Decorations and Dessert

As promised, here are some photos of my fabulously fallish door front!  My favorite part is the wreath, which my grandma made me for my birthday a few years ago. 

This is where I get my craftyness from!

Meet Molly the Mum

And I tried a new dessert today.  They're called Chocolate In-Betweens, and I got the recipe from Lauren's blog Only From Scratch.  I made one change to it though.  I added 1/3 cup of butterscotch chips to the mixture.

Fall Has Arrived - For Me At Least

It's September!  Which, even though the leaves are still green and the weather has still been hot, means it's fall.  In my mind at least.  One of the first things I did this afternoon (after my two hour nap and posting my previous post) was change out my red, white, and blue wreath for my fall wreath and swap out my ladybug flag for a flag with pumpkins and leaves on it, then when I went to Walmart tonight I picked up a yellow mum.  Now my front door area is fabulous fallish!  I'll have to take a picture tomorrow to show you.  We're off tomorrow, which is quite nice.  But I often think what's more exciting than a day off is the night before a day off.  You go about your day as usual, but then you get to anticipate the next day and maybe stay up later without worrying about it.  And while the day off is nice, the nearer it gets to the end, the more you realize that tomorrow life returns to normal.  So, to celebrate fall and my day off tomorrow, I came home after running errands and made a cup of tea and put in my most favorite movie, You've Got Mail, and am currently sitting beneath a warm blanket, sipping my tea, enjoying my movie, and writing to you!  Hope you have a lovely Labor Day!

There are happy feet under that blanket!

Remade

I've been gone since Friday afternoon because we had our ministry team retreat this weekend.  As a student involved with ministry teams, the retreat was always my favorite part of the year.  It's such a great way to start the year - we get away from school, up in the mountains, and if you walk away from the weekend not knowing Christ better, than something is wrong.  Each year the retreat has a theme and project that goes along with it, and it's all set up by a movie, which we watch together Friday night.  This year the theme was Remade and the movie is The King's Speech.  Throughout the course of the weekend we learned that despite our sin and brokenness, Christ has remade us, making us worthy to be His children and calling us to spread his Glory.  The project is always worked on in stages, and when we gather for our last session on Saturday evening, the project has been completed, but the final product is a surprise for the students until that moment.

For the first part of this year's project everyone received a bottle, slips of paper paper and a Sharpie.  All of the bottles still had their labels on them and it was up to the students whether or not they wanted to take them off.  Then we were supposed to write different sins, struggles, fears, or negative ways we viewed ourselves on the slips of paper and drop them in the bottle. 

During the second session, students were given magazines and Mod Podge, Sharpies, and paint markers.  We were supposed to cover the outside of the bottle with the truths about who we are in Christ, now that we've been remade.  Then the students turned the bottles back in and Samantha and I went to work on them.  

We attached bulbs and light shades and turned them all into lamps.  Even though you could still see all of the junk written on the paper inside the bottle, the outsides were beautiful and had a new purpose, to shed light.  And that's just like us.  Yes, we still have lots of junk in our lives, but Christ has made us beautiful and given us a purpose.  We covered the stage of the Big Top with candles and the new lamps, and when the students walked in for worship the got to see the finished product, and it was a beautiful sight!  It was so neat to see them all together on stage because every single bottle was different and represented a different story.  And I love knowing that all over Johnson City, in dorm rooms, houses, and apartments there are now beautiful bottles that have been remade into lamps!

Below are some shots from worship last night, and the bottle that I made.

above and below: junk inside

truths from Scripture

Finished product!

Messy House Tour

When I made that post a few weeks ago about wanting to cover a wall in picture frames, one of the images I posted was from a blog called Young House Love.  It's about a young couple and they're journey of remolding and decorating their house.  From time to time they'll do a segment called Messy House Tour.  It started when followers would comment about how immaculate their house always was, and they wanted to prove that wasn't always the case.  So they'd walk around with a camcorder and prove that parts of the house were disaster zones.  Well this past week my house has become a disaster zone.  Namely my bedroom and bathroom.  So, inspired by Young House Love, I'm giving you a Messy House Tour in snapshots. Hopefully once I get it cleaned up, it won't look like this again until the races in March.

 

 Normally I make my bed first thing every day.  I think it's been made two or three  times in the past eight days.

 Exploding laundry hamper.  I was down to two pairs of

underwear before I did laundry tonight.

Eight pairs of shoes in the entry.