Author Archives: Jeffrey Scott Thomas

7 Tea Recipes You Haven’t Made Yet

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With tea coming in so many varieties, it’s a good chance you haven’t tried all of them. There are probably plenty you’ve never even heard of – that’s until now. Expand your options because we have seven tea recipes you haven’t made yet. You’re sure to find a new favorite on this list.

Get Spicy with Ginger Cardamom Chai

One of the best ways to warm up is with a cup of spicy ginger cardamom chai. Originally popular in India, chai has now made its way into homes worldwide. The delicious creamy tea is a blend of black tea leaves, milk, water, and, of course, spices.

Peel and deseed two cardamom and crush them with a mortar and pestle. Add freshly grated ginger and the cardamom to heated water. Add milk and sugar, and boil. Pour in loose leaf black tea and simmer for a minute or longer. Finally, strain your tea into a cup with a strainer.

Get Refreshed with Vietnamese Lime Tea

Vietnamese lime tea is served ice cold, making it refreshing on a hot day. Tea drinkers love its balance of flavors: sweet, bright, bitter, and crisp. This simple drink only involves green tea, hot water, honey, and lime juice and can be whipped up in minutes.

Steep green tea bags for about three minutes in hot water before removing. Add your desired amount of honey and fresh lime juice for more intensity. Stir the tea and place in the fridge for 10 minutes to cool before enjoying.

Get Fit with Coconut Green Tea

Coconut green tea is a fantastic option for a healthy drink. You get layered notes of sweet, creamy coconut and floral earthiness from green tea. This is one of the easiest recipes since you can purchase herbal tea botanicals with perfectly shredded coconut included.

For an extra boost of nutrition, add pure coconut oil. It is well-regarded for adding healthy fats to your drink. Simply steep green tea in hot water before adding it to a small blender with one tablespoon of coconut oil. Blend, pour into your mug, and enjoy.

Get Foggy with London Fog Tea Latte

London Fog Tea Latte takes Earl Grey to the next level because it’s sweet, creamy, and delicious. By skipping the coffeehouse, you can make it healthier with fresh ingredients. It takes only a few ingredients, including liquid honey, milk, and vanilla bean.

Add Earl Grey tea bags to boiling water and steep for 5-7 minutes. Cut open the vanilla bean, scrape out the seeds, and set aside. Take the tea bags out of the water and stir the liquid honey (or any honey substitute) until fully dissolved. Add whole vanilla bean pod, the seeds, and your preferred milk to the tea. Stir and simmer before straining tea into a mug. Add vanilla sugar as a garnish if desired.

Get Caffeine-Free with Rooibos Latte

Fun to say and drink, rooibos tea is having a moment as more people turn to it for its herbaceous flavors and love that it is caffeine-free. Easy to make, boil water, remove from the heat, and steep the rooibos tea. Add the desired amount of honey and vanilla extract.

To make it a latte, use a milk frother with your milk of choice. Pour the tea into a mug, top with the froth, and sprinkle cinnamon. Not only will you love drinking your rooibos latte, but you can use the old tea bag as an effective acne treatment!

Get Blue with Butterfly Pea Flower Tea Latte

Another interesting recipe is the blue butterfly pea flower tea latte. A lovely blue color, it adds pizazz, and best yet, butterfly pea flower powder is a caffeine-free botanical tea blend. The final drink has a sweet yet mild earthy taste and is known to boost your mood.

Combine butterfly pea flower powder, ginger, cardamom, and vanilla sugar into a jar. Add two teaspoons of the powder mix and a tablespoon of boiling water in a cup and dissolve. Add one cup of your preferred hot milk to the cup and stir.

Get Floral with Lavender Iced Tea

Lavender iced tea is the perfect way to unwind. You can use any type of tea, from black to lavender mint for extra lavender flavor. It only takes a few steps. Brew tea until you reach the desired strength. Meanwhile, make a lavender simple syrup by adding sugar and water to a small pan and cooking over medium heat. Add culinary lavender, and let simmer for up to three minutes.

