Break From Blog-Land

I have taken a break from blog-land. First of all, blogger has been freaking out on me lately and it has gotten really annoying, and second, I have been crafting my butt off!

I have received so many custom requests from my Southern Girl Weddings site! I am very excited about my new venture and I love working with all 0f these lovely brides to be! In fact one of the brides that I worked with received her bridal hair piece in the mail and then blogged about it. She included pictures of her wearing the hair piece and everything! I have to be honest, it made me tear up a bit to see those pictures. No one has ever sent me pictures of them wearing one of my designs before and it really touched me. You can check out her post here.

I have also been adding more inventory to my shop. Here are some of my favorite bouquets:

Purple Peacock

Eat Drink and Be Married

Meant to Be

I hope that I will be able to balance my shop, my life and my blog, but if I am absent again for a while, you will know why!

Free Business Cards

Overnight Prints is offering 500 Business Cards for FREE. Yeah, that's right I said free! You only have to pay the shipping price which came out to be $9.86 for me.

They are one-sided business cards and you can even upload your own image. Here's what mine look like:

I am super excited and I can't wait to get them!

Featured on Etsy's "The Storque"

Southern Girl Weddings was featured on Etsy's Blog "The Storque". I am so excited!

Here is the bouquet that was featured:

It is truly one of my favorites. I love the magnolias and how realistic they look and feel.

This morning I noticed that I was getting an unusual amount of views and hearts, so I looked for a reason why and saw that sure enough I was featured. You can read the article here. It is a lovely article about weddings and even though I am already married, I just love looking at wedding pictures and finding inspiration for some of my bouquets!

Eclair Cake Recipe

I wanted to share a recipe that I made the other day. I found this Eclair Cake recipe on FoodNetwork.com. It is so delicious and easy to make!

Photo from FoodNetwork.com

Ingredients:

• 1 (1-pound) box graham crackers
• 2 (3 1/4-ounce) boxes instant French vanilla pudding
• 3 1/2 cups milk
• 1 (8-ounce) container frozen whipped topping, thawed
• Frosting
• 1 1/2 cups confectioners' sugar
• 1/2 cup cocoa
• 3 tablespoons butter, softened
• 1/3 cup milk
• 2 teaspoons light corn syrup
• 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

Directions

Butter the bottom of a 13 by 9 by 2-inch pan. Line with whole graham crackers. In bowl of an electric mixer, mix pudding with milk; beat at medium speed for 2 minutes. Fold in whipped topping. Pour half the pudding mixture over graham crackers. Place another layer of whole graham crackers on top of pudding layer. Pour over remaining half of pudding mixture and cover with another layer of graham crackers.

For frosting, blend together sugar and cocoa. Add butter and milk, mixing well. Add corn syrup and vanilla. Stir until creamy. Cover cake with frosting and refrigerate for 24 hours.

i ♥ faces Giveaway

Okay, I definitely have a blog crush on i ♥ faces! The photography on there is amazing. There are some really talented photographers and I can spend all day looking at pictures! They are having a giveaway and wait for it, wait for it...

They are giving away Tamron 18-270mm VC zoom lens. This lens totally blows all of my lenses out of the water. It is crazy sweet and I would LOVE to win!

You all can enter the giveaway here.

Taking it for Granted

You take water for granted until you don't have it - or at least I did! Due to the drought that has plagued this part of the country (Texas), the land has dried so much that it is contracting. Our soil here is mostly clay so anyone familiar with that knows that it causes the houses to shift which can be very damaging. Our house has moved so much this year that there is a gap that spans a couple of inches between our door jam and the top of the door! We were just talking about putting a soaker hose around the house to run at night to prevent the house from shifting too much and breaking any pipes. We are under a water restriction and any watering has to be done at night to conserve.

My husband wakes up this morning and goes to take his shower. He comes back into the bedroom and wakes me up asking if I had any water pressure when I showered last night. I tell him that it was normal. He said that he had absolutely no pressure and was worried that our nightmare had become a reality. When it was light enough to see outside, he went to check our meter to see if it was running indicating that we had a leak somewhere - thankfully it was not. One of our neighbors (who happens to be a fireman) saw him checking the meter and asked if we were having problems with our water pressure. Apparently they were too. He thought there might have been a fire in the neighborhood last night and they had to use the water so the levels were low.

I get up a couple hours later and have absolutely no water at all! I guess I had always taken it for granted that there would be running water whenever I needed it. Luckily we had bottled water which I used to wash my hands and brush my teeth with. I leave the house to go to work and the city has the road that I usually take to work blocked off. It turns out one of the water mains had broke because of the ground shifting. Thankfully they had it repaired by the time we got home from work. We desperately need rain.

Vote for Me!

If you have some time, I would appreciate it if you would go vote for my photo in the Cat's Corner photography contest. Here is the link: http://amazoncat.blogspot.com/2009/08/competition-entries-time-to-vote.html.

My photo is #1.

Thank you!