I love the lake house!

This weekend was wonderfully relaxing and awesome. I got to spend it with some awesome girlfriends at one of their lake houses. I love the girls. I love the lake! I love paddle boating and eating oreo truffles!

Wedding Album : I <3 Freckled Nest!

I had such a hard time deciding what to do with my gorgeous wedding pictures from Whitney Lee Photography until I found Leigh-Ann from Freckled Nest . I saw samples of some of her other albums and I knew she was the right person for the job. She was so easy to work with through the design process and she really understood my style and what I was looking for. She did a great job of incorporating my papers and our quotes and I absolutely LOVE the way it all turned out! I'm so excited about it!









Click the title of this post to see her blog post + tutorial on how to make the cover. Click any of the photos to link to the flickr photostream containing more pictures.

Kitchen Appliances

I have some of the cute applicances, but now I need a shelf to put them on so I don't have to hide them!



I love it!

Colorado!

Here are some pictures of this last lovely week in Colorado, where we thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to wear jackets. We were sad to return home to not only 108 degree weather, but a broken air conditioner. Thank goodness we got it fixed that same day! Anyway, Colorado is awesome. Maybe we'll move there someday.

Colorado, originally uploaded by joygoldplanet.

Yeah, we climbed to the top of that rock. It was about 7,000 feet above sea level. We started our hike about 5,000 feet. We're hard core.




This is Alec with his aunt and uncle, Suzie and Gary. They took us through the Rocky Mountain National Park. This spot is near the origination of the Colorado River.


Behind us you can see Horsetooth Reservoir. We went boating there the first night we arrived in town. What a way to welcome us to town!

Caffeine vs. Calories

I found this awesome graph of how caffeine vs. calories. I love the simplicity of it! There's a much bigger version on the original website. Click title of this postfor link.

Handmade Nation

I am so excited Handmade Nation is finally opening in Austin, Texas! I got my special VIP tickets from Sublime Stitching and I can't wait! It makes me even more happy that I get to go to the Alamo Drafthouse for the event. I don't like regular movie theaters anymore because the Alamo experience has me SPOILED!




I'm also super excited to see these people at the event.



Made With Sweet Love

Purse tutorial

I want to make this awesome purse I found on the Ric-Rac blog:

Selvedge dress

This just might be the cutest dress ever. I love the cut of the dress as well as the fact that it's made out of the selvedge of fabric! I need to start working harder on becoming a master seamstress so I can make one!







Found on Ric-Rac blog

Mo-Dettes

Study, study, study until Monday! This semester will be over in 4 days! This makes me happy! One semester down, 5 more to go!

Music Art Journal + Scat in the Dark

I've been taking a class in art journaling that combines music with art journaling from the lovely Kara. Note I said "taking" and not "participating". I hope to finish the simple five day class sometime before September. It's been really cool to see the prompts and spend time thinking about them (when I should be studying) and to see everyone else's awesome work. When I finally finish I'll post all of them.

This is the day 5 prompt for nonlyrical music. I cheated and used music with lyrics, but they are all in Japanese so I have no idea what she's actually saying, so this is still my interpretation of how the music feels without guidance from understanding of words. I think this is the happiest music I've ever heard. It makes me think of young love, sunshine, butterflies, puppy dogs and raindrops on my face.







(You can click to make the picture bigger)

Photobooth Picture from Gallery Party

Our friends who had their CD release party last week had a photobooth at the event and the pictures were awesome and hilarious.




Check out Trevor Ray Thompson, the photographer here

Quilt Project Sneak Peek

I'd been wanting to replace the duvet cover on our guest bed forever, but I never like anything in the stores. I got this idea, drew it out, got it approved by Alec and the two of us knocked out the top for it this weekend. Hopefully, Alec's mom can help us get it quilted, bound, and finished!

Here are some of the detail fabrics (They're not really crooked, I took the picture from an angle):

Here is the top for the quilt thrown on the bed:

Stewart Joined The Army

So my brother has 4 kids. When it was time to find a new home for their dog because their new house did not have any yard to speak of for this large dog to frolic in, he had a hard time explaining to the kids where Stewart (the dog) had gone. He told the truth at first, that his friend had taken in the dog to live at his house. When the kids kept begging daily to go visit Stewart, he finally told them that Stewart had joined the army so they couldn't visit him anymore. The army. Ah, parenting.

Alec and I thought this was hysterical and had intended to photoshop a photograph of Stewart in the army that he actually could show the kids. Well, I think a whole year went by and we never did that. Then recently I ran across this fantastic photography project: Fallen Princesses by Dina Goldstein I love her project for many reasons not limited to my feared repercussions of how growing up with tons of fairy tale input without anything to balance that leads to disappointment with real life.

So I jokingly sent this picture to Alec, saying this might be the perfect photo to put Stewart in for my brother and of course then he had to do it. Probably not the best picture to show the kids, but hilarious for the adults who can appreciate that the dog is not in any real danger.

Biliary Tree

These are the kinds of arts and crafts I'm up to these days. I make internal body structures out of play-doh, photograph them, and label them. Alec helped me with labels. Yes, I'm a huge dork.

Red and Turquoise Kitchen

I already have a couple red and turquoise kitchen items, some of which are vintage pyrex handed down from my Mom. I want more though! I love this kitchen and these other pyrex items I found on etsy.

photo credit

photo credit

The above item was from etsy, but it sold so I can't find the link for the seller.

photo from etsy

Summer Playlist

Happy Independence Day

We're celebrating independence at our house primarily through sugar. I got Alec a super yummy and beautiful cake as a surprise. It is rich chocolate cake with peanut butter buttercream and crumbled Reeses cups. It’s iced in vanilla Swiss meringue buttercream and vanilla fondant, and the accents are in tinted vanilla fondant. Wicked Cakes did such a great job, and I want to eat it at every meal.