Allow the syrup to cool. Next, add the syrup, fresh lemon juice, and brewed tea in a pitcher. Place sliced lemon, ice, and fresh lavender into the pitcher. Pour tea over ice in a glass for a refreshing drink.

The best thing about these recipes is you can customize them to make them your own, so don’t be afraid to experiment. Happy tea drinking!

Image 1: https://unsplash.com/photos/white-and-brown-ceramic-mug-qEcWgrTG578

Image 2: https://unsplash.com/photos/white-ceramic-mug-with-brown-liquid-inside-RKDP3D-6G5E

5 Unique Ways to Honor Your Loved One’s Ashes

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Honoring the life of your loved one is so important when they have passed on. And when your loved one has opted for cremation, there is the question of what to do with their ashes. There are many ways to honor a loved one’s ashes that speak to the beautiful legacy they’ve left behind.

Incorporating their ashes into jewelry or works of art creates a piece that can forever hold their spirit. Spreading their ashes somewhere meaningful can be a fulfilling journey. Planting a memorial garden can help their legacy to grow on. And a custom urn is a way to memorialize them in a way as unique as they are. 

Here are five unique ways to honor your loved one’s ashes and their legacy.

  1. Cremation Jewelry 

Jewelry that incorporates a loved one’s ashes honors them and allows multiple individuals to have something to hold onto. Incorporating a loved one’s ashes into a cherished piece of jewelry can allow them to be with you always—when you travel to places they loved or wanted to see, at special events, and just with you for the little moments of everyday life.

Ashes can be incorporated into jewels, pendants, or other elements of your jewelry. Work with your individual jeweler to come up with the perfect tribute. 

  1. Custom Urns 
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Your loved one was like no one else, so why should you be limited by just a few urn options? Custom urns memorialize your loved one in a way that celebrates their life. An urn can be customized into the shape of your loved one’s favorite stadium, hobby, musical instrument, car, or anything you can think of. A customized urn can represent so much more for your loved one. 

With a custom urn, you are showcasing the things that made their life full and unique. Our lives are made up of all the little things that make us who we are. This option celebrates those little special details! You can think of it as a celebration of their life, rather than a representation of their passing. 

  1. Spread Them Somewhere Meaningful 
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Maybe your loved one moved here from somewhere far away to give your family a new life, and they never got to return to their birthplace. With cremation, you can bring them home. Spreading your loved one’s ashes in a place that was important to them can be a significant experience for your own life. 

Taking a pilgrimage to a place that was important for this special person in your life can be its own important journey. Perhaps you didn’t know this person when they lived in this place, and this can be a way to connect with them on a deeper level and better understand their legacy. 

  1. Planting Ashes 

How better to celebrate life than by growing life out of it? Did your deceased loved one have an excellent green thumb? Even if you’re a complete beginner, planting some flowers with your loved one’s ashes can be a memorable way to commemorate them. Maintaining a garden can be a wonderful activity for the whole family, and these flowers can grow for years to come so that other family members may be able to celebrate their legacy even if they did not know them. 

Every year when the flowers spring up again you can remember all of the wonderful memories you have and build new ones by getting into the dirt and helping that love continue to grow. 

  1. Make Art

Perhaps you’re an artist, or you know one whose work you love. You can incorporate your loved one’s ashes into paint for a painting. A beautiful painting can be emblematic of their life and the relationship they had with you. A painting is something that can be seen every day, admired, and not necessarily feel like a representation of passing. Incorporating ashes into a piece of art creates a memorial to be cherished and is another way to ensure that multiple family members can have a piece of this special memorial. 

Grief and mourning are a lifelong journey. When people have changed our lives in a big way, their impact is never gone. These unique ways of building out a memorial for your loved one can help incorporate the memory of them into your everyday life. These ideas can also help families have multiple tokens that remind them of their loved ones. 

Honoring the life of a loved one is an important, emotional, and multi-faceted journey that will look different for each member of your family. Coming together to collaborate on a way to celebrate a legacy can be a healing and beautiful journey for all. Your loved one was like no one else; honor their memory as such. 

