But really: there are few things in life that can't be improved by the addition of a little neon.
(Painted that penguin, too. How cute is he?)
Looking for good neon paint? It's weirdly hard to find; trust me, I've looked. Try Martha Stewart Satin in Lightning Bug, Orange Soda, and Lime Zinger; they're the paints I've been unleashing on everything we own lately. (Especially fond of my Pollock-ed mirror project.)
I’m a bit of a home scenting obsessive, but stocking up on candles can get super pricey. Fortunately, you can get all that lovely fragrance without shelling out a ton of cash (or any, really). All you need is just a tiny bit of craftiness (and I do mean "just a tiny bit," promise).
Presenting: my favorite (easy) DIY Home Scents.
Lavender
I'm in the middle of a massive Our House Our House Our House obsession.
I love our house.
I'm excited about our move in a vacuum - and specifically excited about the prospect of setting up a whole new space to live in…but still: I sort of wish I could pick up our house and drag it out to California with me. It's just so…romantic. It's like looking at the face of a person I've loved for years and years - there are flaws all over, I guess, but I don't even see them: all I see is what's special and beautiful and perfect.
I cannot stop making dreamcatchers these days.
I've always loved them - the tattoo on my arm is inspired by one, and I've had a huge one hanging in our house ever since my dad and I picked it up on our post-college cross-country drive - but what happened to ignite the recent obsession was that I found one on the Internet that I was completely over-the-moon about.
I first discovered a version of this meal about six months after I started blogging, when a reader sent me a Giada recipe for a dish called "Chicken Vesuvio" (as an aside, the photos I took of the dish are terrible...but also kind of cool examples of something I realized very early on that I had to work on). Over time that recipe evolved into the dish you see here, which is one of our all-time family favorites. Even when I think, "ehhh, not in the mood for chicken"…I am always in the mood for this. It's that good.
Oh - and this is an important part: it uses chicken thighs, which are apparently a thing that nobody wants to buy, because they are hella cheap. So cheap that I just said "hella." (They're also hella good.)
Chicken With Artichoke Hearts (serves 3-4)
