I have been an Olive & June customer since March 2021 and an Olive & June ambassador for just over a year. I LOVE the polish so much. Right now (late November 2022) is O&J's biggest sale of the year and I wanted to share a round-up of my favorite colors and products. Code PARTY25 will save your 25% sitewide and there are free gifts throughout the sale for orders over $40. (Through Sunday 11/20 the free gift is two full sized polishes). Links in this post are affiliate which means if you make a purchase through them, I receive a commission on the sale. As always, all opinions are m ..read more

OKAY! Dropping in to share huge progress from the past few weeks (which is good; our moving truck arrives with our stuff on 6/28!) First let's check in on the veggie garden (here's how it looked in April!) So healthy! We are going to hopefully be drowning in tomatoes and tomatillos this summer. And the pool is coming along! They completed the waterline and retaining wall tile last week. There will be steps on either side of that sharp drop off (there was some confusion between sub-contractors on that but thankfully it's happening.) We picked flagstone coping to go all the way around the poo ..read more

Ready for an update? Last time I shared I had a five month to do list. We have two months to go until move-in day and while the to-do list remains very long, there has been progress. Let's talk about it. YARD My parents have continued to clear areas of massive plant overgrowth and wow, you can tell. The yard is feeling so much bigger (and so much less overwhelming) as they trim back plants and clear random sections of wire fencing. Every time I am up there I work on the yard and love every second of it. It's so great to see the progress. My in-laws trimmed the vines in early March and sinc ..read more

I love doing these annual posts so much. This is my tenth round up, and it's still fun to think about a year in terms of cool stuff I tried. Some of the links below are affiliate. Most are not. Cripe Cottage | The most obvious one. We are so thrilled we found it and SO excited to move in this June. Six soundtrack | Remember when I was obsessed with The Other Boleyn Girl? (I blogged about it in 2006 for sure.) This soundtrack rekindled my love. We are obsessed in our house. I am hoping to take the girls when it starts traveling. Facebook Marketplace | I have found SO MANY gems. Blog post here ..read more

I spent all of 2021 practicing my wheel throwing technique. It was fun! I made A LOT of pots. I still have a long way to go but I am now pretty comfortable at the wheel and am now shifting some of my focus to glazing. I want to play with different glaze colors and do more detail painting in 2022. I am going to be "testing" my ideas on smaller bowls and then hopefully replicating some of the successes on larger pieces. Above are two different attempts at a watermelon bowl and an orange bowl. I want to share what didn't work and then what I tweaked to get better results. The base clay on all f ..read more

I am getting ready to take a year(ish) off of new work, which means my creative focus is going to be on making just for fun. I am so excited and this has been a very long time coming. I hope to share some of my personal projects here on the blog but I know for sure I will be sharing them a lot on Instagram. In an attempt to not spend all of my online time in 2022 answering "where did you get that _______?" I am writing this post. The requisite 800 disclaimers: Most of these tools you can find easily at your local craft or fabric shop (or ceramic shop if you have one nearby!!) Some links are a ..read more

We went up to Sacramento last weekend (the girls and Paul actually stayed the full week and I am headed back tomorrow for a wedding!) and were able to see some progress on the laundry room. Lots of updates and a surprise twist! Let's run through them for a One Room Challenge update. FIRST: we met with a contractor. He is someone we know through Paul's mom and we are excited to work with him on some small and HUGE projects over the next year. His team demo-ed the laundry room (and powder room) floors last week and we decided to have him install the new floors in both rooms. I am sad we will no ..read more

A few years ago my dad epoxied his garage floor. He sent progress photos to our family text chain and I thought "cool, Dad." And then a few months later we came up to visit and I saw them in real life and exclaimed "COOL, DAD!" They were gray with white, blue and black paint chip flecks and just looked so nice. Every single time I came up I was impressed with how finished the garage looked. It was a total extension of the house and just so clean. At the time, we in San Diego and had no plans to move. For awhile, I was thinking about having my dad help me transform our current home's garage fl ..read more

sources: cabinet doors, possible paint color, light, floating wood shelves, similar washer/dryer, utility sink, possible faucet option, 4" hex tile. This fall I am going to be working on our laundry room in the new house as part of the One Room Challenge. I have watched this challenge on Instagram for the past few years and am always hugely impressed by every transformation. I am sure we are not going to "finish" by the deadline (the lead time on the cabinet doors alone puts us at January), but I love a public goal so I am going to join in anyway. Our new house is the first time ever that we ..read more

framed vintage embroidery art! $22 in san diego So, I realize many people got on this train years ago and me writing a post about it now is the opposite of cutting edge. But hello! I am still going to talk about Facebook Marketplace because wow, I am finding good things. Whenever I mention FB Marketplace on Instagram I get two kinds of DMs. People either say "Isn't it the BEST?!?! I am so obsessed." Or they say "I can never find anything good on there. Tell me your secrets." I believe this post will be interesting to both types of commenters because as a fellow obsessed person, my second favo ..read more