and the blurb winner is......

Drum Roll!

christylaura!

christylaura said... 

Would absolutely use Blurb to make a baby book for my little boy, Matthew! Love what they've showcased on their site. Thanks for the contest!

Congrats! Be sure to email me using the contact button above - I don't have your email address!

Thanks everyone for playing along - check out Blurb for some photo book ideas. I'm pretty sure I'm going to get the Istagram book - they're too cool!

Happy Thursday!

Last day to Blurb!

Today is the last day of the big Blurb contest - don't forget to get your comment in soon to win cashola towards a Blurb book of your choice!

Get all the details here

porch props

Happy Monday! (I figure if you say Happy along with Monday it will make me feel better that it's Monday...).

This weekend when I was doing groceries at Loblaws I found some cute lanterns in the I want everything here section. I picked one up for the front porch (only $9!) to put on my little side table. The table is pretty scratched up and doesn't really match out here so my plan is to paint it a light grey to match the grey in the pillows.

what a cutie!

And just in case you care, here's a view of one end of the porch - we moved the couch that was in the back. Now I can take little naps out here and I've worked out here from time-to-time too.

Here's the other end by the front door. Starting to take shape!

Hope you have a great week!

---

PS - Have you entered the giveaway yet?Contest ends this Wednesday!

pinterest: sewing

I thought it would be fun to do a little round-up of the stuff I've pinned on Pinterest lately. Let's look at some pins from my Sewing Stuff board:

Love this iPhone sleeve made out of a tie. Mark has a few ties I could do this with...

Source: etsy.com via Stephanie on Pinterest

Make your own tunic - love this blog!

Source: merricksart.blogspot.ca via Stephanie on Pinterest

Sweet pin cushions in vintage cookie cutters.

Source: simplysublime.typepad.com via Stephanie on Pinterest

Interesting apron!

Source: liveinternet.ru via Stephanie on Pinterest

This last one isn't really sewing, but I have an off-white table running looking for some pizzazz and I thought this one was cute.

Source: abeautifulmess.typepad.com via Stephanie on Pinterest

What have you been pinning lately?

Happy Friday!

---

PS - Don't forget to enter the Blurb giveaway!

a little birdie told me about this little birdie

So I'm not a fan of things with labels - you know shirts that say GAP on them or glasses that have big D&Gs on the arms. Not my thing.

This also goes for soap pumps. I like 'em plain. The problem is that I started using Dr. Bronner's soap a month ago and you're supposed to mix it with water I guess, which I did, and it was coming out so thin and getting all over the sink, driving me batty (breathe).

A woman at the park told me to get some foam soap and just reuse the pump with the Dr. Bronner's refill but again, I'd have to use a pump with a label (and I'm not a fan of most hand soaps on the market in general) so I just stuck with the annoying thin soap.

THEN on a blog post somewhere in blogland I learned about these birdie foaming soap pumps from Umbra.

I had to go to the mall to run an errand and while there I went to Kitchen Stuff Plus to see if they sold the pump. I ended up finding it in the bottom of one of the shelves and $3 cheaper than the site! Yay! I picked up two: one for the main floor bathroom and one for upstairs.

It works!

It's not the ideal pump I want in the bathroom (I prefer my white ceramic pump), but this will do AND it will help me save money on soap and save my sanity for the mess!

Saving my sanity is the utmost importance right now :).

---

Have you entered the giveaway yet? If not, what are you waiting for? Who doesn't want money towards a cool Blurb book? :)

giveaway time! blurb

If you like photo books as much as I do then you'll likely love this giveaway. The nice folks at Blurb approached me to give one lucky reader $35 to make their own Blurb book!

There are some pretty cool options to choose from, but the main one that caught my eye is the Instagram Book.

 How cool would it be to make a little coffee table book full of all your cool Instagram photos?

Another option is a cookbook for all you foodies out there:

Or you can do what the cool people of BlogPodium did and make a notebook!

Here's the deal: All you have to do is to visit Blurb and come back here to leave a comment telling me what type of book you'd make. That's it!

If you want extra entries you can also:

• Follow/subscribe to lealou by clicking that nifty blue "Join this site" button on the right
• Like lealou on Facebook 
• Tweet the giveaway using @lealou so I can keep track of your tweets

Be sure to leave separate comments telling me what you did!

The deadline to enter will be next Wednesday, June 27 so you have lots of time to think about what type of book you'd like to make! I'll choose the winner randomly and announce it on June 28.

***This contest is open to Canadian residents only - sorry to all my U.S. friends! **

Good luck!

father's day weekend

Opening home made cards

Leo with his 1940s new hair cut - thanks Dad!

Family bike ride - yes I rode my bike too - very carefully!

Fun in the pool

Horsing around

Playing with Grandpa

Yummy eats

Blackberry ice cream cake - yum!

