Spring is in the Air

It's funny, when the first signs of spring come I immediately get this thrill of excitement in my stomach. It's always the same, and it's always because I'm SO excited about summer vacation. I know what you're thinking- 'But Jessica, you don't have summer vacation anymore'. You're right- in fact, summer is beginning to be the busiest season for me (so goes the life of someone involved with the wedding world) but I just spent so many years of my life counting down the days until break. I think it's now a permanent reaction. And I kinda like it.

Even without having three months of doing nothing to look forward to, there's just something about the first warm day that just makes me so happy. I just love being able to open the window for the first time after the long winter and fill the house with fresh, new air that we haven't been breathing since last October. It's so clean and fresh and peaceful. It makes the first few spring days some of my very favorite. Today was definitely one of those days. I sat by an open window, listened to Pride and Prejudice on audio and sat and designed a fantastic invitation. What could be better?

On a side note, the invitation I'm currently working on is really fun to make! The bride is a very unique person and I'm really excited about the invitation she's letting me create! I'm not quite done yet (she still needs to send me the wording for the invite, and I need to make some inserts) but I just have to share what I've got so far because it just cracks me up (the wording will go on the right)-

Yep. I love creative people. She showed me a picture of a quilted pillow with this flower created from all kinds of scraps of crazy fabrics and asked me to create an invitation to match. I was pretty much in heaven- find all sorts of patterns and mismatching colors. It's not even necessarily because this is really a style I'd go for, just because it's so different. And she provided much of the creativity in the project- a job that is usually left for me to do alone. (And trust me, people usually expect me to suck every last drop of it out of my brain while they just sit and watch.)

I guess the end of the story is- spring is great. I know it's not officially here, but I'm still really happy it's coming!

Real Utah Weddings

Since about last July I've been writing this Utah wedding blog (you can see it at affordableutahweddings.com). It basically just started as a whim to get more traffic to my invitation site, but then I started having a lot of fun doing it and-if I may say so myself- it's gotten a pretty good response in the blog reading world.

I currently write articles about good quality wedding services that are affordable (think of those stories you hear about someone who knows someone who has an aunt who likes to do floral arranging from her basement. No one knows about her because she doesn't charge enough to make enough money to advertise. Well, now there's a place where she can get a free article written about her design so her business doesn't have to spread just by word of mouth)

It's been a lot of fun to search people out, and I plan to keep making that the main focus of my site, but I'm always looking for ways to expand. Why? Mostly because I'm crazy. And because the more people go to my site, the more advertising money I get! (yes, there is a selfish motive involved, don't be fooled)

So here's my latest idea- and I need your help with it! I'm slowly putting together a page of my site that has pictures of real weddings. It'll be like a bridal magazine where they show all the little details of a wedding- except this one will have pictures of just Utah weddings that were done by normal people on normal wedding budgets. It will include all their great ideas and about how much each service cost and a link to where you can go to hire them for you big day.

The main problem is, well, I need weddings to talk about! I talked all about our wedding, and my cousin so graciously allowed me to write about hers. You can see the beginnings of the site be going to affordableutahweddings.com/featuredweddings/. So here's my big favor-

Can I talk about your wedding? (or someone you know, if it's been a while since you were married!) Did you have any great ideas or fantastic finds when you were planning? Is there something you're always suggesting when you hear people are planning a reception? It doesn't even matter if it's just one service (maybe your reception location was super great) or you went to a wedding that had a ton of great ideas and you want to suggest all of them!

If something just popped into your head- please email me so I can write about it! If you have any pictures, those would be great- but if you don't that's ok too. And if you just think that your wedding was the coolest of all the weddings ever- then send me pictures of the whole day! I'd really love as much as you could send!

I'm excited to see all your input! Here's my email- jessicaageorge at gmail.com

Happy Valentine's Day!

Sometimes we crack me up.

**note- for Doug's sake I would like to ensure you that this is the Valentine's Day dinner I requested.**

Jessica George Design

I'm VERY excited to announce that after a million hours of working on it- my website is finally updated! Get excited!

To see the new look go to www.jessicageorgedesign.com

(to my photographer friends... I may or may not have taken most of these pictures in my living room with my 5 year old point and shoot camera.... don't judge me!)

The Living Room I Dream Of....

I'm kind of ridiculous when it comes to decorating our house. I seriously keep myself up at night thinking about how I want to rearrange our furniture and if Doug tries to talk to me while we're sitting in our living room, half the time I'll respond with- Oh... sorry... I was thinking about where we could put a bookcase in here......

