me to put down my phone sometimes.

life lately because I'm awful at blogging

1// Something that rarely happens: a photo of me with my babes in which I'm showered, looking mostly presentable, and not taking a half-assed selfie with my phone. A mom-of-twins miracle! (super thanks to my husband who shot this for me!)

2// Another shameless photo of my nuggets because look at those faces! They'll be six months this week, and I can't believe it's already been half a year. Vince is trying to crawl so bad, and Hazel is such a master roller that every time I turn my back, she's in a new spot. I've also decided that I'll continue to share their monthly photos on my instagram rather than here on the blog. It's just easier for my life right now.

3// I've started taking barre classes at a local studio, and it is giving me LIFE. It's something I've been wanting to try for ages, and after taking the first class, I was all, "Yep. This is exactly what I need." The studio also offers different types of yoga and cardio classes, so I get to try those things as well. So stoked that I'm being active again. Even though the babes definitely keep me active in a different way, sometimes I just need to be in a room where a toned woman is instructing me to do plié squats until my quads burn.

4// A friend let me know about a tapestry weaving workshop at West Elm that I could sign up for, and I'm so glad I did! I was just writing in my last post that I wanted to learn this particular craft, and the class was so good! It was taught by Anna of Prissage Studio, and she set us up with our very own wooden loom and tools to start weaving. She taught us a few basic weaving techniques, the importance of a good warp, and how to finish off the piece once we're done. She even gave us a bunch of extra yarn so we could finish our work at home. I finished mine a few days later, and I'm already thinking ahead to the next few I want to do! The creative possibilities seem endless, and I've been getting lots of weaving inspiration from instagram. I smell a visit to Michael's coming up very soon, so I can stock up on all the yarn :)

the adventure begins // we got baby showered!

Last weekend, a bunch of our friends gathered with the mister and I for a coed baby shower that was SO. MUCH. FUN! Three of my close girlfriends joined forces to plan, prep, host, and craft their little hearts out, and it was everything a pregnant woman carrying two babies could hope for. Seriously, I need to brag on the women who pulled it all together, because they are rock stars who should start a party-planning business immediately.

As soon as my husband and I walked in, my eyes bugged out, my jaw dropped, and I immediately started to take some photos, because I knew once more people started showing up, I would get caught up in the fun and forget my camera was even there. Which totally happened, and which is the reason why there aren't any group photos of all the lovely people that were there. Boo. Okay, less talk, more pictures!

As thank you party favors to the ladies, I wanted to give these mini succulents (Raina helped me spray paint the containers they came in). I also attached fun temporary Tattly tattoos to each plant. For the guys' party favors, we gave them each a cigar.

The dreamcatchers were made at a fun dreamcatcher workshop earlier this year at a local Rais Case shop. The one on the left is Raina's, and I made the one on the right.

The baby-guessing game of all the guests was probably the most fun baby shower game I've ever played. I wish I had a better, non-blurry photo of everyone's cute baby portrait, but in my excitable pregnant state, this is what I got.

The tiniest guest was also the cutest guest :)

So I mentioned this was a coed shower, but the reason you won't see any dudes in these photos is because they were all off celebrating with the mister on a nearby bar scavenger hunt. I think they were supposed to make mini stops at 5 or 6 places, but apparently there was so much fun-having, they only made it to the first three. But here's a quickie instagram courtesy of my friend Matty. Men doing manly baby shower things.

The guys were supposed to be back to join us ladies in time for the gift-opening, but group of guys + bars = uber losing track of time. Totally fine. They were having a blast.

This amazing sewn-fabric-as-wrapping-paper made by Annalynn (whose Specimen fashion designs I shot a few years ago) was almost too pretty to mess with!

I'm not sure who took the photos of me opening presents, but thank you, whoever you are! It was a nice surprise when I looked through the images on my camera later :)

I've got about ten more weeks until these twin babes are due, but they're already off to a great start! Vince and I are so lucky to have wonderful family and friends. We couldn't ask for more.

bits of life // may

1// A few months ago, some of my girlfriends and I decided that we should get together at least once a month and do something crafty/DIY-able. It would be a good way to hang out/catch up/bonding time, and we'd also be able to fiiiinally put our Pinterest DIY posts to use instead of being just pinned and lonely, never to be made. Our first group outing was a Rais Case workshop where we made our own dreamcatchers, and it was super fun. We finally got around to setting up our second craft event, this time at my house, and we decided we'd try this awesome yarn and eucalyptus wall hanging DIY from the fantastic blog Poppytalk (seriously, it's like DIY porn on that blog). It was ridiculously easy to make, and it came out so beautiful and minimal. I might put it in the twins' nursery, or just leave it in my bedroom where it is now. I haven't decided yet.

