lavender sugar scrub

As I mentioned before, I'm throwing a bridal shower this weekend for my sister-in-law-to-be.  Being the DIY-er that I am, I just had to make homemade favors to send home with all of the guests!  It came to me as I was singing along to Carrie Underwood and exfoliating in the shower one day.... I would make homemade lavender sugar scrub and cutesy it up in little jars!  Ohhhh, I was so excited.  Here is what I came up with:

Lavender Sugar Scrub

1 cup white cane sugar

1/2 cup vegetable oil

4 drops lavender essential oil

1 Tbsp vitamin E oil

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Mix ingredients together in a bowl.  Pour into a glass container of your choice, decorate as desired.

I used 4 oz jam jars that I bought at a home/garden/farm supply store, but you can use any container you'd like!  I got about 3- 4oz. jars out of this recipe.

Happy DIY-ing! :)

what girl doesn't love jewelry?!

Whoa, it's been a crazy one in our household lately!  I feel like we've hardly had time to sit down in the last week or so.  It's kind of a nice change of pace though... come those dark, cold, boring January days in Finland while the hubby's at an away game, I'll be dreaming of these busy days with so much to do!

I'm pretty excited tonight because I just got home from a jewelry making class.  I started making jewelry a month or so ago after my 2nd miscarriage and surgery that followed.  I really needed/wanted a hobby that was all my own and thought that making a few fun pieces would be fun. 

So, I loaded up on supplies at Michael's and other craft/bead stores and began to wing it.  I've really impressed myself with how well I've done so far, and more importantly, I've been having fun doing it.  It's been very theraputic for me and has definitely taken my mind off of the events of recent months and given me back some of the drive and motivation that I lost during that time. 

Since I've enjoyed it so much, I decided to sign up and do a class or two at a local bead/jewelry store.  It was a Wire class, which is what I've really wanted to get better at.  She showed us lots of tips and tricks and we made a pair of earrings to take home: 

Not exactly the beads I would have picked out myself if I had the choice(especially since they're like different colors!) but I'm pretty proud of myself.  I've considered starting a little business out of it (with J being my investor, of course :) )  so we'll have to see what happens.  I even joked about renting a place at the Christmas Market in Helsinki this year... haha!  The 2nd part probably won't be happening.... but stay tuned, I may just have some nice jewelry pieces for sale soon! :)

Here are some of my first pieces:

I'm busy planning my sister-in-law-to-be's Bridal Shower for this weekend (along with a million other things goin on), but check back soon- I'll be writing a post about the shower favors that I made! (no, they're not jewelry :) )

new camera... woo hoo!

We've been in need of a new camera around here for a while now.  The plan was to wait until we got home for the summer since everything is much cheaper there than it is in Finland.  But... we caved and got one here.  Between some frustrating camera experiences lately (the Winter Classic, Stockholm trip... among others) and the fact that not getting it until we got home meant that we wouldn't have a good camera to use for our EuroTrip, we decided that it was worth the little bit extra that we'd spend on it here.  Plus we know it will be a great investment for the future, with all of the traveling we will be doing and for when we have children :)

We had a fairly good idea of what we wanted (a Nikon) and have several friends who have various cameras in the Nikon SLR series... so we price shopped around a couple places and bought one the same day.  The same place that had it on sale also had it with the dual-lens set, which is almost always cheaper than buying the 2nd lens separate.  The biggest challenge was asking questions about it- most sales people do speak English, some better than others... but aren't always ready and willing to explain the whole camera and it's features to us (understandable... I don't exactly have my Finnish camera terms down either!)  But, we got really lucky, and the guy we asked to help us was from the UK.  SCORE!  We picked his brain for a while and ended up taking home the Nikon D3100.  The manual, on the other hand... is in Finnish.  Thank goodness for the PDF file on the website (what would we do without technology these days... seriously?!)

After taking many pointless pictures around the apartment, of the dog, the half dead flowers on the table.... I decided to take it to the game Thursday night to give 'er a try and test my skills.  I can't tell you how much fun I had taking all of the pictures and editing them on the computer.  Looks like I may have found another new hobby!! :)

Here are some of the pictures I took.  I'm pretty proud of how my first sets came out considering I barely knew how to turn the thing on 5 days ago! ;)




Helsinki Cathedral




Senate Square in Helsinki




A row of colorful apartments on a street in Helsinki




View of the sun setting over the Baltic Sea
along the Helsinki coastline




Our precious pooch, Maddie




The hubs at work




Who knew I was a sports photographer?




Lots of cool action shots




#2 in your program, #1 in my heart <3