My Favorite Time of the Year!!

With December comes many wonderful experiences: picking out a fresh Christmas tree, decorating the house, baking cookies, and ElfYourself! That's right, I consider Elf-Yourself an essential ingredient to a successful holiday season. Much to my surprise, they have introduced more versions this year!! Take a look for yourself...

I present to you, the Erickson Family 2012 Elf-Yourself!

Every version (click the links to follow through): Classic, Hip-Hop, Soul, 80s, and Charleston.


I love ALL versions. Please note my dad Mike and Kona (the family dog) high-fiving in the first few seconds of the Soul version!!  And my parent's cute little solo dance in the Charleston version!  (actually, we might change places every time, but you have to trust me that these were hilarious).

I invite everyone to make their own here, I promise you will not be disappointed.

After that belly-laugh, I am back to studying for finals. I swear if I read the words "fecal-bulk" one more time this quarter, I am going to barf... yay for Fiber!! ;)

The Giving Tree

See? I told you I would post more closer to Christmas! :)

I mentioned on Facebook a while ago about The Giving Tree on campus. The tag of a 5 y/o girl requested crafting stuff, and my fate was sealed. After a long, long, long few weeks of non-stop school stuff, I was finally able to dash off to Yakima and do a little Christmas shopping! I learned that I cannot be left alone in the kid's crafting section. Luckily, I was at Craft Warehouse that has super discounts... only a few items for this gift went over a dollar or two, plus coupons! This worked out for both of us. :)

The haul

I think this will keep those little hands busy for a while. Two cute outfits, glitter glue, crayons, colored pencils, friendship making kit, a TON of 12X12 paper, glue sticks, a book....

Beads! String! A nifty little bracelet making tool! What more could she want?!  

I really and truly wish these came in my size. The pockets are stitched with pink, blue, and silver sequins and the button is a huge diamond. With a matching purple shirt, of course! 

A close up. As you can tell, I am so excited for her!! :)

The second outfit. The little ruffled sleeves, scoop neck,  and pink leggings?! I die. 

All wrapped up. My mom taught me to always include a carrying case to keep everything in one place and keep their momma happy too. :) 

The final result!! The wrapping paper is the awesome double-sided stuff, so each gift looks unique, but still cohesive! 

My roommate brought me this little stocking filled with candy while I was wrapping. It matched so perfectly, I had to stick it on top!! ...sans delicious candy... :)

I could not be more happy with how well this gift came together. I hope she has a very Merry Christmas! :)

Oh, Christmas Tree!

I had my doubts about having time (or energy) to put a Christmas tree up in my apartment this year! I was home for Thanksgiving last week and I convinced my mom and sister to go "Black Friday" shopping at Goodwill! We had a full night of Tryptophan-induced slumber, and made it to Goodwill around 3-4pm. Thank you, Goodwill for having your sales at a decent hour (and all weekend, I think!). Everything was marked down 50%, and I found the most perfect artificial tree! It comes apart in 3 sections and each section folds nicely, so no matching "branch A" to "slot A". Much easier.
I forgot to mention the best part- the grand total of my tree was only $10 after 50% off! Score.

Here are some quick pictures of my tree! I have plans to add more frilly things, but I was surprised that I already had enough ornaments to fill a full-sized tree! I have a few leather-bound children's books at the base of the tree from Goodwill last year. I would like to add some sparkly garland to the tree next. I also picked up this cute wooden ornament on the from Real Deals in Ellensburg for $2. I love it.

I hope to add some more sparkle to my tree soon! But for now, I am enjoying the coziness my new tree brings! :)

Holiday Mish-Mash

Hello? Anyone out there?

Life has been batty this last month or so! Midterms came and went and I still haven't had time to catch my breath! There are two weeks until finals and then hopefully I will be able to relax. :)

I have a mile-long list of Christmas projects to work on after this quarter is over, I can't wait! Normally Christmas has taken over my apartment by now, but this year I am on schedule with the rest of the world. Practically moving back to my parents house for the entire month of December means I have to put Christmas decorations on the fast-track in my own home to be able to enjoy it, so at least I have somewhat of an excuse for wanting everything up so early! ...and I just really love Christmas...

The more I think about my apartment decorations, the more I realize how busy I have been this year. I still have Valentines, fall leaves, a few little Christmasy-things, and a "spring" candle holder displayed! Luckily I finally took the Halloween decorations off the front door or else it would have really been a holiday melting pot around here. :) My personal goal for next week: synchronize my decor! Crossing my fingers...

When I am not covered in a mountain of textbooks, I am following other blogs and checking in on the Silhouette store's new shapes! Tuesdays are my favorite day of the week (after Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, of course!) because the Silhouette store always has a ton of new shapes, a new free shape, and an updated clearance section. It is like Christmas every Tuesday, I'm telling you! The downside of following blogs/Silhouette so closely is getting hair-brained crafty ideas in my head that I just HAVE TO complete! I have a whole crafting "to-do" list in my OmniFocus where I can jot down ideas no matter where I am. Sometimes I read them and cannot figure out what the heck I was even thinking. Gotta keep life interesting, I guess. :)

This post ended up very wordy, so if you made it this far- I congratulate you. You will be rewarded with a little sneak-peak of a project I surprisingly had time to finish a few weekends ago! I'll go into it more later in December. Once this quarter is over I am going to be blasting your news-feeds with all sorts of Christmas crafty goodness- be prepared! :)

Hmm... I wonder what it could be! :)

Have a Happy Thanksgiving!!  

