Christiana Childers Photography Blog

We had our home group over for dinner this weekend again.  It really is one of my favorite things to do.  We had such a great time that the neighbors up and down the block commented on it the following day.  Now that is a party! My cheeks still hurt from laughing.  We had a tacofest.  Here are some photos from the night -

Ben has been working hard to get our wall of windows and doors finished for the party.  I love how it turned out!

I made Whoopie Pies for dessert!  I’ve never made them before and will definitely be making them again.  The ones with Oatmeal have a Bacon-Maple filling.  Yum!  I’m not kidding!  You can find the recipe here.

But the yummiest dish of the night…these cheeks here -

Doesn’t the wall look so pretty?!My friend Dawn grabbed my little camera and took some great shots of the night.  I made a collage of them -

Oh!  They are going to kill me for posting that!  So long world!

I like to cook.  A lot.  I love the menu planning, the prep, the presentation and, of course, eating it.  One of my favorite things I do is cook for my homegroup a few times a year.  We had a Valentine’s Dinner last weekend and I wanted to show you what we did.  So fun!

First, I was inspired by my trip to NY where a lot of the window displays and store decorations where made out of old books.  So I bought this book at “the Boutique”  (that’s my code word for Value Village!).  I love old books and I kind of hate to tear them apart especially when someone like Vern J Cole has written in it claiming it as his own in that cool old fashionedy writing..

Ah well!  So I made invitations by tea-staining an old sheet I had.  I then printed out the invite on an iron-on transfer to the fabric and sewed it to one of the book pages.

For decorations, Lora and I made paper flowers out of tissue paper and some more pages.

We also made some lanterns out of sewing book pages together -

Now onto the food!!  Well, at least the soup.  I forgot to take photos of the rest of the food but the soup was my favorite!  Here’s some photos of the beet soup in progress (note: you might die from saturated color! Did anyone else hear me channeling Sue Shoop just then?  One day my mom will read my blog and see all these references to herself…)

I made a second soup – a pea soup and then we put them side by side.  Ben made it look pretty (he’s way better at that than me!) -

Kari took couples photos of everyone.  Here’s ours

And one last photo that I couldn’t resist posting…

If you think you have the best friends in the world, well, your wrong.  I do .  I had to do a quick post on the party my friends threw for me on Saturday night.  As my birthday is on the shortest day of the year (like being four days away from Christmas isn’t lemon juice in the paper cut enough!), my friends had a “Big Night” party for me!  Remember that movie?  It’s about an Italian Restaurant set in the 50s.  If you’re a foodie like me, you’ll remember!  Anyway, they made it all Italian themed in my friends garage (which we call the Garage Mahal -  nothing like MY garage!) Here are some shots from the night…

Is that cake the best or what?!  I tasted great too!  Greg, you have to leave a comment on who made the cake!

My nickname is Sugar, btw…

Ah, Bono.  A birthday isn’t complete without you.  Sorry you couldn’t make it this time…

Here’s me feeling so grateful and humbled by the toasts.

Time for cake!

I wish….what could I possibly have that is better than this.  I love you all so much.

I feel a twinge of sadness as I say goodbye to summer like you do when you say goodbye to a good friend who you loved to have visit but didn’t get anything done while she was here.  So now we are back to the schedule of school which means that I get to go back to walking in the morning!  Yeah!  Lora and I go on a walk most mornings that, up until a few days ago, was laced with beautiful juicy blackberries.  Hmm, blackberry pie!

We also celebrated G’s birthday and I had to share this one with you because I thought it was a great idea and it was a big success!  Ben came up with this one, actually.  He suggested that we have all the girls over for breakfast on the morning of G’s birthday.  We gave prizes for the best bedhead.  Which is perfect for G because G regularly has THE most impressive bedhead you’ve ever seen.  Hands down, bar none.  I’ve started a photo collection dedicated to the record of her bedhead.  Here’s a recent one.

