Beautiful friends

A few weeks ago a friend asked me what my dream for my future is. I did not know how to respond. I have many passions but I could not think of any that could be potential careers. I went home and started praying and thinking about what I could possibly want to do once I graduate(which is so soon!). Well, for those of you who do not know, I love Photography. It is a passion of mine and feel called to capture the special moments in people's lives.

For the past few weeks, my husband and I have been working hard to build our own Photography business. It is still in the works. However, a big step in this process is building a portfolio. I had asked a bunch of my girl friends to help me out with this. The girls all took great photos and here are just a few of the keepers from our session yesterday:

Thank you, friends. You are all beautiful.

We will let you know how the business plan is going as we progress.

Thanks for following!

DIY braided headbands

Okay, you have got to make these headbands. They are super easy and cute!

Materials:
-2 safety pins for each braid
-6 strips of fabric at about 20 inches long and about 1 inch wide.
-5 inch piece of elastic (Got a pack at Michael's for less than $2.)
-a sewing machine would be easiest but since I don't have one, I used a needle and thread to sew the braids to the elastic.

Six pieces of fabric:

 Step 1. Gather three pieces of fabric and use a safety pin to hold them in place.

 Step 2. Braid the fabric all the way to the bottom and then use the other safety pin to hold it together.

Step 3. Repeat the above steps for the other three strips of fabric.

This is what your braids should look like:

 Step 4. Cut elastic for your headband.
*Note: Everyone's heads are different. So, I measured how much elastic to use for my headband by putting the braids on my head and then measuring how much elastic it would take to fill in the gap (Husband helped there).

 Step 5. Either use your sewing machine and do a straight stitch, or, use some thread and a needle and sew the elastic on top of the two braids.

 Step 6. Using your sewing option, sew the other end of the braids to the elastic. (In the picture below, you can see where I threaded the elastic to the braids.)

Here are some finished headbands!
The smaller one is for my little sister ( to be honest... it was the first one I made and I didn't cut enough fabric. Either that or I just have an abnormally huge head).

Here is what it looks like on! 

I hope this inspires you to make yourself you a cute headband. I am thinking they will be great stocking-stuffers!

You can mix and match any fabrics and it will look cute! The fabrics in the one I am wearing did not go well together at all but I think it turned out pretty well!

Thanks for following!

DIY dining room chairs

Once again, this is old news to those of you who are friends with me on Facebook.

This is a fairly simple, but time-consuming project. I did not realize how long this would take. My husband was out of town for a few nights and I wanted to surprise him with some cute newly covered dining room chairs!

Materials:
-New fabric measured depending on the size of your seats.
-Staples and staple gun
-Screwdriver or something to pry out old staples!
-Whatever materials it takes to remove old fabric from chairs(like screwdriver).

Here's what the dining room chairs looked like before:

This table belonged to my stepdad's grandmother. I think this was the original fabric.

Step#1. Pick out your replacement fabric!
Step #2. Remove the current fabric. This takes a lot of muscle. There had to have been at least 60 small staples in every chair. Friends helped me.
Step #3. Measure out the replacement fabric.
Here is how I measured how much fabric to cut:

Step #4. Attach new fabric to chairs and secure.

Old vs. new

 I picked two fabrics. I liked both of them and I was really happy with the results. I did four chairs in the floral print and the two end chairs in the other print. I wanted something different. It worked!

 Finished product!

I just love how the two fabrics turned out!

If you are thinking about recovering some chairs, do it. It is so worth the work. According to my grandmother, "it gives the table new life!"

Thanks for following!

Listen

to this...over and over.