Chris's Cilantro Corn

The Mister has an obsession. His obsession is with cilantro. I am NOT over-exaggerating this, I promise. He loves it. When he is making salsa, he will say ATLEAST 3 times during his taste tests "needs more cilantro" before he is satisfied. He loves to add cilantro to any recipes.

So, I tried to jazz up a vegetable that can be very boring. Corn, kept on the cob.

To make this corn, I chop up half a tablespoon of butter and rough chop about 3 sprigs (which is about 9 medium sized leaves) without the stems. Crack a little black pepper and salt over the top. Then, the corn, along with these lovely things, are rolled up in foil, thrown in to the oven at 350 degrees for about 20 minutes. I usually throw it in at the beginning of the meal and pull it out once everything else is finished cooking. You can even just throw this on the grill to cook.

The corn comes out juicy, brighter, and smelling delicious. If you are into substitutions, I have successfully substituted olive oil brushed on the corn instead of the butter. 

With fingers crossed, I served this to The Mister, hoping he would really love it. And he totally did. This is now Chris's favorite way to eat corn. So, if you know someone obsessed with cilantro, give this super easy veggie side dish a try!!

Making a Prayer Board

We are a family that prays. And we tend to write down prayer requests from others in lots of random places - in my journal, in the notes section on my phone, try to stash it in our head... But we decided that we needed to put these all in one place so that we could see them daily.

I threw around a lot of different ideas - a chalkboard, a whiteboard, a magnetic board... But then I remembered something that we already had (much the same way I remembered the room divider that we repurposed into our headboard). I doubted the decision to use this memo board because it would involve the use of paper... lots of paper. But then I though of the perks of that. We could spin around a prayer request and make it a praise. So, I started to transform an old gift that use to match my decor, but no longer does.

As you can see, this is a premade board. First, I looked at how it was held together and discovered it was just some light, tacky glue that held it together. I removed the hardware and carefully pulled off the back (which wasn't that difficult at all).

 Then, I carefully pulled off the fabric and the ribbons. The ribbons were attached with one quick stitch to the plaid fabric. A quick snip and the points came apart. But both of them were just held to the back with light tacky glue. Easy-peasy to pull off. I was very careful to keep the ribbon straight so that I wouldn't have to remeasure or anything like that to attach it back to my refinished board.

I ditched the red and black plaid fabric and kept the ribbon laid out on the back of the board.

Then, I pulled out the burlap we had for our wedding (you can take a peak at some of those photos here), got my hot glue gun and some scissors to cut that burlap to size. You can see  that nice foam and the cork board like board that it lays atop, now free from plaid fabric.



 Then, I realized I would be burning my fingers over and over because the burlap has those tiny holes... So I grabbed my stapler.

I stapled all the way around, pulling the burlap taut. I didn't worry too much about any ripples I saw because I knew when I hot glued the back on, those babies would be tucked away.

 Then, I moved the board on top of the ribbons, lined it up, and began hot gluing the ribbons in place.

Then, the back of the board went in place, and the hardware was screwed back in.

When I flipped it over, I saw that the ribbons weren't completely symmetrical, but after taking a peak at my before shot, I saw that before this was hidden by the plaid pattern on the fabric. I wasn't too worried or concerned about it to reglue the ribbons. 

Then, I pulled out my trust Cricut, some pretty paper that I thought would look good in our bedroom, and picked the Gypsy font. I glued my letters to the paper and then glued the paper to the top of the board. 

Above, you can see strands of twine peeking out from under the books holding down the paper to the board to make sure it glued well. I put that twine between the board and the paper and tied to to a ribbon, just so that there was something rough (and with tooth) that the glue could help the paper stick to.

What do ya think?? This design enables us to add just random pieces of paper that we may write praises and prayers on with ease. It is also covering our breaker box. We like it.

Upcycled Headboard

When I moved out of the dorms and into an apartment, it was fully furnished. But, I wanted to get some custom pieces to make it feel more like home. So I bought a room divider. At first, it's purpose was to help organize a room I would be sharing with a roommate. Then things changed and it was just me in one bedroom and another roommate in another bedroom.

Above is my old bedroom. You can see the room divider served as my headboard. I purchased it from Hobby Lobby, originally priced at $79.99 but on sale for $40. It followed us to our first apartment together and kind of hopped from place to place. When we moved to our new place, we decided to put a lot of stuff in a closet while we lived in the space and decided what we liked and wanted, decor wise.

We threw around a lot of headboard ideas, particularly ones made from reclaimed wood like I showed you guys here. But, after getting our dresser (I will share all of those details as the room comes together), we just didn't think that style of headboard would a cohesive room make. This prompted us to look at our other options and we remembered our faithful room divider.

Black would have been too dark, so we threw around some other color options and landed on a grey-blue idea. We looked at the options available in spray paint and found the perfect color- just what we had envisioned. Slate blue Rust-oleum. We bought 2 cans of the color and just 1 of primer.



 

Our reasoning for only buying 1 can of primer was that full coverage wasn't super important. The material of the room divider is like that of a basket, and you can clearly see the weave pattern. Because of this, we were confident that the paint would stick, but we didn't want to risk getting a different color by just painting the black material.



So I got to work taking the divider apart. While doing that, I saw that this piece wasn't super high quality. A few screw heads were bent and wonky, making it difficult to unscrew them. The metal hinges had also become discolored and bent up a bit.

 We have a garage now (yay!) so we set up a painting station and got to work. One coat of primer, 2 coats of paint, just following the drying time instructions of the paint.

Before, Middle, Finished

See that texture??

We LOVE the color. And the texture of the room divider. We only painted on side because there wasn't enough paint to do both sides (and the other side is up against the wall... sides and top are painted, though). 



I didn't reattach the divider because 1. The hardware was trash and 2. The pieces together weren't wide enough for our queen (even though they were perfect for my full size).

What do you guys think?? We still need some throw pillows and are debating a couple other additions to the new headboard (like maybe a big M hanging in the middle). But we will see as we live with it! Anyone one else use a room divider for things other than adding a separation to a room.