Projects and food!
Time for another update! I wanted to tell you guys about a few projects I have been working on and some yummy food!
Projects!
First off my diy project, which is one of my first big ones! The wall in my living room is big, which is great; but, it is also blank right now. So, I’m making a piece of art I guess you could say to hang on the wall! 
I saw this wall decal (picture to the right) on Michael’s website. But you can’t buy things online from them : ( and I couldn’t find it anywhere else online or in the stores : ( So, I decided to improvise because I really liked the quote and the fonts and everything.
What I decided to do was to stretch fabric over a frame and then paint the quote on it. My living room has a baby blue and brown thing going on so I used baby blue fabric and I am going to use brown paint. I went to Michael’s and got the frame pieces. They have quite a few different lengths of frame so you can customize the size of frame. I used 40″ and 30″ pieces. I would have wanted to go bigger, but the piece of fabric I was only so big. The pieces ranged from $2-5 so fairly inexpensive. I looked around on the internet and found this site that gave great instructions on stretching the fabric over a frame. You can get a fun patterned fabric, stretch it and then have a great piece to hang on the wall! It was relatively easy to do.
Here is my fabric stretched over the frame
I’m happy with how it turned out and am ready to move onto the next step: tracing the quote onto the fabric and then painting!
Another project I have up my sleeve for when I get back is finishing my room! I spent some time down in Eugene and cleaned up my room and found pretty much everything its home (isn’t that satisfying?!). Now I just have a few finishing touches and then I will declare my room done and be done with decorating the apartment…for now at least : ) When I get back and am actually done with everything I will post pictures!
Food!
First update on my garden! I harvested my broccoli and I wish I would have taken a picture, but oh well. It was yummy yummy and now there are smaller heads starting to sprout! So hopefully in a few weeks there will be more broccoli!! Next cucumbers! I LOVE cucumbers!! I mean I REALLY LOVE cucumbers! So I have been really excited to see them grow and I have even ate one!
Baby cucumber!! Last time I counted there were around 20!!
This was the one that I ate a few days ago! As my mom said, “Vine ripened vegetables are so much better then ones from the grocery store!” I couldn’t agree more!!
This leads right into my next food topic! When I had my cucumber I made a cucumber salad. I cut the cucumber up into strips lengthwise. 
For the dressing I used a vinegar I got in SLO at Farmer’s from Chaparral Gardens. The one I used was the raspberry basil vinegar and it is delicious!! I just put some of the vinegar on the cucumber slices and that was enough flavoring for me. This is partly because the vinegar is so complex and honestly delicious all on its own! I would really recommend checking out this booth at farmers because all of the vinegars are so good, they have samples and most of the bottles are only $10 such a great deal! I have also been using it in a simple oil and vinegar salad dressing, yummmm!!
Another recipe I tried out a few weeks ago. This one is a dessert called blackberry fool that is from Bobby Flay (one 
of my favorite food network chefs). The basic idea is layering a white chocolate blackberry whipped cream with macerated berries. Sooo good!!
In the recipe it says so mix melted white chocolate with the whipped cream. I had some issues with this part of the recipe. To have white chocolate so that it is able to pour and mix it has to be melted, to be melted it has to be hot, but that doesn’t really go well with whipped cream that needs to be cold to stay whipped. So when I started folding in the white chocolate the whipped cream started melting. I put it in the fridge, but ended up with a big chunk of hard white chocolate at the bottom of the bowl with whipped cream. The little that did get mixed in was little chunks. Maybe there is a trick of doing this and not having the whipped cream melt. However, I feel like the white chocolate is just going to harden so the next time I do this I might just chop the white chocolate chips into small pieces. Actually this might be easier to do by shaving white chocolate off of a bar. But overall it was really good, and would be even better with more white chocolate : ) Definitely worth a try, and I bet you could even use other berries. It is the end of berry season, but it is a recipe to keep in mind for next summer!
Other Updates
A few days ago I went up to Portland with some friends and it was a great time! We went to Pizza Schmizza and I had yummy Thai Chicken. Then off to Powell’s City of Books. LOVE this place and I got a few cook books! Seriously if you are ever in Portland you need to check this out. It is 4 stories and an entire block of books!! You can literally get lost and what a great place to get lost. Then we went and checked out a jazz club that Mel Brown and his band was playing at. They let minors stay till 9:30 and it was so great! I forgot how much fun it is to listen to live jazz and watch people who love what they are doing it. I can’t wait until I’m 21 and can stay the whole night and enjoy the jazz! Then we headed to the original VooDoo Donuts in downtown Portland. I love VooDoo, I think I might be slightly obsessed! After that we headed home, and it was a great fun filled night of exploring the city!
My mom and I are leaving tomorrow after she gets off work to go on a road trip and look at colleges for grad schools! I’m really excited to get to do this with her and have some quality mother-daughter time. Also I am going to be in SLO for the weekend since you can’t really tour colleges or meet with departments on the weekend. I’m pretty excited to visit because everyone will be there and of course to look at grad programs : ) I hope to be able to go to coffee and catch up with some people that I miss very very much
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Life in Oregon 