Pineapple Glasses

There is something particularly dreamy about a city that embraces pastel-hued homes. Ones that sit along charming cobblestone streets, and finds a way to use a fun fruit as a humble sign of welcoming guests into its arms (pineapples to be exact, who would have thought?) A rainbow assortment of ‘buttercream-frosting,' ‘summertime peach ice-cream,' and ‘mint chocolate chip’ is about the best way to describe the colors the city boasts as its own. Charleston, S.C. is like no other. It’s a place where history once touched just about everything you see and the salty air seems to hint summer will always be around the corner, even when fall is quickly approaching us.

Being in Charleston recently on my last beach ‘hurrah’ trip, it made me begin to think about how we are just about approaching the ‘in-between.‘ You know, that time where we aren’t quite ready to say goodbye to our little white dress and our prettiest peach nail color, but when someone says ‘pumpkin’ or ‘chunky knitted sweaters’ - we’re all over it. So, I thought about now is the time to have some friends over to toasts the beginning of the end. Goodbye, sweet summer, and just about hello, lovely, fall. With a little inspiration from Charleston itself, I decided to create a DIY that involved super status-simplicity (so anyone can do it, as you’ll see sweet little ones enjoying!), entertaining, pineapples as our sign of welcoming fall (woo!) - and a little fun.

I ended up using all my Martha Stewart crafting paint, and I tried to find Collins glasses, but settled with the above, instead. After you have everything, the rest is pretty easy.

After you get done wrapping your tape (to keep edges even when painting), simply paint your bands - I chose gold for mind, but obviously it's up to you what color you prefer.

The stencil can be a little tricky, but perfection isn't really what this DIY is all about. I realized that real quick when I insisted on having a small stencils (whatever, right? ha.) If you want something a bit more polished- get a bigger stencil!

Also, make sure when you begin to take the tape off, to be really careful - sometimes if the paint hasn't set it will begin to peel! Just make sure to paint your second coat, and then follow by taking the tape off immediately. When you let the paint dry and then take the tape off - that's when trouble follows!

The rest is pretty simple - savor the rest of summertime (and secretly begin to wish for pumpkin lattes!)

Written by regular contributor Laura Joan White

Goodie Bags!

We decided to put together some goodie bags to send out to a few friends of ours in Los Angeles. We didn't want to send anything too bulky, or too much, we just the perfect amount of 'hooray' in the mail. After some thinking, we decided to send out a few vintage candy favorites - when we say vintage, we don't mean we dug out some candy bags from the 1950s. No, we meant our childhood favorite candies like - flavored sour straws, candy bracelets (who doesn't remember these!), and wax candy bottles. To top off the candy, we had amazing letterpress cards done by Metal Doily Press. They were absolutely stunning, and had the perfect touch of yellow - one of our favorite summer colors (that and blue).

Aren't these cards just lovely? We had a summer idea in mind, but didn't want to go overboard. While we wanted to celebrate summer with one last hurraw, we also wanted to invite our friends to see the new website in case they already haven't! So Metal Doily Press came up with this design, and it was absolutely perfect. In a few weeks, these arrived at our door ready to be shipped out!

We used Wilton goodie bags, and put custom Erin Condren stickers on each bag. And sealed each bag with washi tape that we got from Wishy Washi Tape.

A plate of sour straws (4 pounds worth). What more can we say...but yum!

Happy Summer! Enjoy these days before we enter fall (and that's a whole other celebration waiting to happen!).

Day in Fort Wayne

We're the Ihrie's - a spontaneous, fun having, fit-throwing, and cuddle loving family from Fort Wayne, Indiana. Thrifting, creating, baking, and DIY-ing is our sort of thing. Our ultimate dream is to renovate an old school bus or vintage camper and travel the country. We (Mom and Dad) own a rapidly growing photography business called Della Terra Photo. Photography is what we love to do, and it is so rad that we get to call that our "job". Capturing our life in images is so important to us, because we do try to go out of our way to do crazy and fun things with our children--we want them to remember that. In this post, you won't see anything spontaneous or exciting. This part is just us being "normal" - if that's ever a word that could be used to describe our family. Morning

Here's the hard part. Trying to get out of bed in the morning and only running on a few hours of sleep, because we (we being Tarah and Josh - aka Mom and Dad) have been up editing photographs all night. It's so hard to ignore the awesome sound of laughing kids--and then that inevitable scream of terror because "he/she is touching me." Usually it's because of "she."

Our morning's usually start out by Maxx (3-years-old) stealing someone's phone, or rolling over to him playing his online learning games on the computer. The kid loves technology.

Little miss Eila (2-years-old) usually starts and ends her day with a bath. Do not ask how it's possible to get that dirty--just accept that it is, in fact, possible. She loves to watch herself talk in the mirror. We don't know how this started, but it is literally the cutest thing ever.

Now comes the part where we chase Eila around for twenty minutes trying to get a diaper on her. Sometimes the floor gets the worst end of that...literally.

Art is something that we push very hard on our kids, and the awesome part is that they love it! It is amazing to watch them be so artistic and imaginative...even at such a young age, but then again, with weirdo parents like us, you kind of have to be.

Afternoon

We took a stroll downtown to grab some lunch. While on our way, we noticed a man taking a photo of the cityscape behind us and thought "there's nothing that interesting back there". We turned around and noticed a huge cloud of smoke and explosions (you can see it in the background of this image)...an old warehouse had caught on fire and the cars that was inside of it were exploding!

Pint & Slice is one our favorite spots to grab a bite to eat with the kids. Everyone knows us there - therefore, we don't have to worry about our ridiculously energetic kids running around like a pack of deranged hyenas.

This is the calmest you will ever see our kids in a public environment--and it lasted a whole thirty seconds.

To us, this is what makes up for all of those hard days and fights between our kids--seeing them love each other unconditionally. It is so incredible and heartwarming.

We're at the zoo! It is very convenient to live a few streets away from one of the best zoos in the country - we can't get enough of it!

Yuck! Goosebumps appear every time they must drink out of that god-forsaken 'lion.' Germs, germs, germs!

Night

The usual mad-dash to the grocery store before dinner which always results in someone breaking down. We try to feed our kids completely organic (and locally when we can). Oh, we forgot to mention that we are also vegetarian! Our kids have never consumed meat a day in their lives...even while in Mama's belly!

Frantically cooking enchiladas before our friends arrive for a combined family dinner! We are never on time.

Our great friend Jennifer helping us finish up our dinner setup. Eat your heart out Mexico!

Enjoying the great company of some great friends--otherwise heard as the guys talking about motorcycles and us moms yelling at the kids to sit down and eat their food.

Ah, bath time - savior of the day! Off to bed we go, and then up in the morning to do it all over again--but we would endure that kind of awesome chaos any day.

Written by regular contributor Tarah Ihrie