giveaway winner and wedding cake

first off, i would like to thank all of you for participating in my first giveaway!

i had a lot of fun doing it and i hope to have many more in the near future. 

thank you so much for entering and for sharing it with your friends.

&

the computer chosen winner is...

'melissa!'

please send me a note with your address and what color necklace you would like

 and i will send you a fun little package.

{several of you have asked if you were not the winner if i would be willing to sell you a necklace.

 i would happily sell these little pretties. they are $14 each. just contact me with your color choice and address and i will send it your way... 

i am hopeful to have them in my etsy shop in the very near future as well, but am not making any promises}

this month my husband and i celebrated our 1st anniversary. i must say that i never could have imagined a more perfect first year of marriage. we had so much fun and God taught us so many things about ourselves, each other, but most importantly about how much we need Him in our marriage.

 i have been so incredibly blessed!

 i also had NO idea that a year could pass so quickly.

 it seems like i was just planning the wedding.

i love traditions (old and new), so i really wanted to keep the tradition of saving the top layer of the wedding cake for our first anniversary.

our wedding cake was SO delicious!

it was a keylime-coconut cake.

and from the looks of things, i was not the only one that thought that it was AMAZING! 

i was so extremely lucky to know an incredible cake baker quite well

 {my very talented mother}.

she experimented for weeks to come up with a recipe that we all loved. 

not only did she make our wedding cake during the crazy wedding week,

but she told me that instead of saving our top layer of the cake and pretending to enjoy eating frost-bitten cake on our anniversary in the name of tradition, that she would just make us a fresh cake for our celebration. 

so this weekend we got to enjoy this cute little anniversary cake!

thank you so much mom. :)

and i think that it may have been even better after a year. ;)

if you would like the wedding cake recipe, <------ this is the link to my mom's blog.

and i was also excited to be able to use our cute little 

cake toppers

that i blogged about last year. 

i am so excited to make a set for our friends marianne and david for their wedding this summer!

i can't wait to share many more fun celebrations with you in the future!

my first give-away!!!

a giveaway!

so i have to admit, i have been rather ashamed at myself for my inconsistency with my blogging. 

i honestly intend to blog fairly frequently. i take pictures of things fully intending to post them... and life... procrastination... laziness...and exhaustion get in the way. but i really am going to try to blog at least once a week.

 so, in an effort to encourage myself to have a little more accountability with my blogging, i thought that i would do my first little giveaway. 

so, to each of my 11 followers, your odds should be pretty high! haha. ;)

i am giving away one of these cutie little pom-pom flower necklaces that i showed in yesterday's post:

{i will let the winner request the color of their choosing.}

the random computer drawing will take place at 12:00 PM on

monday, april 23, 2012 

{one week from today}

how to enter:

1. you can get one entry by becoming a new follower of my blog.

*if you are already a follower, just comment on this blog post to be entered.

2. you can get a second and third entry by sharing a link to my blog on facebook and/or twitter

(just let me know that you have shared it in the comment box below

 or else i might not know that you have shared it).

and hopefully this will help give me a little encouragement to be a little more consistent in my blogging.

"may the odds be ever in your favor" ;)

can't wait to hear from you.

~ norajoy ~

putting Pinterest to good use

I don't know if you have all discovered it or not, but not quite a year ago i joined the crazy addiction called

 .

for the first several months after discovering pinterest, i spent my evening hours "winding down" for bed, happily and rather obsessively "pinning" things on my pinterest boards. if you aren't familiar with pinterest, it is basically and online filing system. if you find a picture or article or idea that you like and think that you would like to remember in the future then you can "pin it" or file it away for later use. it is fun though because you can see what other people have "pinned" so you can "pin" their ideas as well. 

when i first heard about pinterest i didn't think that it would be something that i would really like that much. i mean, i have plenty of my own ideas, and i have google when i can't be quite creative enough... but once i finally decided to venture into this strange new craze called pinterest, i had a hard time finding my way back out of it. 

in fact, i spent SO much time "pinning" that i rarely found time to actually do any of the projects or make any of the recipes that i had pinned. after weeks and weeks of my online hoarding, i managed to get things into perspective and i started putting my pins to good use.

i followed this necklace tutorial:

pom-pom necklace tutorial

mine looked like this:

i made a bracelet out of an old t-shirt following this tutorial... {kind of}

braided t-shirt bracelet

this winter my husband and i had soup night on wednesday nights, so i was able to use many of the soup recipes that i had pinned. i blogged several of our favorites... though i have to admit that i inherited my mother's habit of changing every recipe before ever trying it the original way. we did find a couple new favorites on pinterest that didn't make the blog though.

italian wedding soup

buffalo chicken soup

 i found pinterest to be incredibly useful when i threw my very first Thirty-One

party 2 weeks ago.

If you haven't heard of thirty-one gifts, it is a company that has lots of really cute, very practical and affordable bags and organizing containers.
you can check them out here:
thirty-one catalog

i wanted to try some new appetizers and desserts for my party. i feel like i tend to fall back on the same familiar recipes for every event that comes along, so it was great to be able to just look through the recipes that i had "pinned" over the past few months and have lots of fun new options.

here are some of the fun recipes that i made for my party:

chicken wonton tacos

cheesy sausage wonton stars

antipasto kabobs

this recipe has been one of my favorites that my mom has made for years:

double decadent brownie torte

for christmas i received a williams-sonoma mini tart pan from my brother-in-law and sister-in-law. i had been waiting for an opportunity to use it, so i was very excited to try it out for the party.

i used the williams-sonoma crust recipe:

mini tart crust recipe

i made my very first lemon curd for in the tarts and i was really disappointed that it didn't set up right... so i will admit, i cheated and bought lemon curd.

and i have to admit that i was most excited to try out this punch recipe:

raspberry-pina colada punch

this claimed to be the only punch recipe that you will ever need.

it was very good, but i think that i will collect a few more. ;)

the party was SO much fun! and everyone seemed to enjoy the new snacks as much as i enjoyed making them (and i am once again indebted to my sweet mother for showing up early to help assemble the appetizers before the guests arrived. she is my hero when it comes to entertaining).

and finally, i have to share my very favorite pinterest moment.

my husband and i went to the beach to celebrate our first anniversary 2 weekends ago.

one afternoon it was rather cloudy, so we decided to do a little shopping. we walked past an adorable dress boutique. i glanced in the window and i stopped immediately!

i saw this dress:

  i had it pinned on pinterest about 3 months ago. i had tried to buy it then and it was out of stock, so i actually had determined that i was going to try to make it. i had thought about it many times in the last few weeks, so i was probably a little too excited to find it in that little boutique. 

my sweet husband insisted that i get it, and i was more than willing to comply. :)

hope that if you haven't yet discovered this fun little world called pinterest that you will check it out soon. and feel free to start following me. 

pinterest