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!

This weekend we took a little trip down to Portland to visit my cousin Ruthie.  Isn’t she the cutest?!We had a big time.  Portland is too cool!  Here’s a sampling from the weekend -

Also Ruth taught me a new way to dye eggs and you know how much I love eggs!  Here are some photos of the process -

First you peel some onion skins off of purple and yellow onions and then soak them in water.  We also did purple cabbage but it didn’t work too well so I wouldn’t recommend it.

Then you wrap the egg in skins -

You then roll up the eggs in some clean scrap cloth.

Bind the whole thing up in rubber bands and boil like you would hard boiled eggs-

And the result! -

Cool, huh?!

I love doing Ukrainian eggs at Easter.  I haven’t pulled all my stuff out for this year but I wanted to display mine and the girls eggs from previous years but I’m running out of ways to display them.  Whenever we find real bird’s nests I keep them for this reason but I still don’t have enough nests!  So I got the idea to make some out of shredding some books.  It was really easy and worked better than I hoped!

I started by shredding up an old book (one that I’ve been using for some of my other projects).  I found some bowls I thought would make nice nest shapes and then covered them with plastic wrap.

I just used a little bit of flour and water and started adding strips to the flour mixture and then placed them over the bowls.

It was about here that I thought, “Yeah, this is never going to work…”  But it did!  I just left them to dry and they popped right off and made beautiful nests.  Here are some photos of my eggs…

I found these sand blasted glass eggs at a garden store.  I thought they looked cute in a couple of the real nests that we had found.

I’m sure I’ll be posting more about eggs soon!  Happy Easter everyone!

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…

So our decorations are up!  I’m rather chuffed with how my house looks so I thought I share a little of it.  It’s mainly just candle groupings with greens that I gathered from outside with stuff I had around the house.  Good thing too because we spent a whole heap on brand new outside lights as EVERY SINGLE BRAND NEW LAST YEAR strand was out!  Grrr.  So we thought we’d go for the commercial ones this year to hopefully avoid the waste next year.  Anyway, here’s my entryway -

I got the candles at the Dollar Store!  I love seeing this when I walk in the house.

Here’s a couple more around the house -

I’ve always been fascinated by smoke ribbons so when I blew some of these candles out I thought I’d try to photograph them.  I won’t tell you how much time I wasted trying to get an “even better” shot…. I think smoke ribbons may be my biggest photography challenge yet!  The camera didn’t know where to focus so I took it off auto focus but then I wasn’t fast enough…blah, blah, blah…it was hard, people!  Here’s what I did get -

Cool huh!!

One more thing… One of my dearest and oldest friends (not that she’s old, our friendship is old…wait, that’s doesn’t sound right either! Errr my really good friend, Kari!) started a blog called MamaBloo.  She is an amazing writer, mother, teacher and friend.  If you’re a mom, you’ll love her wit, observations and writing on mothering and life.  Check it out at www.mamabloo.com.

This post is definitely in the “Things That Make Me Happy” category. Last week so full but it was packed full of so many of my favorite things.  I have a lot to be thankful for.

This tree makes me happy because it is in a special place for me.

I think I’ve taken a photo of this tree every year for several years.  Once a year my girlfriends and I go away to my friend KA’s parents house to pick our book club books for the year.  This year we just gave up pretending to be a book group and we are now just a group would loves to be together and stay in our jammies all day and sometimes a few of us read the same book.  I’m thankful for my girls (who’d all kill me if I showed a photo of them all in jammies so I’ll stick with the tree).

I’m thankful for cozy moments like this in front of a real fire.

I’m thankful for my home group.  We celebrated Ryan H’s birthday on Saturday.  There is nothing better than getting together with friends over a yummy meal.  Here’s a few shots from the evening.

Lora decorated the table for me.  I just love it! 

I love it when people pick up my camera and take shots.  Thanks Ryan B for this one.  Look at JJ waiting for his turn to hold Baby W.

I’m also so thankful for my family, wonderful friends here and abroad, love, laughter, adventure, U2 tickets !, new babies in my life, my home, my camera…and on and on.  The Lord has blessed me richly and I am humbled by it.

Happy Thanksgiving!

*I just re-read this and thought I should mention that I’m not trying to be all code-y with KA and JJ that’s really what we call them!  But I never use kids names in my posts so will always say W, C, P or whatever for kids.

Boo!

Girls eggs from this year

Tools of the trade

 I miss you Lisa!