Getting Our Garden On: Take 2

Posted on June 3, 2013 by Frame by Frame Style

So our first go around at a vegetable garden didn’t work out as planned. Only a few of our seedlings survived the cold weather.

After a few weeks of rain and cold, our garden looked like this:

All of the seedlings except for our sweet corn and some of our herbs didn’t survive. We were also left with a lot of tiny weeds.

To replace our failed seedlings, I bought a selection of mature vegetables and some garden soil from the Home Depot. These vegetables (and technically “fruits”) came in really neat biodegradable pots that you can plant straight into the ground. To learn more about the biodegradable pots and how to plant them, check out the Bonnie Web site.

In addition to the mature plants, I also planted new green bean and red pepper seeds. I planted the seeds in garden soil in hopes that the rich soil will produce better results.

Our sweet corn stalks are doing really well despite a few cold days. The stalks are getting pretty tall compared to when we planted them.

How are your summer gardens going?

Before I wrap up this post, did you notice anything different about our photos? I’m working on some upgrades to Frame By Frame Style and this is the debut of our new photo tag. Hope you like it!

Pretty Petunias

Posted on May 19, 2012 by Frame by Frame Style

I was very ambitious today when I made a trip to Home Depot to buy plants for our front porch flower pots. Instead of just coming home with flowers for the pots, I came home with all of this:

When I got home, I started arranging the flowers by the garage door to see how they would look. I’ve been wanting to add more flowers over there for a long time, so today was finally the day!

Once the flowers by the garage were arranged, I started working on the flower pots on the front porch. It was really warm out and by starting on the porch, I could hide in the shade until the sun dropped behind the house.

Once I was finished with the flower pots, I had a few extra petunias left over, so I planted them in the beds right in front of the porch.

Then it was on to the flower bed by the garage. I found a beautiful yellow/orange hibiscus bush at Home Depot. I debated between a rhododendron and the hibiscus bush but finally settled on the hibiscus. I really like the color and think it will look nice with our other tropical perennials.

Once I was finished digging out the clay (which took FOREVER) and planting the flowers, the final product looked like this:

Also, while I was at Home Depot today, I found new path lights! Our old path lights are faded and several of them do not light up anymore. We got them for pretty cheap, so I figured it was time to replace them. I also love that you can change the new lights from color changing to white light, not to mention that they look cool during the day.

After I planted all of the petunias and the hibiscus bush and installed the new lights. I took break to see how it all turned out.

I’m very pleased with the results of my gardening day! Every year, we add a little more to our gardens. I love how they are looking this year. I can’t wait to see everything in bloom! Our lilies already have buds, so it’s only a matter of time!

Up next for our gardens: new mulch!

Quick Christmas decorating project and poinsettia ornaments

Posted on December 17, 2011 by Frame by Frame Style

Need a quick way to decorate your home for the holidays? If you have leftover wrapping paper and a few frames, you can put together fun Christmas decorations to set around your home.

Remember the wrapping paper frames that are sitting on our kitchen island?

With a quick change of the wrapping paper, we have Christmas frames sitting on our island.

You can change the paper throughout the year for different holiday decorations. If you receive a gift wrapped in beautiful paper and you can’t bring yourself to throw it away, why not use it in a picture frame?These frames are great to put in bathrooms and guests rooms. They are a nice holiday touch without taking the time to decorate every room in your house.

I love this project because it took me around 15 minutes this morning to switch out the wrapping paper in the frames. If you would like to read more about my wrapping paper frame project, visit my earlier blog post here.

And if you’re looking for a few inexpensive Christmas ornaments, you can make Christmas poinsettia ornaments.

First, cut a paper towel or toilet paper roll into 3/4 inch strips.

Next, take each strip and use your fingers to pinch the ends. Holding each end, push toward the center of the strip to create the poinsettia petals. If not, they will look more like daisies as seen above.

Next, lay out four strips and put them together in a star pattern and then take another four strips and cut slits on each side of the strip. With the four slit strips, hook the strips together until you have a finished flowers that look like this:

There should be four petals on the bottom and four on the top.

If you would like to add the centers to the poinsettia, you can use Q-tips cut in half, or you can leave the flowers as is. Finally, spray paint your flowers in your choice of color. I chose a deep red because I love red poinsettia.

Once your poinsettia are dry, you can hang them on your tree with string! I used the flowers above to make a recycled wreath for an office competition. It’s a great way to repurpose paper towel rolls.

Happy Decorating!

Pinterest and reorganizing my office

Posted on August 1, 2011 by Frame by Frame Style

I’ve been hearing more about more about the Web site Pinterest, so I decided to try it out and link it to my blog! Here is my Pinterest site where you can find my inspirations and favorites.

http://pinterest.com/frmbyfrmstyle/

It’s still a work in progress, so keep checking back and I will continue to add more content. I’m also going to come up with better names for my boards, but as for right now, I’m having writer’s block when it comes to great names. It will come to me, somewhere random, I’m sure. I always find myself jotting things down on post-its or running to find my iPhone to jot down an idea. This is probably another good reason for me to join Pinterest. I found this article on Real Simple’s Web site that talks about using Pinterest for decorating ideas.

http://simplystated.realsimple.com/2011/07/11/pinterest-may-help-your-decorating-add/

Aside from joining Pinterest today, I also reorganized my office. I usually find myself doing this when papers and office supplies start stacking up and all of the clutter starts getting to my OCD. Because I spent about an hour yesterday shredding the junk mail that stacked up by the paper shredder, I focused my energy today on sorting through the random boxes sitting on my bookshelves. I have a habit of storing things in boxes and forgetting where I put them. About a year later, I go through the box and it’s like finding buried treasure. Although sometimes, the buried treasure would’ve been more useful a few months prior. When I was actually looking for it.