2// Fun outings with friends! It's crazy to think this will be our last summer sans children, so we're taking advantage as much as we can. Like bonfiring on Mission Bay, something we'd actually never done our whole time in San Diego thus far. And catching a Padres game with 30+ friends in the Picnic Terrace area. I don't even care for baseball that much, but who cares when your ticket includes all-you-can-eat burgers, dogs, snacks, and drinks? Sign me up, said every pregnant lady ever.

3// The mister and I decided during my 16th week that we couldn't wait any longer to find out the sexes of the babies, so we made an appointment at one of those 4D ultrasound clinics for the very next day. I was nervous that my loinfruits wouldn't be in a good position to view their bits, or that we'd have an awful tech who didn't know what she/he was doing (some of their Yelp reviews weren't too comforting), but we couldn't have gotten a better experience. Our ultrasound tech couldn't have been nicer, positive, or more competent. As soon as she looked at each baby's nether regions, she pointed out right away what she saw. The verdict: Baby A is a girl, and Baby B is a boy! So stoked! We bought these onesies the next day at one of our fave shops, Graffiti Beach, and I can't wait to put them on their tiny bodies.

4// This was taken just a few days ago, at 17 weeks 3 days pregnant. Holy mother of belly. In just three short weeks, I went from "She probably eats a lot of tacos" to "There's definitely at least one baby in there." These babes are growing fast. And I'm definitely feeling it. Lots of lower back pain, round ligament pain that keeps my vocabulary quite colorful, and getting a good night's sleep is impossible. The mister likes to affectionately call me "preggersaurus" and I don't even mind, cause it's true. I'm always waddling, shuffling, grunting with certain movements, and I'm hungry every two hours. Sexy stuff, right?

portrait // let's get cloudy

A friend of mine recently commissioned a portrait of himself for his professional website, and I was so stoked to help him with it. Dan wanted something playful and fun, and he was particularly inspired by my pet cloud photo that I made in 2011 as part of my 52 weeks project.

We decided to emulate the look and feel for his own portrait, right down to the stick-on/faux wallpaper and cloud element.

When I shot my original photo, the wallpaper was actually on the wall behind me (a diy project that my husband helped me with, and it was NOT fun times), but for Dan's shoot, we wanted to keep things much simpler and just temporarily rig it. So we taped a bunch of vertical sheets of the paper together, and then attached the whole piece to the top of my seamless backdrop set.

A quickie behind-the-scenes shot!

I made our cloud pretty much the same way I made it the first time: with pillow stuffing. The material was slightly different this time (the former being more cotton candy-esque), but I think I actually prefer the newer one.....it had more texture and looked more like....cumulus clouds? If you're a meteorologist and happen to be reading this, please correct me if I'm using the wrong cloud terminology :)

It was pretty simple after that! A few quick shots using the same lighting setup from the original, then the post-processing stage where I also kept it as close to the original as I could, and BAM. It was done. Not too shabby if I say so myself :)

You can also check out an additional image from the shoot on Dan's website!

Project DIY Bookshelf is complete!

So a few months back, I posted about how I wanted to re-create Morgan Satterfield's amazing-super-rad Ace Hotel-inspired DIY bookshelf. Well folks, it is done. Over the course of three weeks and two trips to Home Depot, the Mister and I finished it, and it is beautiful.

I didn't take photos through every step of the process, but here's the few that I did take.

Behold the pipe cutter and threading machine at Home Depot. Actually, I have no idea what the technical name for that machine is, but it is a beast and got the job done. Thanks, Home Depot guy!

I snapped this real quick right before I started spray-painting all the pipe pieces. Don't I just look thrilled? Prepping the pipe and the wood definitely was the most tedious and time-consuming part of the project.

Pretty painted plumber's pipe all organized neatly on the floor.  Shortly after this, the Mister and I started to hate life. A lot.

I definitely didn't hate how my stained pine shelves turned out though. Beautimous. The two longer shelves did end up being a bit darker than I wanted, but I attribute that to the fact that since it took longer to paint it, the stain had more time to set in.

