Category: Valentine’s

This year Valentine’s Day just happened to fall on our weekly dinner and grocery shopping night. My mom stays with the kids and my husband and I go out. Sometimes it’s a slice of pizza at the store and other times it’s one of the many restaurants we love.

After dinner, we went shopping. Wegman’s is our store of choice. We actually find that it’s “Family Pack” options are less expensive than BJs and Walmart. At any rate, as we entered the store, we walked right into a huge display of roses. Of course they were beautiful! But I wasn’t even interested!

“Those will be cheaper tomorrow!” I said as I skirted around them.

Fast forward to Friday, February 15th. Dinner was running late, so my sweet husband picked up the few things we still needed from Walmart on his way home. When he finally got home, he had these beautiful yellow roses. They are so pretty! And the best part… they were 50% off!

Yes, it’s true, February 15th roses are better than roses on Valentine’s Day… at least for this practical mama!

And that pretty pitcher? We bought it from Bed, Bath and Beyond during our Thursday night shopping trip with a coupon. It matches my new (Black Friday 2018) “fancy” dishes and was only $11.99. (Not an affiliate link) I think we’ll be adding the other serving pieces over the next few months as we have coupons. They will look pretty in my new display cabinet (I’ll have to share pictures of that someday soon) and on my table.

The painting, I decided to do late last night. My father-in-law had arrived late and we were all just talking in the kitchen. The flowers were so pretty just sitting there on my table in my new pitcher and I gave in to the impulse to try to paint them without doing a sketch first. So there I was, standing at the kitchen counter painting while my husband and his dad were sitting on the stools and we all talking.

I started with the yellow, then added the greenery. Last I added just the shading for the white pitcher. (Painting white things is tricky!) I waited til morning to add the pen.

I took a before and after pic for you so you can see the difference between pen and no pen. I’m often afraid to add the pen because I’m happy with how a painting looks so far and I know that I can completely ruin it if I do the pen wrong. But more often than not, I love the end result with pen so much more. It just makes it pop! Not to mention defining lines and clarifying the object being painted.

So which do you like better? Flowers on February 14th or 15th?

Gathering here.