So after rummaging through boxes and throwing away trash and other useless items, I organized what was left and placed the items in their new LABELED homes! I also reorganized my books and added a few more that were laying around the house from my last visit to Borders.

The brightly colored boxes came from my sister-in-law. She used them for my bridal shower to organize and display different games and such and then after the shower, she gave them to me. The black and white box came from my best friend. She used it to wrap my Christmas present last year! How clever! Most of the boxes and baskets in my office were once given to me as part of a gift or to wrap my gift. I love giving (and receiving) presents in boxes and baskets that they can reuse again.

I rearranged some of the boxes and supplies on my other bookshelf for a less cluttered look. The bright green basket also came from my sister-in-law. She gave my bridal shower gifts to me in a green basket and a pink basket! They came in handy while I was planning my wedding and I used them to transport some of the wedding decorations. The gray and white box is from the Container Store and I used it to carry wedding papers and labels for our favors. Now the boxes have a home in my office storing supplies and other items.

For me, it’s always easier to work in a decluttered, organized office. It’s calming. Not to mention now that I’ve labeled the boxes with my handy-dandy label maker, I can easily find what I put away.

If you’re in the market for a label maker, I really like my Dymo Letratag.

Reusable wedding centerpieces

Posted on July 25, 2011 by Frame by Frame Style

Getting married? Just married? Or looking for centerpieces ideas that you can reuse later? When choosing centerpieces for our wedding, I wanted them to be fun, beautiful and most importantly… reusable.

My husband and I got married last year in a beautiful restored barn that was completely decorated in french country-style and didn’t require much work when it came to picking out the centerpieces for our wedding. Below is a picture of our hall sans flower centerpieces. I came to find out after the wedding that our florist didn’t arrive until around 1:30 (she said she would be there around 10 a.m.). Our wedding was supposed to start at 2:30 and our centerpieces were not finished. Thankfully, my mother-in-law quickly ran around and completely our centerpieces before everyone arrived. These little things happen on your wedding day, but the result (as long as you do not panic) can still be beautiful. And no one even knew… including me! But I digress, back to the centerpieces…

photo credit: http://www.bensphotos.com

Unfortunately we didn’t get any photos of just our centerpieces at the venue, but they turned out beautiful. For half of the tables, we chose tall clear glass vases with glass beads and added with fresh-cut gerbera daisies to them. On the other half of the tables, we placed white lanterns with tea light candles. Our colors were bright pink, bright yellow and bright orange with splashes of green and blue. Below are our bouquets. They incorporated three of our five (yes five) colors.

photo credit: http://www.bensphotos.com

At first, you might be overwhelmed by the thought of using five colors, but I tried to bring them all together in subtle ways. All of the colors reminded me of a bright summer party and that is why I chose them. To incorporate all of our colors together in each of the fresh-cut flower centerpieces, we filled tall clear vases with blue and green glass beads and then added two or three fresh-cut gerber a daisies in pink, yellow or orange. In the vases, we also added glass fish to make it look like there were fish swimming in the bottom. Because I ultimately couldn’t decide if I wanted just flowers or just candlelight, or both, every other table had a white lantern with star cutouts in the top. To create candlelight, we placed a LED tea light inside each lantern. We used the LED tea lights to keep the lanterns from being too hot to touch and the tea lights were reusable. Win!

It was completely intentional that I chose centerpieces that we could use later. The purpose behind the centerpieces was definitely the usability. I wanted them to be both fun and functional. They also played really well into our the atmosphere of a fun summer party. Now the centerpieces serve as decorations for our home, so and every time I see them, I am reminded our how much fun we had celebrating with family and friends on our wedding day.

Since our wedding, I also added a red lantern and a green lantern. Here are a few of the lanterns in our home:

Because we had sixteen tables, I had plenty of leftover vases and lanterns. I’ve used every vase and lantern somewhere throughout our house. Here are a few of my favorite ways I reused the vases:

I also put together some DIY arrangements for our escort card table. I arranged miniature pinwheels like flowers in brightly colored pails filled with floral foam. After I arranged the pinwheels, I covered the floral foam with leftover green (paper) easter grass and then found little white flowers in my stash for making floral wreaths. The finished products now sit on top of my office bookshelf:

Finally, we chose favors that we could use later if we had extra. We picked daisy wine bottle stoppers in our colors and gave them to each adult (each guest under 21 received a package full of Jelly Belly jelly beans in our colors). Now when guests come over to our house to enjoy a bottle of wine, we get out our wine stoppers and sometimes we even send them home with their own stopper.

Designing everything for our wedding was so much fun and I love that we can continue to enjoy pieces of our wedding everyday. It was also my own little way of being green :). The only thing we didn’t keep and incorporate from our wedding were the fresh-cut flowers. Everything else is somewhere in our home!