Welcoming Spring... 🧚🌿 whimsical baking, nature-inspired crafts, & simple Easter home decor!

Happy springtime! It is currently the spring equinox and naturally we started the day by making a flower crown. It had been so long since I made a flower crown and I thought what better day than today and we've built out a little spring equinox agenda full of crafts, DIYs, decorating, fun recipes so I am very much looking forward to today. I love celebrating the start of each new season. I feel like it's just super comforting and makes it just gives us something to look forward to and makes life more fun frankly so very much looking forward to this and my Grammy is actually in town because it's spring break. She's a school psychologist so she gets the week off and her and my mom are going to come over for a little dinner in the garden so we have some fun recipes to try and I'm just really excited to welcome the spring season together. Now to make our spring wreath we've been able to reuse the faux florals from previous years and I believe last year I added that little birdhouse to the wreath. I'm not totally sure if I'll do that again but we'll play around with it. We made these pressed flower Easter eggs probably four or five years ago at this point. They're so cute. I still enjoy them a lot. We have our big golden egg that we used for the beehive DIY recently and now I'm repurposing it as a little egg storage until we'll pull it out Easter weekend and then mommy will put on her pink headband. I also love this little egg where you could put a gift or something in so maybe I'll use that for the Easter basket but for now I'm just going to store it away until then and this adorable tablecloth I thrifted last year I think. I'll probably just use this the morning of Easter as well or the weekend of Easter. Last spring we had a cardinal couple make a nest in our elderberry tree and I've been saving the nest ever since. Once they left we trimmed down our elderberry tree because it was taking over the yard and I preserved the little nest and it just kind of lives up here and I like to look at it every so often because the intricacies of it are truly remarkable. I'm so in awe. I really hope some more birds will make nests in our yard this spring. The other evening my friend Liz hosted a spring craft night and we made these adorable little nests. We added dried floral around the nest and then these eggshell candles. So cute. I'm gonna wait to light it on Easter. I also made these yummy peanut butter Easter eggs for the little craft night and I filmed the making of them because I wanted to share that with you because the recipe looked a little intimidating because they're so beautiful but it actually wasn't too tricky. So I'm going to insert that footage now and I think I'm going to make that recipe again for Easter because they really were so yummy. Agreed. Brandon had one the other night and he said agreed. Look how delicious they look. Okay here's how they turned out. Some are more beautiful than others but overall super fun to make. They're absolutely delicious and I love how they turned out. I have these little mini bird nests that I put a few in to really add to the look. I've been working on Wells and Palmer's Easter baskets and I'm having so much fun with it. This is Palmer's basket that we've had for many years and I'm giggling at the fact that it's like three times the size of our son's Easter basket but hey he was the first the first baby in the house technically. So in his basket I found these fun treats at Trader Joe's. They like look like artisanally made sugar cookies. They are very fabulous. Let's see what flavors. They have peanut butter, dried eggs, flaxseed, coconut oil, salt, some coloring but they use like beets and green tea extract for the coloring so I liked that and then this fun squeaky toy that Wells and I picked out for him when we were at Home Goods. It's so cute and then I found this cute felt dog figurine and it reminded me of Palmer so I know our son is gonna absolutely love it and what really sold me is that he has green rain boots on and we just love our green rain boots as well so he's part of the family and then I have these refillable quilted eggs that I purchased last year and I plan to probably this year just put like little notes or something. I'm not so sure yet but I think they're so cute and then this egg or this egg this book is really neat. It basically shares what's in the egg so it's educational about different animals and I'm actually learning something new as I'm flipping through it. It says a baby platypus is in this egg and it's one of only two types of mammals to lay eggs. I had no idea so I think this will be a fun one to flip through. Good milk proportion today. I started having one shot of espresso instead of two so I still need to work on my ratios. Clearly that is not the perfect color. I like it much darker. Still yummy. Apparently preserving the flowers in beeswax is as easy as dipping them in melted wax which seems too good to be true but let's see. In an effort to make this experiment as simple as possible, I'm simply going to microwave the wax and then dip our florals in our melted wax and hope for the best. We shall see. I'm gonna do one of these cute little sunshine flowers first. Okay I feel like this will be more impactful with a flower like this with the whimsical delicate petals. Okay it changed it a little bit but still nice. I didn't do enough wax to cover the stems obviously but that's okay for now. I also don't have a plan on what to do with these. I'm just experimenting here but I suppose the opportunities are endless now. We could make a little banner with