Easy Artisan Bread

My name is Hayley and I am an addict. A bread addict, that is! I came across this wonderful artisan bread recipe from Simply So Good while browsing Pinterest months ago. I have quickly become the favorite daughter and favorite study group member. I seriously cannot stop devouring this bread. I followed her methods verbatim in the beginning, but I have quickly found out this recipe is very hard to mess up. It always seems to work out even if my dough seems extremely sticky. The plain recipe is fabulous and a great place to start, but these are some others I have tried:

• Lemon, swiss, and rosemary (this one is probably my favorite) 
• Cinnamon, nutmeg, rasin, and brown sugar 
• Pumpkin and sage 
• Dark chocolate and dried cherries (want to try) 
• White chocolate chip and cranberry (want to try) 
• Pistachio and cranberries (want to try) 
• Garlic and caramelized onions (want to try) 

The pumpkin sage bread was the recipe I brought to my study group on Sunday. We all spent days reading about lipids, gastrin, and gastric diseases and totally deserved to treat ourselves with a carb overload. I picked up a HUGE bunch of fresh sage from the farmers market for $1 (along with two asian pears, YUM). Of course bread always needs butter so I chopped up a bunch of sage and made a sage compound butter. The next day I sautéed leftover sage pumpkin bread in browed sage compound butter and had croutons to go on my salad. As you can tell, I am a little obsessed and will try this again. The pumpkin sage bread was devoured before I got any pictures, but I do have pictures of the loaf of rasin bread I made a few weeks ago! 

Dat crust.

Ignore the bag of soil in the background, my porch is the only place with adequate lighting!

I wish smell-o-vision was a thing. 

Sometimes I think I just use bread as an excuse to eat a lot of butter. 

Just for fun (and because I took them on the same day), my new old lady glasses. 

Side note- I think the sage from the market was slightly spider infested. Every time I pull it out of the fridge I end up with a little cooking buddy. And not the cute Rattatoulie kind. Please don't tell Adam. ;)

I am linking up to a few linky parties this week for the first time. I always LOVE scrolling through lists of linky parties and seeing the wonderfully creative things other bloggers are doing, so I have decided to join in on the fun! If you're stopping by from one of the linky parties, welcome to my little space in bloggerland! :)

Pumpkin Spice Addict

This is the look of a dog newly addicted to Pumpkin Spice Hershey's kisses. I was eating a few and he would not stop begging, so naturally I gave him one. Normally when he is begging for something weird (fruits, vegetables, pumpkin spice kisses) he will just spit it back out. Not this time! I have created a furry little monster.

(Disclaimer: This short little post was actually written about two weeks before I published, but I must have hit "save" instead of "publish", and then forgot about it. I found it in my files and thought it was too cute not to share!) 

Back to School and OmniFocus

Adam Sandler's "Back to School" song from Billy Madison has been stuck in my head all week! Lemme sing it to you now:

"Back to school, back to school, to prove to dad I'm not a fool!"

 Okay, it might only funny if you've seen the movie and can hear me in the right voice. :)

Moving on... I am just starting up my LAST first week of school so I've been working hard all day getting organized for the quarter. In the past I've always meticulously written out every assignment in a small planner and tabbed every single reading in all my books with little green sticky tabs. I was always good about keeping up with assignments (I've made it this far, haven't I??), but the reading tabs always got dirty, bent, lost, and forgotten. The only function the reading tabs served were to make me feel organized at the beginning of the quarter and then I would curse them as I furiously ripped them out of my books right before buybacks! Enter: my beautiful new MacBook.

I was able to pick up my Christmas present early (THANKS, Mom and Dad!!) and it has been so awesome for school. My old lappy had to be on life support at all times (both the charger and internet cords) so taking the behemoth to class was not really an option. Now I am that annoying girl sitting in the front row typing away (sorry classmates!). I can take notes directly into powerpoint documents so I am no longer printing out hundreds of ppt presentations every quarter.

One last awesome improvement in my academic life is a program called OmniFocus. This app was $40 through Apple (I had a gift card), and at first I was really disappointed and thought it was a waste of money. Although I was so utterly confused the first few times I tried to figure it out (even after watching 10 tutorial videos), today something just clicked! I had to just start entering in my coursework before I really started to understand the layout. I am so excited to have finally figured this out, and Adam is probably excited to quit hearing about it. :) The online explanations for this program were really vague, so I just wanted to give a quick overview of how I organized mine for anyone who may be interested.

I can view all my tasks in the order that they are due. Right now all I have are readings to complete, but I am sure this list will be much longer as the quarter goes on. The OmniFocus tab that is always on my bar (the little purple guy) will display how many items I have to complete soon (in yellow) or past due (in red) so I can quickly see how much I have to complete soon! 

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For anyone trying to use OmniFocus for school (the program is initially set up in a work format), the way I have it set up is this:

Projects: Main tasks, regardless of which class they are for. Mine include "Readings" "Exams" and "Assignments"

Contexts: This is where I have my courses separated under the "School" tab. This way I can easily click on whatever class I need to see quickly and focus on that first.

 Like I said, I am pretty pleased with my organization this quarter. Let's hope I can keep it up! :)