Tiny feet

I wanted to post some of the baby "shoes/booties" I crochet. I am willing to take orders for these and the price is around $15. Let me know, in the comments, if you are interested. Lots of colours available. 100 % cotton (crochet cotton not yarn)

On the Scrapbooking Front...

I signed up to be a Liftateer on Fiskateers and have been loving it. Since it requires a lift each week I knew that I would get 52 pages done this year at least. Plus I try to do the sketch and colour challenges each month so that adds a further 24 pages. WOW!! That is 76 pages per year. I may have some decent looking albums in a years time. Actually, my son's album is starting to take shape but is still pretty random. I need to fill in the blanks here and there to finish it off.
Here are some of the pages I have done for his book:

I got a lot of pages done during the Fiskateers Lift Off Challenge. It was great fun and really got me motivated. Now I just need something to motivate me with housework, laundry and cooking. Maybe I need to be able to post my clean house, supper on the table and clean laundry in the drawers!

I finished up a second page to make a 2 page spread out of some pics of my youngest children's summer theatre work.

A fun page to do with a copy of Today's Parent magazine specially printed with my sweet granddaughters on the cover.

Jasmine as a baby.

My son, Aaron

My little china doll, Jillian.

Sweet, adorable Kayla.

Grumpy Girls who would not smile for a picture.

I had these prints floating around from a portrait package from 7 years ago. We have one framed and in the living room but these were extras that never we didn't need to give away, etc. I decided to do a page featuring them and get them out where they could be enjoyed more.

Time to quit blogging now, no more surfing or scrapbooking. I have to do some housework. Happy Halloween everyone. Stay safe tonight.

Happy Halloween

Here we are at the end of the month already. The days are cool and very crisp and there was a dusting of snow yesterday morning.  Our granddaughters are excited about Halloween, their grandparents not so much. Still it is fun to have a special day to break up the routine a bit. My main complaint about Halloween is the costumes that gross me out. I am an adult and can take it but I wonder about some of our tiny, tender hearts who haven't seen this sort of thing and may be frightened. I think the gross and gory could be kept for adult parties where wee ones won't encounter it. That said, my son created a Zombie movie and it is available for viewing on http://www.pinkbike.com/video/225690/. This is not for children and it is gory. It was created for young guys who like biking primarily. However, if you like a little zombie action you will likely enjoy it too. We will not let our tiny ones view it and when Aaron sent me the link he warned me and told me what the special effects were made from and how they did it.  Still even as an adult I was a little bothered by it. So please take care to protect your children this Halloween. Keep them safe on the streets and safe from disturbing images as much as possible. Help them to understand that some things are just costumes and tell them how they are made. Most of all help them have a Happy, Safe Halloween.

P.S. I remember when my second daughter was young and she had fallen asleep on my lap and I was watching TV, she woke up and there was a woman on a tv show wearing a facial mud mask and my poor little one just started screaming. Months later she came in the bathroom and I was wearing a mud mask and she shrieked again.
 The other night someone posted a video clip on Facebook where you are supposed to watch for the ghost in the picture and turn your sound up so you can hear the cameraman whispering. Then while you are watching and listening intently this ghoulish face POPS into the screen and screams. I screamed and screamed I was so startled. My poor cat was not amused as she went flying from the room. My husband came running to see if I was okay and to see what the cat had done to me. That was all the Hallween thrills I needed.

The heat is on...

We broke down this week and fired up the furnace.  Jack came home from work and I was sitting wrapped up in a blanket so he decided the time had come.  This week we have been helping our daughter and son-in-law move the woman whose house they bought out. It was a foreclosure and she didn't seem to be able to get it together to move herself so their friends and family got together and did it over two evenings. That was definitely much kinder than calling the police in to begin evicting her through the legal system. It also was much faster. The house needs a lot of cleaning up and repairs. When they are completed Caroline and Paul will be renting it out. It will be a busy time while they do siding, windows, doors and yard clean up outside.  The inside needs the kitchen and bathroom done plus some drywall, electrical and lots of cleaning.

Update

I feel like I have been very busy but I know it hasn't been all that bad.  Mostly I just operate in a slower mode than in my younger days and things take longer to do. I could use a recharge of some sort.
I have done one scrapbook page this last week. It is my granddaughter's preschool graduation photo. I didn't even go to kindergarten and certainly not preschool. Some of my kids did a type of preschool but their "graduation" consisted of paper grad hats and a few snapshots if mom remembered the camera. Now preschool graduation includes a portrait in a cap and gown! Here is my layout:

