Goodbye 2011

Merry Christmas Eve

Hope everyone is having a fabulous day with family and friends. I had my first newborn photography session with this little man last week, can't wait to share them on the blog next week!

Presents under the tree

It's Here!

After 2 1/2 months of waiting the Daniel Tosh show is tonight! I've never been to a comedy show, so I am super excited. Time to go get ready...

Sad, but true

Yes. It's true. These cookie jars are EMPTY. How terrible! Even worse? They sit atop my microwave that's broken. It feels a little white trash to write that. It's been broken for a couple weeks now. I'm digging myself deeper here.

A wreath for the kitchen

Two-fer

Missed yesterday's post. Sheesh. I'm not doing so hot on this daily December post thing!

Oopsie

This is make-up for yesterday's post! These giant ornaments are suspended from the ceiling. Sometimes my dog randomly barks at them.

Believe

A Pink Tree Lighting

Today on the way home from the bus stop Celeste asked if I'd like to go to her "tree event". I said sure. She said "I'll put you on the list". And she did. She made a little guest list. Blew up balloons. Braided my hair and put a tiara on.
And ta-da! Her pretty little pink tree in her bedroom...

Peppermint kisses

So good the jar is already half gone!

Paper chain santas

Stars and lights

These stars and lights are surrounding the entrance from our dining room into the kitchen

December third

Well it's day three of December and I finished the advent calendar. Better late than never, right? I've always wanted to have one but have never thought of making my own. A big thank you to Pinterest for inspiring me this year! Celeste is at her dads house this weekend, so I'm leaving the past days ornaments up so she can do it when she comes home. She helped me make some of the tags too. I wanted to decorate some tags for gift wrapping too, but I ran out. Better order more soon, Christmas will creep up on me before I know it.

Flameless candles

Love the soft flicker and glow of these candles without the worry of one of my crazy animals starting a fire. I had a cat that almost caused a house fire twice. Once by knocking a mask off the wall into a candle and it immediately burst into flames half way up the wall. Scary. The second time she knocked a lamp onto my bed and it melted and burned through my pillow when I finally smelled it in the other room.

Christmas cottage

Dear blog readers, I am so very sorry that I didn't do practically any posts for November! I wanted to at least do a November recap, but with two weeks left in the semester it's crunch time.
So I want to try out a daily post of something for December. Not much writing, mostly pictures, so I hope I find the time to stick with this goal. Speaking of goals, any resolution planning happening out there?

Before it's Thanksgiving....

Guess I had better get my Halloween post up before it's Thanksgiving. I cannot even describe how overwhelmingly busy I have been with my class projects. I feel like this years Halloween was so rushed. It's my favorite holiday and I feel like I didn't get to enjoy it as fully as I like. The cherry on top, I had class on Halloween, so I had to send Celeste to her Dad's. So, so sad.
I did take Celeste trick or treating down town, which we usually do every year. This year, though, I got dressed up too! I saw a sugar skull makeup job on Pinterest earlier this year and I just had to do it. Afterwards we went to a birthday party at the roller skating rink and I skated for the first time in over a decade. We tried to carve our pumpkins, but we ran out of time. Super lame.
We had another birthday party we attended the Sunday before Halloween, then we managed to fit in our annual tradition of Halloween sugar cookies. I frosted them with pumpkin icing. They were super yummy. I know next year I will be even busier since it's my last semester of school, but I am secretly hoping I will be able to enjoy my favorite holiday fully next year.

Supermodel vs. Zombie

This is my first project from my Photoshop course this semester. We took a photo of ourself and then totally glammed it up (aka supermodel) then we made ourselves totally gross (zombie!).
Here are my pictures....

Model

Original

Zombie

 

Obviously for the super model one I didn't have to do much. Just kidding! I took away all my blemishes, freckles and moles. I took out my nose stud. I fixed my teeth and whitened them. I lightened my eye color and darkened my eye shadow and lips. I changed my hair color, gave my skin a glow and fixed the background.

For the Zombie I used a watermelon rind to give my skin texture via layers and blendmodes. I altered my cheekbones and jaw line. Added a maggot infested open wound to my chest, changed my eyes to green and darkened the image overall.