So the hating life part wasn't that it was necessarily hard to put together, just....figuring out where to drill the holes in the wood so that everything would be nice and symmetrical and even. Because even though we were using Morgan's exact design, we had to adjust the measurements to fit our wall (hers was wider). But once we had the holes drilled in the first (short) piece, it was cake for the rest of the shelves.

Tip: Doing any kind of project like this with your significant other will go much smoother with the addition of beer. Especially when it's delicious, hoppy, Alpine beer.

So we basically just put it together from the bottom up once all the holes were drilled. It went pretty smoothly from here.

Almost there.

The finished piece!

Other than the overall width of our bookshelf, the only major thing we had to change from Morgan's design was the height of the top pipe pieces (from where it connects from the T to the elbow piece). I believe her top pipe lengths were 12 inches, and we had to adjust ours to 9 inches, so it could fit under that overhang on our ceiling.

And just like Morgan said it would be, that bookshelf is solid. I'm so happy with it. We ended up spending about $318 for all the materials. Not too shabby. I'm still in the process of adding some of our books and decorative objects to it, not to mention deciding what kind of framed art I want to put in that large open space.

Also, sorry for the crappy iPhone pics. I'm sure I'll take photos of this thing with my fancypants camera soon enough :)

pipe (and wooden) dreams

So not too long ago, in this post, I talked about how I took out our books and stacked them by color against a wall in the living room. Definitely bright and happy to look at, but obviously this is just a temporary solution. That's a lot of wall space, and I intend to use it.

Here is it's current state.

So I decided to take some inspiration from Morgan Satterfield's blog, The Brick House, and her genius DIY shelving unit. For a couple reasons. One, it just looks damn good. Simple. Stylish. And two, it'll be more budget-friendly than most of the shelving units I've seen at those big home-goods stores.

So the mister and I will tackle this project within the next month or so, and if all goes well, it will hopefully look like this:

Stay tuned.

nesting and why blank walls scare me

The nesting process is usually pretty slow for me. If I move to a new space, I like to just live in it awhile before I decide what goes on the walls, and where.  I'm pretty fickle too; I've moved the couch around at least two different times, and I keep moving my indoor plants around too. But after four months of living here, some of these blank walls were turning into my nightmare. A girl just needs stuff to look at, ya know?

So right above my desk, I hung up some of my favorite photos, cards, and things that currently inspire me. I really love using twine and bulldog clips to hang stuff because I can always swap things out and hang different stuff. Cause I'm fickle, remember?

This is one of my favorite cards from Cracked Designs. So awesome.

Since the mister and I are slight hoarders when it comes to traveling, we had amassed an obscene amount of travel ticket stubs from our adventures in Europe. They were all just sitting in a box along with a bunch of coasters, maps, and travel brochures (cue flashback to every episode of Hoarders ever: Why am I keeping this stuff? What is wrong with my brain??), until I realized I better do something with this. So voilà! One free afternoon and several blank frames later, I had this. It's only a fraction of what we've collected, and I'm sure I'll add on to it, but for now, pretty dang good, no?

I call this the Buyer's-Remorse-Turned-Photo-Collage-Project. That big faux-wooden old-timey map wall hanging (actually there's two of them) was an impulse buy back in Spain, and it wasn't until our stuff arrived here in our new home that I realized, "Ugh. I hate this thing." So I decided to re-purpose one of them as a backdrop for a bunch of photos. Photos that were previously in a box, all sad and desperate to be displayed. All these photos are 35mm film photos from my Diana Mini camera. I'm thinking of using the other matching wall hanging for a bunch of Instagram prints.

I know, this doesn't really count as wall art, but I still wanted to share this. Up until today, all our books were stored in a bunch of cardboard boxes and sitting against this wall in our living room. The mister and I have plans of building custom wall shelves from floor to ceiling in this space, but that probably won't happen for a while. Which I'm fine with, but staring at ugly brown boxes was starting to get me down, so I took those bad boys out and started stacking them by color. Which makes my eyeballs so much happier.

Dear Current-And-Potential-Friends-Who-Borrow-My-Books, I can be pretttty stingy with my books. Just warning you now. If I haven't gotten a book back after a couple months, I start to worry. After six months, I start to question the solidity of our friendship. And if it's been a year or more, you're pretty much dead to me. Just kidding. Kinda.

This is in my bedroom, even though it's not quite finished. I need to mount the map to some cardboard or something, to make it a bit more sturdy. But this was super ridiculous easy. Just some vinyl adhesive letters and a ruler to line things up. God bless you, Michael's Arts and Crafts. I have missed you for three and a half years.