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!

Under the Weather...

The sunny days are getting shorter but still remaining hot and humid. Conditions are pretty dry and we could definitely benefit from some rain.
My oldest granddaughter, Jillian will start school in a week and a half. Kindergarten is no longer the half day it was when my children were little but is now a full day. When our children were young it was the half day and then in Grade One they got out half an hour before the older grades.  I have to wonder what changes, in the education system and in the world, Jillian will see in her lifetime. I am not really sure that I would like my children being gone all day at such a young age. They are only with us for such a short amount of time.
I haven't done any scrapbooking or other creative pursuits but I did spend some time sorting and rearranging some of my supplies. I need to get busy and gather some things for a garage sale. I am going to downsize the fabric stash and I may edit some of my scrapbook paper and take out some I know I won't use on my projects.
This week we have been trying to get things organized to get our bathrooms' flooring replaced, our furnace replaced and air conditioning added and our fascia, eavestrough and gutters repaired/replaced. It is hard to believe how much it all costs.
I haven't been looking forward to the fall/winter season at all. It took so long for summer to arrive this year. It was the end of July before the rain quit and we got some consistently good weather. I definitely have to have some "carrots" to dangle in front of me so I won't dread fall so much.  At this point we are planning to go to a Murder Mystery Dinner Theatre at an historic site and then do their ghost tour the next evening. Since it is almost three hours away it we will stay overnight.  We will also plan a fall trip to Alberta probably in November and I would like to find something fun to a weekend in the winter. Everything always seems to revolve around snow sports and that is out for me. I would love to try a winter scrapbooking retreat or something along that line. For now though I am going to try and enjoy the sunshine and hot days/cool night.s
Have a great day!

A New Week

It's Monday morning again! I can't believe how fast the time goes now, it seems like everytime I turn around another week has passed.
Today I went straight to the sewing/scrap/? room to start some clean up before I did anything else. This poor room was desperate, crying out for help every time I walked down the hall. I could hear its pitiful cries at night "organize me, please". So before I could get waylaid by anything else I decided to put some time in there.
I spent over an hour but I am not sure how much improvement I made. The new things I got in Spokane were all in a project tote so I worked on putting them away. I relocated my stamps and put away a bunch of tools on the counter. While tidying I did find two Cricut Rewards coupons so I entered them though I still don't have enough for anything I really want. My preference would be a new cartridge for free but it looks like I would have to buy three more cartridges at least to get one free. That won't be happening anytime soon because scrapbook expenditures are on hold for now. We are planning for a new furnace and air conditioning, new flooring in the bathroom and new gutters and downspouts. All extra cash will be diverted to those projects from now till Christmas. I will, however, have a nice little Christmas wish list if anyone is interested :).
This afternoon I did some cleaning up in the kitchen. Our church is having a garage sale to raise funds for the local food banks so I am on the lookout for things to donate as I tidy around the house. We really need to pare down our belongings and make a bit of open space in this house. There are a couple of bigger things we could part with and a boat load of smaller items. I just have to dig them out. Before I start though I think I should re-read Clutter's Last Stand by Don Aslett. It was one of the very first books on getting rid of clutter in the home and it was hilarious. Don can write on boring subjects like housework and make it so funny.
Last night we went to Jack's sister for supper. Jack's parents were there and five of their six kids were too. I admit to be a bit envious. Only one of our four children lives close enough to see weekly. Other than my daughter who lives twenty minutes away I only see my parents regularly. My sister lives in Alberta and my brother is pretty busy with his own stuff. I am grateful to have my parents still and to have my husband's family near especially his sister, Anne and her husband, Wally. They live just 5 minutes away and so are now our closest family. Jack's parents live just 2 minutes away until they sold their home last year and moved into a seniors' apartment.

Little guests....

Our two little granddaughters are sleeping over tonight. They were so good today. Both girls ate a good supper and enjoyed some of grandpa's leftover birthday cake. Grandpa headed off to enjoy his stargazing night at Taghum and the girls watched a little TV. When I told them it was bathtime there was no fussing and Kayla asked if I had a timer. I found my Santa timer and she thought it was pretty cool. She got bathed and then Jillian had her and in no time at all they were all clean and ready for bed. I tucked them in and adjusted the bedside lamp for Jillian and never heard another peep from them. Being a grandma to these little girls is so easy and so fun. They are so precious and we both adore them.

Road trip

We took a little road  trip on Wednesday to Spokane and shopped at Joann's, Hobby Lobby and Michael's. I picked up some scrapbook supplies to add to my stash-only fourteen sheets of paper and one punch. However, I did add some brads and metal embellishments, a couple of tiny spools of ribbon, a light box for embossing and a handful of stamps and other things. Pics to come soon....hopefully.
Yesterday Caroline and the girls came to spend the day for Jack's birthday. We really didn't do anything much for his birthday and I feel bad about that. He just never really knows what he wants to do or what gift he would like. I always have a list ready so if anyone asks I can tell them. Hmmm.....maybe I will just have to shop from my list if he doesn't have one.
Today I had to hem a dress for a neighbour. It took way longer than I would have hoped but it has been delivered back to her now. While I was doing that Jack made up the icing for his cake and then when I was finished with the dress I iced his cake.  This afternoon we went in search of flooring for our bathrooms. No one seems to make quite what we want but I have one picked out now. I hope he likes it too so we can get this project done. The next step will be to find out how long it will take to get the flooring in and get it installed.
When we got back from doing errands and picking up flooring samples I put the ganache and malt balls on the cake and got the posters ready to go to Mental Health(for my support group). Jack has gone to drop the posters off now and to pick dad up so we can go to Caroline's for supper and to celebrate Jack's birthday with them. Seems like it was a busy day.
Tomorrow I am hoping to get the craft room organized again and take some photos of my new stash items. There are chores here that are starting to call my name and so I will have to get to some of them....unless someone else volunteers?!?
The flooring store just called back; they can get the flooring in by Tuesday but can't install it till the week of September 12th. Now if Jack and I can agree on the floor I like we can get the ball rolling here. Should he show poor taste and like something else then we are doomed to be forever hunting for a floor for the bathrooms. Please wish me luck in getting the floor I want a floor we like picked out.
Hope you are all enjoying the beautiful summer days. All too soon it will be fall and back to school, etc. I won't say the W or S words yet.

Lately, In My Nest

Last fall I started to get serious about scrapbooking finally. I had dabbled a tiny bit in the early 90's when it was a relatively new in its current form. I just couldn't find the time when the kids were at home and it seemed that now was the right time in my life. Since then I have been stocking up on supplies and tools and trying to keep a steady pace on my new hobby. I love the creativity involved in it. There is so much you can do with paper, it's virtually endless. Plus, I can also add bits from my sewing and crocheting and make use of my ceramic paints too. Here are some of my projects from the last month.

These are the cards the ladies made from kits I assembled for a "girls" camp day.

My daughter's university graduation layout. I used silver foil paper from Dollarama for the outer frame and a pale lilac for the inner frame. I cut the large flower out of pale lilac cardstock and then inked it darker with my stamp pad and dauber. I entered this for the old photos challenge on Fiskateers.

This card was for the inchie challenge on Fiskateers. I really like these stamps that look like spirograph designs. Anyone else have a spirograph as a child?

This layout was for the black and white with a pop of colour challenge. The trees are cut from vellum. Pictures are my son's from his trips to China.

Taiwan layout- I loved how the big arrow and the motorcycle cutouts turned out.


A challenge for this week: Dust off your forgotten hobby supplies, whatever it might be, and have fun creating something. Then be sure to comment and tell me what your hobby is and what you made. Just a few more weeks of summer!