Reviving Retro: How to Give Vintage Items New Life in Your Home

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Buying vintage has become one of the most popular trends of 2023, and not just among the climate-conscious. For those who crave antique collectibles that can’t be found anywhere and for those who want something that makes a statement, vintage is the way to go. But giving life to a vintage piece can be like inflating a deflated tire; it requires patience, perseverance, and the right arsenal. 

Reviving vintage items in your home is more than a design choice; it’s a celebration of history and a nod to sustainability. Being aware of how to transform vintage items for home purposes is essential. It might not require an extensive renovation, but little changes that aid significantly. It might be something as simple as DIY stain glass lamps or something as complicated as replacing hardware and refinishing old furniture. Here’s your simple guide on giving vintage items a new lease of life. 

Refurbish and Refinish

Thrift stores are a goldmine for those who know how to look, and when you’ve found the right items, from mid-century furniture to quirky accessories, there are many dated pieces you can revive with the right refurbishing. If you’ve found worn-out or damaged items, there is a chance that you can fix them through a bit of refurbishing. This can include reupholstering old sofas, armchairs, and even headboards. 

Use wood polish, wood paint, and clear sealants to revive wooden furniture. You can highlight the natural grain by refinishing it, and any chips or scratches on the wood can be fixed with wood glue or filler. 

Repurpose Items

While items and furniture are made for a specific purpose, there’s no reason that you have to use them the way they’re intended. For example, vintage record crates can be repurposed to be unique side tables or even shelving units for other items like books. Unplayable vinyl records can be repurposed to be decorative bowls with a bit of heat molding. Depending on the vintage item you have, there is a variety of choices when it comes to repurposing.

You can repurpose old lamps to be planters, especially if they are not functional. Other examples include repurposing wine corks to be a bed headboard, and vintage clothes can become a blanket or a throw. The easiest repurposing projects can be turning vintage items into decor. Changing a vintage bicycle to become outdoor decor doesn’t require much. Just paint it again, and you’re done!

You can also go on a hunt for vintage suitcases and upcycle them to be side tables (providing both aesthetic value and storage). Old suitcases can also make for ideal shelves for any home. You can also paint over them to ensure that they fit your home’s interior design. 

Invest in Quality Equipment

If you want to have functional vintage decor in your home, you need to purchase tools that can help revive them. It can include items like a vinyl record cleaner to ensure that any vinyl records you purchase end up being usable. It can guarantee that your vinyls are always in peak condition, and this is vital if you use them frequently or plan on selling them later on. 

Investing in basic items like cleaning supplies is essential when you’re planning to purchase vintage items. Rust cleaning solutions, abrasive scrubs, leather cleaners, cleaning gloves, and so on are vital for vintage items. All vintage items will require a good clean once they arrive in your home, and you need to have a good cleaning routine down to ensure that they look well taken care of once they’re in your home. For wooden items, you may need some type of sanding machine and experience in handling wood-cutting equipment.

Consider Layering

Creating a thoughtful and well-decorated home means guaranteeing that you have a good combination of vintage and modern elements. Combining these two elements will help you highlight the vintage items where needed and ensure your home still feels current and relevant. It could be something as easy as designating one vintage item per room to be the focal point, whether it’s a retro dining table or a vintage chandelier. Let that be the central piece for the room, and build the rest of the decor around it. 

Another way you can layer vintage items throughout your home is through the thoughtful use of textiles. Rugs, carpets, tapestries, throw pillows, and curtains make for great layering pieces in any room. Layer these textures alongside modern furniture to create an elegant and sophisticated place that remains functional. 

Making Your Home a Vintage Haven

Vintage items, whether they’re passed down in your family or have been found elsewhere, all contain their own stories. It could be in the craftsmanship of a bygone era or the sentimentality with which they were passed down. Knowing how to revive them and accommodate them in your home can take considerable thought and hard work. If you’re determined to make the most of vintage items in your home, it has to be through careful placement, refinishing, and upcycling. Once you have the basics down, there’s nothing stopping you from making your home a true vintage haven!

