More Snow!

We've had a pretty snowy winter this year. It snowed again in February. We had already been out of school for 4 days (two weeks prior) and now were out 3 more days. The first day was because they knew it would start coming down at lunch time and when it did it came down fast!

A lot of people went to work and waited for it to start snowing before they left. Since so many people got on the roads at one time and the road conditions were already getting worse Raleigh ended up similar to Atlanta's gridlock. This is a picture that was pretty widespread of Glenwood Avenue:

We got about 4" or so, but it was then topped with a layer of sleet. 

The next morning that frozen layer on top was no fun. The dogs couldn't walk in/on it very well so I stomped around in our backyard to break most of it up for them. 

We were out of school again Friday and it finally started to melt since the temperatures shot up to 50 degrees. And now it's supposed to be in the 70s at the end of the week! Crazy weather.

The Rest of January

I have been slacking a little in my blog posts mainly because work has been pretty busy. I need to upload lots of phone pictures though from the rest of January so here they are! 

We kept Speckles and Bailey for a weekend and they watched the Panther's playoff game with us... Vegas didn't enjoy it because her daddy wasn't happy. 

I brought my kids Krispy Kreme doughnuts to make exams a little bit more manageable :)

Vegas finally got her stitches out and was super excited to be able to run and play again. 

We grilled out with a bunch of friends and our "kids" napped together when it got late ;)

Enjoying brunch at Tir Na Nog before an early afternoon NCSU basketball game. 

It SNOWED. Not a whole lot but enough to keep us out of school for FOUR days and Trey got to work from home for 2 of those days. 

And Vegas and Tyson got to meet a new friend. Rick surprised Jennifer with a new puppy that a friend of theirs was fostering and so of course we went over for a play date. Tyson and Vegas both loved him. Tyson really wanted to play, play, play. Barley finally warmed up to playing like a maniac and had some fun with him. Then he got worn out and snuggled with the "mama" Vegas. 

Cornhole Boards

For Jennifer and Rick's Wedding gift, Trey decided to make them cornhole boards. Rick has become somewhat of a cornhole fanatic so we thought this would be a pretty exciting gift. 

He got started with some directions online. Then after getting them assembled we had kind of paused for a bit trying to figure out what to put on them. We didn't really want to do the typically NCSU boards and were trying to be creative. While looking on Etsy, I found a hop sticker that we could use as one decal but we wanted something different on the other one. I contacted the shop owner and he said it would be about the end of December but he could make us something. Well he had been bogged down with Christmas season and that didn't work out quite yet and then I got my vinyl cutter for Christmas so I figured we could figure it out ourselves! 

We decided that we wanted to do hops on one and grain on the other. The only issue is that I can only cut 12" wide, but basically as long as I want. So we pieced together 3 hops on one board and 2 grain designs on the other. 

 I was super excited about how the vinyl turned out and we got paint to match for the edging. Trey spent a few evenings painting the edges and sides of the boards. 

Then we applied the vinyl  decals and he painted on top of it all with polycrylic so you could still see the nice wood he bought. 

We were pretty thrilled with our vinyl application!!

The lighting is pretty terrible in these pictures but I'm proud of how they turned out!

DIY Map

Holy cow this post has been about a year and a half in waiting... sad. 

I posted a LONG time ago the supplies for my last DIY project of the summer and I'm assuming most people guessed what I was making. I had been wanting a map to pin the places that we have traveled together. They are surprisingly expensive so I decided to make my own.

 

I ordered this map off of national geographic of North America, I wanted a map that had the islands that we enjoy going to, but not the entire world so this one was perfect. 

I got an old cork board from my parents' house that was no longer being used and painted the trim to match the room that it is going in.

Preparing to paint

I had to trim the map just a little bit to fit and there was excess space on the top, so I took some of my extra burlap from my other projects and cut that to fit the extra space. 

I used mod podge to glue the top of the map to the cork board instead of having to use tons of pins to keep it down because it wasn't laying down to the board. It is a little wrinkly from the moisture, so maybe it wasn't the best idea in the world, but it works!

I started adding our pins and was super excited but still needed to do something with the top burlap. 

I was going to have a friend freehand paint it since I'm no good at freehand anything but just kept putting it off. Basically school started back and I hit pause. Well for Christmas I got a new Silhouette Cameo cutting machine and it's AWESOME! I have finally started to figure it out and complete a few projects. I used it to cut out what we wanted and used it as a stencil. Trey painted it while he was painting for another project and voila finally done! 

 

Can't wait to get more pins on the map!