Tis the Season!!

Yay it's Christmas time! I love this time of year all except for the freezing cold weather. I think I have at least 2 cups of hot cocoa a day to help warm me up! Well since I haven't posted anything recently I thought I should get on. Our Thanksgiving was great. I had to work from 5 till 2. I came home and made buttermilk rolls and a pumpkin pie (pumpkin pie takes ages longer to cook than it says in the recipe). We celebrated Thanksgiving with the Sutherland side. We ate at the Old Rock Church and then stayed the night. The Gardener family was there which made it so fun! Their kiddos are such cuties!

Yesterday we went to a concert. It was the Forgotten Carols concert. I love all of that music! I really didn't see the whole story with those carols until we saw the show. Michael McLean was one of the main characters and he was soooo funny! Coming home we took the scenic route and "oooo'd and aaaa'd" at the Christmas lights. We are going to go down sometime this month and see the lights on Temple Square.

Halloween Halloween!

Decorating for Halloween is always fun! I don't have very many things though because we're saving for adoption. So I found a cheap way to make a fun Halloween decoration. I found it on this blog.



Painting the jars was so easy and fun. It didn't take long for them to dry either. Next thing I did was draw on the face. My creative sis and law Brixannne decided to do a mummy jar. I didn't get a pic of it but it was way cute! Here's a picture of them all done and lit up!
I think they turned out cute! You can get battery operated tea lights if you don't want to have to light real ones up all the time. My other Halloween project was getting a dead branch from the canyon and painting it black. I stuck it in a pot and planned on putting purple lights on it. Then I decided to just do black spider webs on it. Here's how it turned out.
I still have to get something to cover the dirt. But I still like it!

I LOVE FALL!

I went out and about the other day to see the pretty fall colors. I love this time of year it's soooo pretty! So I decided to go on a hike up to the wind caves. I snapped lots of pics!

Here it is. It took me about an hour to make it up there! I had to take lots of breaks. The day I went it was perfect for hiking.

My window is no longer undressed!

I finally got around to making a roman shade for my laundry room. I got a titch too much fabric. I forgot to get the measurements before I went in to town so I just got 2 yards of fabric. There were a lot of things that didn't go "as planned" in this project but I still like how it turned out! I found a blog online that explained how to make no sew roman shades. It sounded so easy (It wasn't as easy or as fast as I thought it would be though!) The blog is called Thrifty Decor Chick
http://thriftydecorchick.blogspot.com/2010/01/rewind-diy-no-sew-roman-shades.html. Hers look very very good. I took a couple pictures along the way of this process.



I used hemming tape to do my edges. All you have to do is measure and then iron! It went pretty quick and looks just as good as if I were to sew it.






It's kind of hard to see from this pic, but you sew ribbons of varying lengths along the edge of the shade and on the front is a button. (You don't see the button unless you let the shade down.
Here's a better one of the ribbons.

And the finished product! I think if I would have lined the fabric, the light wouldn't have come through as much. For my first attempt at this I am satisfied and glad to be done!

Day 3 of our Vacation

So we took a drive down to a place called Cripple Creek. We stopped at a mine. They had all of these old rusty things that we kind of liked!
This is what the mine looked like where you go down.

Everyone who was going on a tour of the mine got a hard hat and then a coat if they needed one. We were going down 1,000 feet so it would be cold. This sign was the last thing we saw before we went down in the dark.

They put about six people in that tiny space and then there was another one right on top of that one.
This was our tour guide who works as a miner. He showed us how they used to mine through the years. He definitley fit the "miner look". His favorite thing to say after almost every sentence was, "Just one of those things". It got to be kind of funny!

At the end our guide picked out one of those rocks that had flecks of gold in it. This mine was one of our favorite things we saw on our vacation. At the visitor center in Cripple Creek they had a diagram of what the whole mine looked like. After we ate lunch we went drove through a town called Victor. They had lots of abandoned mines that you could walk through
We saw this off of the side of the road. It used to be a tunnel but I guess it wasn't sturdy so they built the road around it.

The last thing we did that day was we took a cog railway up to Pikes Peak. It was freezing all the way up there! We saw a couple of big horned sheep. The views were really beautiful. It was cloudy at the top so you couldn't see that far.

Day 2 of our Vaca

So it's been a little longer than a day since I've posted, but I found time today! ; ) So the first place we went was to the Manituo Cliff Dwellings. It's a remake of Mesa Verde cliff dwellings that you can go walk around through. It was neat to see and read about the history there.

This next photo we found these in a gift shop and thought they were funny!

The next place we went to was called the Cave of the Winds. We took tons of pics but hardly any of them turned out as well as they looked like in real life.
This next picture is what they call cave coral becuase it looks like under water coral. I think it's pretty!

Close to the top of the picture is what they call cave bacon. Do you see it?!?
This one was a column and then the floor shifted and the column broke.
The next place we went to was a cute little town called Manituo Springs. They had the best custard there yummo!


This bike was ginormous!!! I had the hardest time reaching the handlebars on that thing! This bike was just sitting on the sidewalk just begging for a photo! The last place we went to was called Seven Falls. It was beautiful!





This shows what a hike it was to get up there. I think there was at least 300 steps!!! Well I covered almost everything that we did our first full day in Springs.