July 2015 – Loving My New Simple Life

Most of my life I have loved the color yellow!

In the past, I have had a yellow front door, and when country decorating was so popular, I had a yellow and white checked, wallpapered kitchen.

Even with changing styles, I have not let go of it!

I now have settled for using yellow in my living room and dining area. The white sofa with the yellow drapes works happily, for me, especially with the floral print on my dining chairs and matching toss pillows.

I think I have mentioned and shown you in the past that I absolutely love toss pillows. Pillows are an inexpensive way to change and update any room.

I like to bring other simple yellow things into the room when I can find them.

Found this distressed yellow clock at Hobby Lobby when all clocks were 50% off!

Our home is small and our budget, even smaller! I really cannot do a bunch of decorating and updating in every room, but oh how I have learned to embrace what I have in my home, even the messes. There is beauty in taking care of what you have, and of course, in appreciating what you have! It took me a long time to realize that!

During my growing process, I know that everything doesn’t have to be perfect in life, or in our homes. Much work to be done on the rest of this life of mine, but today I took a big step by sharing with everyone a bit of my home, feeling proud of it….it is beautiful to us!

Today was a perfect summer day, hot and humid, so I made a pitcher of lemonade, photo above. Tall glasses, filled with ice, and garnished with “yellow” lemons. So refreshing, and a treat for us when taking a break from our yard work. I have included my favorite lemonade recipe at the end of this post. Invest in a wonderful glass pitcher!

Yellow will always be somewhere in my home, it’s brightness, joyfulness, like bringing sunshine into our lives!

Love you all so much, enjoy some lemonade today!

Simple lemonade recipe:

Ingredients:

Bag of lemons squeezed to 1-1/2 cups of lemon juice

1-3/4 cups of sugar

8 cups of water

Directions:

In a small saucepan, combine sugar and one cup of water. Bring to a boil and stir to dissolve. Allow to cool to room temperature and then refrigerate to chill.

Remove seeds from the lemon juice, but leave the pulp. In pitcher stir together chilled sugar syrup, lemon juice, and remaining 7 cups of water.

Enjoy!

We were invited to my sweet niece’s new home for the 4th. Just being with my sister and her family is always a reason to celebrate for me. They are all so dear and such an important part of my life!

On Sunday, July 5th, I decided to bring out my red, white, and blue for a small celebration with “my family”. Of course, we had another reason to celebrate, looking forward to watching our USA women’s soccer team playing in the final game later that evening.

I set a small table on our back porch with a few special colorful, holiday items.

The utensil bags were easy to put together using a cut off small brown bag and adding a band of star paper and a glitter star.

I love the red and white dotted ice cream cups which were perfect for our dessert, Greater’s chocolate chip ice cream. Greater’s is a famous ice cream shop in our Cincinnati area, and now famous across the country.

Greater’s is also a candy maker and uses the broken chocolate pieces for the “chips” in their ice cream selections. Some of the “chips” are small candy bars!

If any of you ever visit the Cincinnati area, stop for some ice cream at Greater’s. They not only offer chocolate chip, but also chocolate-chocolate chip, mint chocolate chip, and the cherry cordial chip is one of the most popular.

I brought out the beverage tub I recycled last year at this time, and tried a Martha Stewart idea, filling balloons with water and freezing, using to surround the drinks.

It worked great. They froze hard and did not break! I like the idea that you can choose any color of balloons for the occasion.