Pink and Black

I used to not be a big fan of pink. It took me yeeears to finally bring some pink pieces into my wardrobe. I'm over that now, I am comfortable in pink now, and I love the combo of pink and black. So, I picked up this cute little vintage skirt at Junkee's a while back, and have finally decided to wear it. I really love the texture of the floral pattern. I kept everything else black so my skirt was the standout piece.
We've started work on our second project in my Illustrator course. We are to pick a state (Montana, yay!), choose two state parks and design a logo for each and a poster for one. The poster is supposed to mimick 1920's-1930's travel posters. Sounds super fun and right up my alley right? The instructor didn't like my logos. Lame. Now it's back to the drawing board. I've seen it happen, but it's never happened to me. But I guess it's a lesson learned as to how it will be out there in industry, there will be clients who don't like what you present to them and you will have to think longer and harder about your design concepts. So that's what I'm going to go do now....

 

Shirt- thrifted

Skirt-   Junkee's

Tights- Icing

Shoes- Candies

A Little Day Trip

I've talked to a few people who've made the trip to Apple Hill. It's about a couple hours away, up highway 50 through Lake Tahoe near Placerville, CA. I've always wanted to go, so we decided to make the trip this year. It is a pretty drive up, and the only part of the drive that was aggravating was the 45 minute delay due to road construction in South Lake Tahoe, on a Saturday. Who does that? Oh, let's take the busiest tourist day and close our road down to one lane. Okay?
 Our first stop was the pumpkin patch! The pumpkin patch at Apple Hill was so much better than our local one, so much more variety. It was a very decent price, and lady was really knowledgeable and told me which of my picks are good for baking sweet pumpkin treats.

Celeste adores her little baby pumpkin. The dogs already tried to eat it.

This pumpkin above is called "one too many". When the lady pointed at it and said one too many, Celeste says, "Aww, man. I really wanted that one." I thought it was so adorable!

View of the patch.


After the pumpkin patch we stopped at one of the orchards. We were hoping it was a pick your own orchard, but it wasn't. We were hungry, so we ate lunch at their burger stand and shopped their farmers market for some produce. I brought home a giant jug of their apple juice. It so unbelievably good. I should have got more. We also picked up honey, apple sauce, apples, plums, and grapes. The grapes are so sweet. I haven't had grapes that good in years. And Celeste tried her first ever caramel apple.

After the orchards we decided to visit a winery and we had our first ever wine tasting. It felt a little weird at first, but it was pretty fun. They had a little kids table set up so Celeste colored pictures with other children while parents sampled the wines. They were running a special on their Sangiovese, buy one get a second for a $1, so I picked up a couple bottles.

All in all it was a really fun getaway day, and a great kick off to the Fall season. Which is after all, my favorite!

It's about Time!

I am probably the slowest blogger ever! I just realized it is almost October and I have forgotten to post the rest of Celeste's birthday party pictures. In typical Kristine fashion, I forgot to take pictures most of the party, and only have one very blurry picture of the cake! Oh well, it was very fun, and it was Celeste's first slumber party, so she had a blast.

Our guess how many game, and we also played  a guess the snack food (Celeste's idea) where we blind folded the girls and fed them goldfish crackers, oreos and twinkies. No, these are not our typical snacks, but I wanted to make sure they were foods little kids could easily recognize by taste!

Party bags filled with goodies like candy dots, lemon heads, lemon suckers, pink rock candy and pencils and erasers. (pink and yellow of course!)

For food we had a "make your own sub sandwich" bar, but I forgot to take a picture! I also made zucchini muffins, lemon iced sugar cookies, raspberry lemon tartlets and my grandmas awesome lemon berry jello mold (not pictured).

The only shot of the cake. It was pink batter inside...

Present time!

This is the fabulous fluffy bed we made for the girls...

but this is how we found them! Apparently they thought they saw a spider.

Purple Sweater Dress

While I wait to hear back from my instructor on my second critique, I thought I'd take a moment to share an outfit post from first critique. For awhile now I have been trying to dress up the jeans, and when I can avoid them all together. But I most definitely make it a point on critique days. I believe how you represent yourself carries over into how you represent your artwork. Even if this is just college, it is a good practice for the real deal.
So I have this lovely sweater dress I picked up while thrifting with my BFF in Seattle this summer. Honestly, I just liked it. I had no idea about the whole "Missoni" thing until the Target hoopla. It just happens to be ultra convenient that this is hip right now. More than one girl at work was like *gasp* is that a Missoni? And I can grin and say, "nope, six bucks and thrifted". I have been waiting for it to be cooler so I could wear it, and luckily last week it was. This week we're in the 90's. Lovely Fall!