The girls really got into it and had a big time.  

They also decimated 3 pounds of bacon!

And last but not least!  We are now the proud owners of a new puppy!  We are over the moon with him.  His name is Blue.

Can you get over the cuteness!

Happy Fall!

I’m going back a little bit for this post as the baby that this shower was celebrating is now in her third month.  Here she is a few weeks old…

Isn’t she sweet!  So I hosted a shower for my dear friend Kari – we met in HS, went to college together, were roommates in college, in each others wedding and now we are neighbors!  Could you ask for anything better?!  Anyway, I wanted to use photos in my decorations because, well, that’s what I love. I collected a few baby things from friends who are in the baby stage and took photos of them then printed them out on thick paper and made decorations out of them while also adding some fun paper in there.  Here is the result -

I couldn’t let the paper scraps go to waste so made little flags out of some skewers I had on had and stuck them into the cupcakes.

All in all, it was a great little party and I just love using photos in new and unique ways!

I did a photo shoot this weekend that I’m so proud of and I’m dying to post about! One of my favorite photos of my life has come out of it. But I have to wait until the first of June as it is a surprise for the family.  Obvisiously, they know I took pictures of them but they can’t see the final product because it is getting rolled into their house remodel which is being done Trading Graces.  Trading Graces is a whole post on its own. It’s so exciting!  I can’t wait to tell you all more soon!!

Meanwhile, I got to go to an Fashion Show called “Sunny Mood” with some local designers in Seattle on Friday which was really fun!  The designers where uber talented.  I’m not much of a high fashion gal so I was really there for the art but I did really like what I saw in the fashion show.  The venue for the show was so cool also.  It’s called Sole Repair on Capital Hill.  It’s what I always wanted in my dream home which looks a lot like a warehouse apartment.  Exposed brick walls, giant metal beams and a funky huge roll up window in the front.  My friend Neece Clark did all the art for the show (and this is how I knew about the show).  She had some stunning paintings up and it is so fun to see her work evolve.  Just when you can’t imagine it being better!  I’m fortunate to own some of her art and this show made me want even more! ”Honey, would it be OK if we sold one of our cars to buy a painting?”  I’m almost there.

I was also so impressed with the floral design at the show.  So creative!!  Here’s a photo I took on my iPhone of my friend Mary and the dress form bouquet.

Isn’t that clever?! And isn’t Mary the cutest thing?!  The floral designer is Meghan Stoller (meghannaehr@hotmail.com) and her business is called Mum.  Now I kind of want to have a wedding so I can have clever flower arrangements done by Meghan.  “Honey, we are selling the car and getting married….again.”

We have some friends who moved for work, by work, to Paris (including a paid for flat in the St. Michel area!). I know, right? Whatever! But, let us set aside our jealousy for a moment because;

1.       It couldn’t happen to better, more deserving people.

2.       This blog entry isn’t about overcoming jealousy, remember? Oh right! On to our project…

So I hosted a party to send them off in style! I had just been to Paris a couple of months before so I printed out on plain ol’ paper two photos that said “Paris” to me,  took some random glasses and bottles that I had, and put them together for the display you see in these photos.

I just slid the photo in between the inside jar with the flowers and the outside glass/jar.

My favorite thing is making decorations out of nothing (i.e. FREE) and this really was.  The velum was the only thing I bought.  I bought four different sheets of printed velum and turned the right side in so that you just saw the outline of each design coming through.  I cut each velum into strips the height of whatever glass or jar I was covering and then taped it into a cylinder.  I then wrote French words or phrases (found on the internet – sadly I don’t speak French) on strips of paper and taped that over the velum.  Dropped a votive it and, well, voila!

Another quick note:  I didn’t have enough fruit to fill the bowl so I took a smaller bowl and turned it upside down in the big bowl and piled the fruit onto so it looked like it was full.  See, I’m really cheap!

Adieu!