This felt like a pretty special Father's Day. Mark got to spend lots of one-on-one time with Leo and my Dad happened to come into to town on Sunday so we had lots of fun playing and a bit feast. I'm sorry the weekend is over!

Hope you had a great weekend.

happy friday

Happy Friday! Mark and I managed to make it to the drop-in centre this morning where Leo's daycare goes every day. Today there was a Father's Day Tea. They made a bird feeder. It was so sweet to see the two of them working together. Well Leo didn't last long really - he wanted to run and play, but the five minutes they did work together was cute. I'm so happy that Mark made time to do this - it's these little moments that I love.

On the paint front, I pulled out my nifty Para Paints deck that I got from BlogPodium and whittled it down to two colours I'm going to test for the baby's room.

I decided I'm keeping it simple. I started thinking of a million things I could do to the room (stripes? chevrons?) and the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to keep it simple. Who knows I might add something later like a fun decal, but for now it's just going to be plain 'ol paint. I don't have the energy! :)

I'm really loving this really light mint colour or the light beige (although I'm leaning towards the mint). I'll see what I can find this weekend and test it out!

Have a great weekend everyone and Happy Father's Day to all the Daddies out there!

honey tones

My sister-in-law just sent me this - pretty darn close to the colours I'm using! Ahhh decisions!

Source: design-seeds.com via Stephanie on Pinterest

paint help for the nursery please!

Ok need a bit of paint help please!

Here is the room for the nursery (old pic - I've cleaned it even more and the crib is set up yay!). The walls are grey, but more blue than grey.

Here's kind of where I'm going for colours and I just don't think the blue/grey really matches that well. Especially with teal (the crib sheet I made is teal as well).

I think the walls should still be grey, but more of the colours in the flowers in the middle fabric above - so could be a browny-grey I guess??? Anyway I said "grey" to the hubs and he really doesn't want more grey in the house. He wants something different because the entire house is painted in one shade of grey or another..

So I was trying to compromise with grey and maybe add a fun stencil or decal or something. Or stripes? I was playing around with the idea of light teal and grey stripes, but I'm not sure I'm up for it.

Dunno - what would you do? Help!

just pouffy

I'm not going to lie, the heat is gettin' to me! Thank goodness it's been a bit cooler these past few nights because this belly can't handle it! (and thank goodness I live by the lake because honestly it's so much cooler down here than the rest of the city...)

On the first cooler night, I thought it would be ok to cook some chickpeas (I soak and then simmer dried beans) and then sew, which also means iron. Apparently it wasn't cool enough to do those things because I was sweating and complaining all night.

Oh well! Even though I'm not a fan of it, we're getting air/con next week I think so hopefully it will be a bit more comfortable for me to last the rest of the summer.

Anyway, I decided I would work on making a crib sheet. I'm 99% finished because I realized I didn't have enough elastic so I have to get some to finish it off. It was so easy, I'll definitely be making more... (more on that when I finish it).

The next project for the nursery is a pouf I think. I was going to go with the more Moroccan style round poufs, but I'm really loving these square ones from West Elm so I think I'll be making one of those. They're much easier to make too!

Here are some inspiration photos:

and some from Pinterest:

Source: thecre8tiveoutlet.blogspot.com via Sarah on Pinterest

Source: decoratingthedorchesterway.blogspot.com via Caysey on Pinterest

 

Source: apartmenttherapy.com via Leigh on Pinterest

What do you think of the square pouf? Pouffy enough for ya?

garden update + a colourful addition

It's amazing what just over a month can do to the growth of a garden. Well Mark had a bit to do with it... he's getting quite the green thumb! After I took the last pics, he basically went to work and started moving plants around and cutting back some of the over grown stuff. After a few of the big rains we've had his hard work has made all the difference!

And the garage is done! No more patchy grey spots... (I see there is some work left to do on the window there!)

Mark found all of these ferns behind the garage and moved them to the corner. They fill up the space nicely. He added this candle holder to the corner too as a little sculpture ;).

Last time I posted a pic of this section, there was barely anything here - now the hosta is ginormous! We'll definitely have to split that next year.

And our new addition that just came home tonight - our new sectional!

We've been wanting something bigger for a while now - although I really liked it, the small couch that was here before just wasn't great for both of us (plus Leo!) to lounge (it's now on the front porch - more lounging space!). Now we've got a place for all of us, plus guests.

We picked it from Abacus Furniture (you can see it from the Gardiner at Islington beside that crazy party store). Mark was eyeing a beige one for a bit, but when we went to see it we weren't thrilled about it. It just seemed...blah. I wanted some colour, so we took a risk and made the decision on the blue and we both love it.

The fabric is by Sunbrella so the quality is pretty good and should stand up to the elements (although we'll likely take the cushions in when it rains anyway).

We spend as much time as possible outside in the summer so this will be perfect for us to hang out!

Happy weekend y'all!