Choosing the Right Plan for Your Dream Home

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Whether you are shopping for “The One,” you are building a new home from the ground up, or you are remodeling the home you already cherish, the decisions you make along the way can both be intimidating and highly rewarding. It is natural to feel overwhelmed when you wonder about how to logistically turn your dreams into reality, whether that reality will be as good as it was in theory, your budget, your timeline, or anything else. To help start you off right, here are a few key thoughts to help guide your next steps.

1.  Practical Considerations

Before you design your live-in masterpiece, make sure it is compatible with your lifestyle. The absolute last thing you want is to build your dream home only to find out it doesn’t suit your needs. 

The Ins and Outs of the Home

Ultimately, your home needs to be livable. For example, if you are looking to expand your house for more rooms for a growing family or for more overnight hosting for guests, do your goals to add rooms accommodate adding extra people, with comfortable space, adequate privacy, and enough bathrooms? If you’re planning for a multigenerational home, are you considering safety, accessibility, and versatility with your family’s changing needs?

Similarly, when you consider your house’s exterior, consider the type of materials used, including choices in facades that are suitable to the climate you live in. After all, if you live in an area that is prone to hurricanes, it would be best to factor in durability for extreme storms into your choice of materials such as paneling and tiles before you get blown away by an idea that will, too.

Design Code and Permitting

Before you pull out the blue tape, make sure that you’ve gone through the red tape. While working with licensed and bonded teams will help with quality control and legality, it is helpful to first make sure that what you are considering is feasible. For example, many municipalities require additional permits for Accessory Dwelling Units; additionally, understanding that expanding your home will require changes to your electrical wiring and installing extra pipes, which could lead to additional inspections and fees for hook-ups to water and sewage. On the other hand, your plans may qualify for tax breaks and other federal or local incentives! Planning for these contingencies can help spare financial and legal heartache, and help you anticipate delays in the timeline.

2.  External Influence: Upping your Curbside Appeal

There are many great reasons to invest in exterior architecture and home exterior makeovers. Not only is your home’s outside the first impression you make to yourself and others, but putting the extra effort into the outside of your house can definitely boost your home’s value! Alongside practicalities like maintenance and, if you are or will be in a planned community, HOA restrictions, consider your personal aesthetic: do you want quirky and playful? Timeless and elegant? Hoping to accentuate a cultural tradition, such as a classic Southwestern abode or a Scandinavian seaside town? Designing with the front end in mind can help you also consider which parts of your design matter most. From there, you can make more empowered decisions on who to contact in terms of contractors, specialists, and/or agents.

3.  Insider Information: Your Interior Design Mind

While curb appeal is important, your living room’s spaciousness, kitchen surfaces, and staircases matter as well! Consider, for example, that you already have an idea for your ideal amount of natural light, both for your own personal tastes as well as ways to add eco-consciousness into your enhancements. Even more, for kitchens, laundry rooms, hobby rooms, and bathrooms alike, consider which practical elements you want to make the focal point, such as a countertop that is a conversation starter, or a porcelain sink that sets the tone for the room.

Whether you are designing the whole house, or looking to modernize one room, once again, start with a theme or favorite piece of furniture you want to design around. 

Start Building Your Team!

Once you are ready to hammer away, make sure that when you are collecting your bids, you are also looking for compatibility with the folks who will help you achieve your housing dream. After all, whether you are working with a real estate agent, or you are working with an architect, making sure that your people are also ready to execute your vision is at the front and center of everything you do. While budget and reading quality reviews will always matter, make sure that you also feel comfortable with the people you are working with. So, here’s to happy dreaming and even happier doings!

Flawless Wedding Brows: Timing Your Perfect Look

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Your wedding day is one of the most important days of your life, and naturally, you’ll want to look your absolute best. While the dress, hair, and makeup are the apparent highlights, one aspect that often gets overlooked is your eyebrows. Well-groomed, well-shaped, and perfectly filled eyebrows can be the cherry on top of your bridal look, framing your face beautifully and enhancing your eyes. This blog highlights the importance of planning and timing your eyebrow grooming to achieve that perfect look on your big day.