preserved flowers. Oh the chamomile kind of closed in on itself. Let's see if I can redeem it. Okay that one did not work out so well. Let's see if we can try again with the chamomile. I feel like this flower is the most exciting. Consensus is that this is a semi-successful endeavor. I think these more- oh this looks like a butterfly actually. Okay the wheels are turning. I feel like we need to make some sort of butterfly something with these preserved flowers because wow that one really looks like a butterfly. I'm gonna try to arrange the petals like little butterfly wings before I dip it and then we can definitely- oh my goodness this looks just like a butterfly. It even has the little antennas. Wow wow wow. This one wasn't that exciting. Okay I would say that is a semi-successful experiment. The only flowers that really were working with the wax well are these Lala Bonitas that I got from Trader Joe's and I really really am loving the idea of making some kind of butterfly craft with them because it really is just so perfect. Maybe a little- I really don't know. If you have any ideas I would love to hear them. I could even just like use them with a gift tag as a cute little element but they feel pretty solid. I mean it's very interesting. I didn't preserve the stems so I might need to trim off the ends which might work well for whatever craft we end up using them for but that was fun. In the meantime I'm going to stick our little beeswax preserved flowers in our Easter basket. That looks absolutely darling. I want to make a colorful hummus, garden inspired hummus, and essentially I'm going to make one batch of hummus. This is my game plan. I have not looked up a recipe. I'm just have it working. The gears are turning in my brain but I'm going make one batch of hummus and then I'm going to split it up into three parts and then I'm going to blend in some beetroot powder in one part to make it a beautiful vibrant pink color and then I'm going to do either herbs or some spirulina powder or maybe a little bit of both for the other hummus and then I'm either going to keep one just standard like a lemon garlic tahini hummus or I will add some turmeric to that to give it some more of that orangey shade of color so we're still brainstorming but then of course we're going to top it with some olive oil, some edible flowers, and then I also have some dried out like flower sprinkles so we'll probably add some of those as well. Also on the menu tonight I'm going to make some lentils which isn't necessarily spring inspired. There's vegetables in it so we'll just run with that and then possibly naan if we get to it. I love homemade naan. I used to make it almost once a month. It's so delicious and of course pairs perfectly with hummus and lentils so we'll see how the rest of the day goes but that's the goal. Getting some parsley and oregano and basil for our hummus. Our parsley is very happy right now. Grandma's here. Yeah. Salud. I added a little dash of spirulina powder to make it more green. Okay it's coming together. We have two of the colors and little dollops and now for the rest I'm gonna do some turmeric and then one beetroot powder. I forgot to film any of the process but we have our naan rising right here. Now to get started on the lentils. I met a friend at a coffee shop and this precious little angel was there who watches my videos and she made me all these little love letters while we were sitting at the coffee shop and this one is so sweet because she drew our bird bath and she wrote new because it's our newest addition to the garden, our little bird bath. Oh my goodness I'm just melted, that absolutely made my day. Here's the bird bath again and she gave me these cute figurines and said they would look so cute in the garden which I absolutely agree so let's go find a spot for them. Thank you Riley. I've been loving our taper candle holders by our tv with beeswax candles. We've been going through them pretty quickly because I've been putting them or lighting the candles when we host and then whenever we watch a show or a movie it just creates a cozy ambiance at night with all the lights off. I just love it. I'm going to give you a closer look because at first when I first installed these they actually the candles would drip off because there isn't a big rim but I found a little tool to help that. It's this little glass insert that you just set at the base of your candle holder. It's been great for various different candle holders because now I don't have candle wax from the tapers all over our home and table runners. My grammy's too tired to make a flower crown. No I'm not too tired. No we're wrapping, we're winding down after making the naan, the lentils, the hummus, we're winding down. So here you go now you get to wear this one. Okay. What was your favorite part of the meal? Uh it was all delicious. I always love lentils and I always love hummus and I always love feta cheese and yogurt so I cannot say there's anything in this meal that I didn't love. What was your favorite Brandon? Fish. Oh yeah Brandon cooked fish. That I didn't get any of. I just got a bite. Very generous. Expose that. Oh my goodness we're just having the giggles now. Yeah we are. We're getting sleepy. And we're not even having any wine. It's just, it's just us. We did it. Yeah we go back a few years. I was at the hospital when she was born. Okay we're gonna, we're gonna um go to sleep but thank you for watching. Have a beer. Brandon said go to sleep. We have a lot of cleaning to do. Oh my goodness. Okay well we're gonna go clean up but it was a beautiful first day of spring. Yes it was. Hope you have a wonderful season. Yes. Bye. Hasta la vista.