Stoked to tell you guys all about my latest adventure at West Elm. Last Thursday, I hit up their DC store for a fun night of food, dranks and ornament-making with blogger friends. For those of you interested, they're hosting their first "Makers Residency Program" there this holiday season. They're sponsoring 9 local artists to offer customers a curated assortment of handmade goodies (!!!!) in addition to their own stuffs. Their metro-area makers will also be hosting workshops there so it should be good times all around.
For this shindig, they had Samantha Testa of Painted Palettes come in and give us "faux calligraphy" lessons. She handed us all packets and we sat around a huge table to practice tracing her lettering before tackling our DIY ornaments.
Left: Samantha, our fabulous instructor, werkin' it like a boss! Right: La Belle Mel perfecting her calligraphy. FYI, we were totally SILENT throughout our lesson because we were concentrating really hard. Calligraphy is tough - I was definitely struggling.
Our finished ornaments! Mel, Kate, and I totally cheated and asked Samantha to do ours for us. In our defense though, we tried to make our own (my sad attempt's pictured on the right, ha). Samantha wrote my name out for me, and I tried to copy it but it made no difference because I ran out of room *sniffles* I brought back an extra packet for practice though. I'm gonna be a pro in no time...probably not, but hey, positive thinking never hurt nobody!
West Elm hired a nomtastic caterer + bartender for the event, but I didn't get to eat anything because of my whole clean eating diet. All their drinks + treats looked delicious though. I was super proud of myself for practicing such great self-control, ha.
Afterwards, we went to Union Market to grab dinner. I wasn't super hungry so I just went to South Block Juice and grabbed their Tropi-kale smoothie before joining Mel + Kate at Rappahannock Oyster Bar. OMG, I can't even begin to tell you guys how yummy it was. I expected it to taste super healthy (aka gross), but it was surprisingly delicious. I don't remember all the ingredients, but I think there was agave nectar, coconut water, spinach, kale, mango andddd give or take a few fruits and veggies, ha. It WAS super expensive though! Dang, $8 for a smoothie? Probably won't be getting it on the daily, but it was a nice treat! Anywho, that's all for today. Who else LOVES smoothies? Comment with your favorite combination.
