Beach Stone Placemats from Wrapables.com

(And the whole site is 30% off – just enter DAILYCANDY at checkout)

Another cool flickr.com related thing:

Flowers Colr Pickr

Looking for pictures of flowers in your colors? Just pick one from the color spectrum and this snazzy little tool will pull pictures from flickr. Have fun!

Blurb lets you choose from a bunch of different styles and create your own hardcover book. They have templates for cookbooks, photo books, baby books, dog books and portfolios among other things.

Seems pretty cool but sadly, it isn’t out of beta yet so no playing with it to see how well it works. It says spring for the full release so we shall see – may the reality live up to the idea.

To Have & Hold – Magical Wedding Bouquets

The Basics
An entire book dedicated to wedding bouquets – creative, absolutely not run of the mill, fabulous bouquets!

The book has only four chapters:
Spring
Summer
Autumn
Winter

Beyond that, each chapter has smaller sections on various featured flowers. Each flower is seasonally appropriate and generally available during the season they are featured under. A great place to start if you have no idea what is available in the middle of winter for your New Year’s Eve wedding or the middle of summer for your 4th of July extravaganza!

The Good
After a little discussion on the background and history of each featured flower come the pictures! The designers are very talented and did a nice job featuring each flower while pulling in unique accents to compliment and showcase them. I love that each bouquet is accompanied by notes on the typical costs associated with the pictured bouquet and information on the individual flowers in each one! How many times have you seen something you liked in a magazine and then spent way too long trying to figure out what flowers they used? They also spend time on various stem treatments – one of those wedding details that I love that is too often overlooked.

The Not Quite As Good and The Bad
Honestly, not much. I would have liked more bouquets but that being said, the book is over 200 pages long so there are a ton of ideas in there! I can see some brides being turned off by the amount of color shown – it is a very bright, colorful book. White is not the predominate color in this book so if you are afraid of color, might not be the best place to start for ideas.

All in All
Great book, great ideas. I don’t know many brides that would be unable to find something they love among the pages.

66. Make fresh salsa from scratch

I got a fab new cookbook called The Best Light Recipe today and decided to try out the Fresh Tomato Salsa recipe. Great recipe – mild enough for anyone but easily spiced up, chunky and very easy to make! All important things in a good salsa. The recipe from The Best Light Recipe:

Fresh Tomato Salsa

1-1/2 lbs firm, ripe tomatoes, cored and cut into 3/8 inch dice.
1 large jalepeno, seeded and ribbed (the heat is in the rib and seeds so reserve to spice it up later)
1/2 cup minced red onion
1 small garlic clove, minced or pressed
1/4 cup minced fresh cilantro leaves
1/2 teaspoon salt
Pinch of black pepper
2-6 teaspoons lime juice
Sugar to taste.

1. Place chopped tomatoes in a large colander to drain for 30 minutes. Layer on jalapeno, onion, garlic and cilantro. After 30 minutes, shake to drain off excess tomato juice and discard juice.

2. Transfer tomato and veggies to serving bowl. Add the salt, pepper and 2 teaspoons of the lime juice. Toss to combine. Taste and add the jalapeno ribs and seeds (if desired), sugar and more lime juice to taste.

Enjoy!

The thing about draining the tomatoes for 30 minutes? Keeps the salsa from being too watery. Great tip from a great book with all kinds of fun tips and hints like that!

That makes 15 things done, 1 postponed and 85 remaining! I am in a cooking/baking mood so I think Thing number 69 is next on my plate.

Ever thought of making your own wedding bands? The Wedding Ring Workshop lets you you design and then actually create your wedding bands under the watchful eye of a professional jeweler.

No locations in Kentucky yet but it looks like if you live in (or are willing to travel to) Southern California or Virginia in the US, or hop across the pond to London or Edinburgh you are all set!

I am all for turning Miss Manners on her lovely, fluffy white head from time to time but there is one rule of etiquette I never advocate breaking – if someone does something nice for you or gives you a gift, take the time to send them a thank you note.

Don’t know how to (or hate to) write thank you notes? A painless primer: How to Write a Thank You Note (via Lifehacker)

A few more comments on TY notes:

Just in time for Easter – Make your own PEEPS!!!

Mom taught me how to eat Peeps when I was little and there is only one correct way: remove the plastic wrap and leave them on the counter for at least 1 week. Eating them before the 1 week window is up is unacceptable. Nothing like stale Peeps for Easter or anytime of the year really.

Side note to Grace: yes, I posted this because of our conversation this weekend. Be the Peep!

I firmly believe that Easter candy is the best candy of the year. Does anyone really disagree with me on this?

Meghan and Matt by Chris Holley-Starling Photography

My model couple – wait until you see the rest of the pictures, you’ll see what I mean. And just a beautiful inside as outside – LOVE THEM!

BACKUP YOUR COMPUTER! DO IT RIGHT NOW!

I just got word that they were unable to save anything off my hard drive. That means I lost any emails sent or received from around March 1 through last week – it is going to take my forever to recreate that. I lost well over 1000 bookmarks. I also lost the last 2 weeks of work documents.

*sigh*

Bear with me as I try to recreate all that stuff, it is going to take a long time. Anyone have a wall I can hit my head against?

Seriously, go back up your computer. What are you waiting for?