The journalling is inside the blue frame and is printed on vellum. The butterfly was cut on my cricut out of white cardstock and then just inked with a stamp pad. Maybe I should have used a more contrasting colour but it does show up better in person and the wings are folded out for a 3D effect. Of course, they will get squashed in when I put it in an album but for now it is sitting on the ledge on my piano. Since neither hubby or I play piano and the piano sits silent now, we use the music book ledge for displaying pictures of our children and grandchildren. They are easily removed should someone come home for a visit and want to play the piano.
The days are getting cooler and shorter and I have been trying to plan some activities to pull me through winter. I have battled depression for a good part of my life and winter with its short days and overcast, dreary days can be a struggle. My mobility issues tend to increase this challenge. I am looking forward to doing more scrapbooking and to completing challenges with Fiskateers.  There are some local crops scheduled but I am not sure how many I will attend. The packing and unpacking of gear is rather tedious and inevitably I want something I don't have with me. I will have to improve on my ability to plan for a crop so I don't need a semi to get me and my stuff there.
Around home we have completed a few projects. We had new flooring put in both upstairs bathrooms. The carpet that the builder put in our ensuite is no more. YAY! Jack put a much needed shelf in our bathroom vanity and we rearranged and added some shelves to our cleaning closet. It is much more functional now and looks so much tidier. Thanks Jack!
We are also gathering items for a garage sale. I am letting a number of things go that I have been hanging on to thinking I needed them. I am downsizing my recipe collection, especially ones I have never used. I gave Caroline two of my Company`s Coming kids cookbooks and eliminated three magazine holders of booklets and magazines and one binder full of printed recipes. I may still have more to go, I just have to be more courageous. When I sorted through the wedding supplies I was able to empty one big box so far and two are to go to the garage sale. I am selling or donating the two dozen rose bowls I have from Caroline's wedding. There was also about 900 envelopes from the wedding that didn't happen. I tossed the preprinted ones, no idea what I was thinking in keeping them. Perhaps I was planning to send myself a lot of mail in small envelopes. It would have cost a fortune. Oh well, saner moments have prevailed now and they are out the door. The blank envelopes will be used for my handmade cards and shared with other cardmakers. They will be handy for that.
I hope you are all having a good week and enjoying sunny autumn days.
Laney

Indian Summer

The weather forecast for our area is temperatures in the low to mid thirties all week. I hope we have a nice, long Indian Summer after our very rainy start to summer. It was August before we got weather that was decent. Tomorrow is our annual Labour Picnic at the lake. We are getting some work done on the house on Tuesday though so we will have to make sure we are ready for the installer before we can head to the lake.
I always get the urge to organize, regroup and plan each September. I am sure it comes from twenty years of getting kids ready for school each fall. Sometimes I miss those punctuation marks in the year that having kids bring into our lives. Now just the seasons and holidays mark one week as different from another.

I am trying to decide what photos to use for my next layout. Since it is September I did think about doing Labour Day picnics or back to school photos. I will have to dig around and see what I have for photos. Also, I have to do a page about Miss Jillian`s first day of school as she starts kindergarten this year.

I received an email this week with this link to a yummy sounding recipe. http://www.citytv.com/cityline/food/recipes/article/151220--balsamic-glazed-onions
I like sauteed onions a lot and I love balsamic vinegar so I am going to give this one a try.

Last summer we went to the Baynes Lake Farmers` Market and really enjoyed it. They had a lot of vendors for a small area and we purchased a handful of things including a three panelled wood nativity scene and some chocolate bread from a bakery in Fernie. The bread was so yummy. It was not a sweet bread but rather a yeast bread.   I searched the internet and found this recipe: http://www.davidlebovitz.com/2010/04/chocolate-bread-recipe/ .
It looks pretty darn good so I would like to give it a try and see how it turns out.

Our church is having a garage sale to raise money for the food bank so I want to go through my house and find some donations and get started on some fall cleaning. I hope my husband realizes I am going to need his help with some of this work. Poor guy. Hopefully though he will enjoy having more space around the house.

I signed on to do a scrapbook layout a week and post it at Fiskateers.  I am looking forward to this challenge and I think some of my adult children are as well. It gives them a chance to finally see some of the photos of them showcased. Getting 52 layouts done in a year will be great too and that will not include what I get done at crops, etc. Pretty exciting to think about all those layouts being done!

It's also time to go and find the fall wreath, mantel decorations and centrepiece. What do you decorate with for fall?

September is here

It's hard to believe it is September so soon. The weather has been lovely and hopefully it will continue for a while. From last Friday until Wednesday I participated in the online crop on Fiskateers.com. I really had a lot of fun and got a lot accomplished. Here are a few of the challenges I completed: 

I finished the second page of this two page layout of my daughter's convocation.

 

 
These are some of the cards I made during the crop.

The above are the layouts I did during the crop challenges. It was great to get so many layouts done during that short amount of time and I am really looking forward to participating in more crops. Someday I may even complete a whole album!

Happy Scrapping!