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Thursday, January 26, 2012

My Dirty Wedding Dress

 So for those of you who don't know, it RAINED on my wedding day. Well not just rained, it poured! Yes, every bride's (or at least one having an outdoor wedding) worst nightmare! The only way to describe it is absolutely awful! That is not what this post is about though. So since this is what it looked like on my wedding day...

This was once a beautiful green space set up with chairs and an arbor for my wedding. Then the dang bottom fell out and completely flooded this space. Yes, all of the tan you see is muddy water! Notice the tree branches down on the right too. Many of our wedding guests had to stop on the side of the road on their way because the storm was so bad. Last thing, those are people out there in the rain bringing our chairs in. Bless them!

 ...my wedding dress got a little dirty. Right after the wedding, my mother-in-law found out how much is it was going to be to get it dry cleaned. Well it was well over $100. So I thought I would just wait until I got a job and then I would get it cleaned. So in the meantime, the dress was wadded up in a trash bag in the closet. It was too dirty to hang up with everything else. Well this "job" I thought I would have once we moved down has yet to come into my life...seven months later. So I decided to take matters into my own hands. I decided to wash the dress in the washing machine (yes, the tag says dry clean only)..oh well. So here is what I started with.


 So I am sure you can see that this dress is no longer stark white. There are quite a few noticeable stains. So I broke out my trusty stain remover, Shout, and started rubbing it on all of the stains and dirty spots.



 I let it sit about 5 minutes and then I threw it in the washer. I put it on the delicate cycle with hot water and turned on. Then I just had to wait. When I got it out, it looked great! It didn't come apart! Not even a single button fell off!



 Yay! It is clean! The lighting is pretty terrible but trust me when I say that this dress looked a millon times better! There were a few little spots I could see, but they were on the underside of the dress. So they didn't even matter. I was so excited. I don't ever plan on wearing the dress again, but I was excited because I found this picture on Pinterest that I hope to recreate one day.

via Pinterest
The picture explains it. You photograph your little girl in your wedding dress and then she can display it at her own wedding. So cute! Now hopefully I will get a little girl one day so that I can do this! Since that worked out I decided to do the same thing with my wedding shoes because they were absolutely terrible. They were white. Even when it isn't nasty outside, it is almost impossible to keep shoes white. So needless to say these shoes looked bad. So here is the before and after.

Before

Before

Before

After

After

So much cleaner!!!!
 The only thing that didn't come out were the dirty toe stains. Me being the foot-hating person that I am thinks that is gross too, but it was in the 90's that day so it was inevitable. The rest of the shoe looked a ton better and now I can actually wear them again and you aren't going to see the toe stains because my feet will be covering them up. I was really nervous to do all of this, but it turned out to be a success! I saved over $100!


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Monday, January 16, 2012

Ruby

 This past week, my family lost one of our pets. My family got our cat, Ruby, around 10 years ago. They found her by the dumpster at Zack's Food Rack, a local store near our house. She was just a little thing then. Of course, my little sister, Mattie, wanted her, so they took her home. At that moment she became a member of our family. She was always a very loving cat. She was also a little demanding at times. She liked to be fed at around 5 o'clock in the morning. Why so early? Well this is when my dad fed her when he was working, so she began to expect this no matter when it was. She also wanted wet can food, not dry cat food. Until you fed her she would meow to the top of her lungs like she was starving to death. Even after being fed, if someone else walked by, she would meow like this again hoping you might fall for it. Sometimes it worked...she got fed twice. We would always joke and say she forgot where she came from. Ruby also had really bad allergies and her nose ran all the time. The funny thing was, she would come up to my dad and let him wipe her nose with a tissue.  I always liked to call her Ruby Princess but her given name was Ruby Elizabeth {named by Madison- when she was little she wanted her name to be Ruby because it was her birthstone. Since it wasn't she named her cat, Ruby and Elizabeth just goes with every name..haha}. She wasn't in the greatest of health, and I know she is no longer suffering. I know that it is better off this way but it doesn't make it any easier to lose your pet. We will all miss Ruby. Unfortunately, the pictures that we have from when she was little are not digital and I had no way to scan them into the computer. Here are a few pictures I wanted to share.


Peeking in the window. She was probably hoping to be fed again or hoping to get a chance to sneak in the house
She always found her way to my bed if she ever got in the house.



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Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Back to School

Yesterday was not so good of a day for me. Ben started back to school. You would think after Ben being off at Clemson for four years, that I would be used to this by now. I am definitely not used to it. I know that now he is living here with me and he will come home when he is finished and I will get to see him. The only problem is now he comes home and shuts himself in his office to study :( So now I have to deal with the fact of being in the same house but still not getting to see him. I get used to it somewhat after the semester gets going but after having a break the reality hits hard again. I had nightmares the night before about being home alone. This didn't help the matter. If you know me well, then you know I hate scary movies or anything else the least bit scary. So much so, that when a scary commercial comes on the tv, I mute it and turn my head. I know this is quite childish, but if I don't do this then I am scared for weeks. So yesterday morning, I got up and was scared and couldn't do anything in the house because I was so paranoid. I am doing a lot better today! Over the past week, Ben and I tried to make the best of the end of his break. One thing we did was watch ALL 8 of the Harry Potter movies! Let me just say, these movies are not short. We thought we could watch them in a day or two. Then we checked the length of these movies and they were all 3-4 hours! So we spent almost the entire last half of the week watching them..haha. So the end of Ben's break was spent just being lazy. We both enjoyed all of the movies though! If you haven't seen these movies, I would highly recommend them!


 Sorry I don't have any other pictures to share. This is just one of those posts that has no pictures to go along.



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Wednesday, January 4, 2012

New Year's Eve

 For New Year's this year we went to Athens to stay with Ben's brother Andy. Our good friends, Hunter and Charlotte came to visit from Charleston. We went to Andy's apartment, hung out a little while, went and ate, and went to see the band, Reptar, at The Georgia Theatre. We had a great time just hanging out and getting to see our friends!






Thanks Ben for the wonderful picture...
Please excuse Ben's hand in this picture.







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Tuesday, January 3, 2012

A Short Re-cap of the Holidays

We have been pretty busy lately, so I haven't posted in a while. I figured there was too much for me to post about, so I am just going to hit the high points.

Jaxon visited Santa!


I made some Christmas candy for my family and friends.

Ben and I threw a Christmas party for our new friends!


I wrapped a few presents.

Ben and I had our own "present opening morning" before we went back to Gainesville.
Santa brought Clemson her own stocking this year and boy does she love it!
Cuties!


We had a small Christmas get together with my family, so the kids could open their presents.
We stayed with Ana and David Christmas Eve to see what Santa brought Jaxon.

A Big Buzz Lightyear!


Precious!
Then, we had Christmas Day brunch at Ben's parent's house. We even got to see little Piper!



After Christmas, my mom, Mattie, and I all went to visit my dad in Kentucky. We had a great time!

 We had a great Christmas and we hope you had a wonderful Christmas as well!


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