So the other day my aunt called me about this fabric sale- a whole room of home decorator fabrics for $2 a yard! I finally got the fabric to make the curtain I've been thinking about. I spent all day last Saturday sewing it and am pretty excited about the results... now if we can just make it up to Idaho to finish that bench we started over Christmas we'll have the perfect little reading corner. I'm pretty excited.

Oh, and I'm not much of a pet blogger.. but while I sewed I pulled out my spring wreath and put it on the couch so I'd remember to hang it up (I know it's February and not spring yet, but I can pretend can't I?). Georgie spent the whole afternoon in the middle of it and I thought it was cute- so here you go.

Mrs Dransfield's 3rd Grade Class

One of my best friends from BYU now teaches third grade up by Draper. Once a month she lets me go up there and teach art. It's pretty much the highlight of my month every time! I've learned a lot about the level of art a 3rd grader can do! There have been so many things that have just amazed me (they are SO good at looking at a picture and recreating it!) and some things where I'm like- why don't you get that yet? (pencil shading. It's a lost cause.) It's been a lot of fun and has gotten me to think about all the things I do in art so that I can figure out how to explain them- something that I really enjoy.

This month her class has been practicing their class play to perform next week. I went up there on Wednesday to help make a corner of their classroom into a jungle. I taught the kids a few pointers about how to draw animals and we let them draw till their hearts were content while Jill (I mean Mrs. Dransfield..) and I worked on making a butcher paper rain forest. We had the kids hang up their animals in the forest when they were done. That's personally my favorite part. You definately have to click on the picture to see their animals close up. They did such a great job!

I'm so excited to go see them perform next week!

Here are some of their costumes- Jill and I made them hats to wear so they'd look like the animal they were playing.

Happy Groundhog's Day!

Here are some pictures of our 3rd annual Groundhog Meatloaf making experience. This year instead of making one huge groundhog (check out the pictures from last year) we did our own little ones. It worked out a lot better... mostly because we didn't have to wait three hours for it to cook!

You'll notice I made a shadow out of ketchup behind mine... I'm really looking forward to that one year where the ground hog doesn't see his shadow. I don't actually remember that ever happening in my life- though I still get excited every year in case it will. I'll cross my fingers for next year.

Free Movie Mondays!

I love getting free stuff! Here's my new favorite-

Redbox sends out a code (through a text) every Monday for a free movie rental! It makes a fun little family night if you ask me!

Today's code is 25ch63

To sign up to get a text every Monday go to- http://www.redbox.com/Help/Signup.aspx

If you don't want to get the text, it looks like there's a lot of people who just post the code online. Just google something like - "free monday red box code for 2/9/09"-change the date each week of course- and you should be able to find it every Monday.

Happy Movie Watching!

Cousin Dinner

Somehow, by some miracle, six of the seven children in my dad's family had a baby with in about a year of when I was born. I have all these great cousins my age-it's made for some pretty fun family reunions my whole life.

There are a bunch of those close cousins who live in Utah and on Monday we had a bunch them over for dinner- Julianne and Matt, Heather and Kevin and Camille. We've been meaning to do dinner together for so long now (I think it's literally been years..) and it was so fun to finally do it!

I'm still kicking myself for not taking a picture (though I'm pretty sure this blog is full of random pictures of people sitting around our kitchen table... because we like to cook for people... so I'm sure you can all imagine what the picture would be like!). Doug had the greatest dinner idea- I highly suggest it! We made a salad and boiled up a bunch of pasta (a task that took me all of 10 mins) and then requested everyone bring their favorite paste sauce. It was so fun! We got a delicious fresh, homemade pesto sauce, some Olive Garden Alfredo (who wouldn't love that?) and this amazing zuccini shrimp stuff that Camille learned how to make in Italy. YUM! It was so delicious and so easy and a lot of fun to see what everybody would bring. I'm definitely going to remember the idea next time we have people over!

Doug and I have set a new goal to actually invite family over more often. We live so close! It's so ridiculous that we don't see each other more often. So all you cousins out there who are reading this-get ready to be invited soon!

Christmas from the Maryland Staceys

My family does the whole pick a name thing for Christmas, and this year Nathan and Alisa had our name. They gave us such a fun gift! Alisa is a professional photographer and has some of the coolest photos- I was really excited when I realized I could request some for our walls! The top picture of the Kirtland temple is one she did- she gave us a bunch more and it's been so fun to figure out where to hang them.

To go with her pictures, they sent us this mix to make homemade pretzels. I guess they live by this Amish bakery that makes the most amazing pretzel dogs (who knew a pretzel dog could be so good!) so they went and asked for a mix and they whipped this up for us. We had a lot of fun spending our Saturday morning making them... and eating them :) They really were SO yummy! I'm definitely going to request they bring another mix to our next family reunion so we can enjoy them again :)