Starting Early – Your Brow Journey Begins

If you’re considering a significant change to your brows or simply want them in top shape for your wedding, you should ideally start planning six to nine months before the wedding date. This allows enough time to grow out your eyebrows if needed, experiment with various shapes and styles, and recover from any potential mishaps. This is also an excellent period to find a professional eyebrow technician or aesthetician who understands your needs and vision.

Different Types of Brow Treatments

The type of treatment you choose for your brows depends immensely on your current eyebrow situation and the look you desire.

  • Threading or Waxing: These are great for cleaning up stray hairs and defining your brow shape. For these treatments, it’s recommended to start a regular schedule of appointments 6 months before the big day and have your final appointment a week before the wedding to avoid any redness or irritation on the big day.
  • Tinting: Brow tinting is excellent for those with lighter brows who want a darker, more defined look or those desiring fuller-looking eyebrows. Monthly appointments beginning 3-4 months out is a good idea, with the final session 3-5 days before the event.
  • Microblading: Microblading is a  semi-permanent eyebrow tattoo that can last anywhere from 1-3 years. It’s perfect for those with sparse brow hair, uneven brows, or anyone who wants to dramatically alter their brow shape. Start this treatment at least 3-4 months prior to your wedding date, allowing time for the initial treatment, healing and touch-ups.
  • Brow Lamination: This is a semi-permanent treatment that creates sleek, well-defined brows. Brow lamination is perfect for taming unruly brows and creating volume and fullness. Ideally, have this treatment done 1-2 weeks before your wedding day.

Trial Runs Are Essential

Any changes to your brows, especially significant ones, should have a trial run. This way you can see how a specific shape or treatment works for you, how your skin reacts, and how they look in photographs which can help in refining your final look.

Consistency and Aftercare

Once you’ve established a routine, stick with it. Consistency is key to maintaining your brows and achieving your desired look. Aftercare, particularly with treatments like microblading or brow lamination, is crucial. Follow your technician’s advice regarding moisturizing, sun exposure, makeup, and touch-ups.

Natural Touches

Besides professional treatments, remember to keep things natural. Lightly fill in your brows using a brow pencil or powder, ensuring it matches your hair color. A clear or tinted gel can keep your brows in place throughout the day.

Embrace Your Brow Journey

Every brow journey is unique, much like every bride. Embrace the process of transforming your brows, and remember to have patience, especially if you are growing them out or undergoing procedures like microblading. Keep in touch with your brow specialist regularly and don’t hesitate to share concerns or ask questions. This will ensure that your brow journey is smooth and enjoyable, leading you to flawless results.

Balancing the Facial Features

Brows play a significant role in balancing and complimenting your facial features. Therefore, while shaping or treating your eyebrows, remember to keep your face’s overall structure in mind. Whether you fancy bold, arched, straight, or feathered brows, ensure it harmonizes with your other features. Similarly, consider your wedding day hairstyle and makeup when deciding your final brow look. This way, your brows will not only be perfect on their own but will also beautifully complete your entire bridal ensemble.

Highlighting Your Brow Game

Finally, no brow journey ends without highlighting your brow game on your wedding day. Be it through the seriousness of an altar promise or the joy of a dance-floor twirl, your perfect eyebrows should get their moment to shine. You can accentuate your elegantly defined eyebrows by keeping your eye makeup minimalistic. Alternatively, you can go all out and opt for a dramatic look that pairs perfectly with your standout brows. Regardless, remember to use a waterproof formula for your mascara, liner, and brow products, ensuring that your flawless brow look remains intact throughout the emotional roller coaster of your wedding day.

Be You

The most important thing to remember is that your wedding day is about you. The ultimate goal is to feel confident and radiant. Your eyebrows, like the rest of your look, should reflect your personal style. So while fashion trends and expert advice are helpful, let your individuality shine through.

To conclude, achieving flawless wedding brows involves thoughtful planning, consistency, and individual expression. With the appropriate timing, treatments, and expert help, you’re well on your way to having beautiful, picture-perfect eyebrows when you say, “I do.” On your wedding day, when all eyes are on you, your eyes will be beautifully framed by your perfectly groomed brows, completing your bridal look in the most stunning way.