I have also been making these Vanilla Raspberry Sundaes from the Martha Stewart magazine's most recent issue. I think I can get behind anything that has to do with sugar lately.

More Improvements on the Home Front

We forgot to take actual "before" picture for this specific purpose, but I did happen to take a random shot of the living room when we first moved in. Please note the horrible TV stand/entertainment center made of black yuck and glass. I hate furniture made of black yuck and glass. It screams to me of Nagel's art and I feel like I should feather out my hair and wear neon colors.

In addition to the aesthetic issues the stand has it is also a bit more unstable that I think reasonable for an electronics geek husband to own. I was more than a little shocked when I found out the details.

We happen to have a wood working expert in the family who was happy to lend a hand and all of his tools. The picture below is the unit before Alec did any staining or added the "feet".

Finally, you can see the brand new, finished, and crafted totally by hand entertainment center. Ray and Alec did a fantastic job! Yay!

We still have some more furniture projects in the works so the living room won't be "finished" for quite some time.

Baked Beans

Alec walks into the bedroom and sees this on top of my armoire:

Alec: Um, Joy? Why are there baked beans in the bedroom?
Joy: Circuit studying!
Alec: what?
Joy: That's my barbell for adductions!

I try to keep him guessing.

Best Husband Ever

So I have a huge test in Cross Sectional Anatomy tomorrow and I've been a freak stress ball for about a week. My wonderful husband insisted, and I mean INSISTED that I get a massage tonight because I've studied enough and what I really need is to relax and good a good night's sleep. He's the best.

I'm reposting the story he wrote about how we met that we had previously posted on our wedding website. Who knows how long those stay up, and who ever looks back upon them?

It seems natural to begin with, “So how did we first start dating?” which is pretty darn interesting in its own right... but not the story we’re telling today. So how did it all happen, or better yet, where did we first cross each other’s paths? In keeping with our respective personalities, our introduction required more than a little bit of awkward social circumstance.

Many years back, Alec began working at a new job and within a few weeks of starting, a co-worker and his wife invited him to meet them at a local bar. Though highly uninterested in their choice of venues and doubting having very much at all in common with this couple, Alec didn’t want to appear rude with a new colleague, thereby souring potential relations at work. After a bit of coercing, the offer was accepted. (At the risk of sounding elitist, some editorial content must be injected at this point to further the irony of our meeting and explain that this particular bar is the kind of place Joy and Alec would both generally avoid as if every table and chair brought with it a moderate chance of the plague.)

Upon meeting said co-worker and entering, Alec felt extremely out of place and began people-watching over a few rounds of drinks. Out of an extremely packed bar, there was quite obviously one person who consistently caught his eye… and why wouldn’t she? Even across a dimly lit thirty feet, she had an amazing smile and laugh that spoke of humor and a desire to make her surroundings a place we’d all like to be part of (which Alec likes to say is evident to this very day). She was comfortable with herself, yet without the slightest note of arrogance. She was unique, yet visibly quite genuine and unlabored. Not to mention, she was wearing the greatest black jacket with pink trim. So yes, Joy was sitting at a small table, also looking out of place given the element, and talking with a female friend (who also turned out to be a co-worker at Joy’s recently acquired job).

At any rate, Alec’s co-worker apparently took note of how his surveying the room seemed to linger a little bit longer any time his eyes passed in Joy’s direction. It was at this point that he and his wife began a discussion as to whether Joy and her female friend were there together or “together.” What was Alec’s reaction to this, in a word? Mortified, folks. It didn’t take long at all for the discussion between husband and wife to evolve into a full-scale debate, at which point the wife challenged to go over to the girls’ table and find out. The terrors and humiliation that ran through Alec’s brain were white hot, and despite his protests she proceeded to walk over, introduce herself, and sit down in the last open chair. Seriously? The one person in that establishment to whom Alec might like to talk, and he was unwittingly caught up in a sad social display that would almost certainly result in his looking like an underdeveloped fool. It was at this point that Alec turned to walk out the door, but his co-worker stressed that they could walk across to the other side of the bar as his wife chatted away on her devious little mission.

Sitting on the other side of this place, it was obvious that Alec’s co-worker was trading text messages with someone on a fairly regular basis. After an uncomfortable fifteen minutes, his co-worker informed him that he had to relieve himself and asked Alec to please remove his wife from her conversation? Eager to get it over with and leave, Alec walked over to Joy’s table and before any words had the chance to escape his lips, the wife bolted up from the now-empty chair and said, “Hey Alec, I need to use the restroom. Take my place for me while I’m gone. Joy, this is Alec,” and promptly abandoned him at the table. At this point it dawned on Alec that he’d been set up from the beginning.

The ultimate revelation here was that this couple had planned to see who the new employee would gravitate toward, and then thrust him into a “sink or swim” scenario. The fake debate, text messages, and restroom trip? All part of the ruse. But hey, that night Alec and Joy managed to find great conversation and a bunch of laughs in a sea of striped shirts and popped collars. It’s crazy to think that two people so completely out of place, meeting up with their respective new colleagues for almost identical reasons, were able to establish a friendship lasting many years before dating ever entered into the picture. Well… before they were nebulae, but that’s a whole other story.

** Professionally edited by an OCD journalism major! It's great being surrounded by brilliance.