Family

In all the different houses we have lived in, this picture has been hanging on my wall since about 1990. It is a crayon/watercolor by a very special little girl. It usually hangs in my crafting room but now is in our bedroom. Here is the artist... the littlest one. The taller beauty created the little artist.

And this is them today. Well, 35 days ago. I'm sure I have posted about the wedding before, but just was feeling retrospective today. My beautiful granddaughter Elizabeth was married to the love of her life, David. Yes, another generation of 'David's'. It's a good name, you know! And so I've heard, another good man also. The other additions to the family since the original photo are Joshua, the tall handsome one on the right, Allison, the little beauty in red, and Melody the little angel on the right.

Saturday

I love Saturdays! Didn't get up until 8am, then had a nice visit from our friends Marjie and Steve, then off to Snohomish to finish clearing out the storage there. It is done! We stopped in Lake Stevens at Conto's and had our favorite ham sub with honey mustard dressing. I started that when I was on one of my diets and I switched the mayo for honey mustard dressing and it is sooooo good. They always know when we are there by what we order. Nobody else does that.

The time has flown by today though. When we got home I did these two little cards, inspired by Paper Crafts May/June issue. I cut the little pieces while watching tv last night. I had gotten kind of in a rut with my cards all being standard size, and these are the same size, so they will fit in the same envies but just cut long ways. I like it and think I'll do a few more with different designs.

Dave had a major milestone yesterday with the water problems here. After tens of thousands of dollars and 9 months of work he found a major fracture in the main line. The discovery didn't come without much consternation yesterday of capping off the pipe and that causing another rupture. If his last capping hadn't worked, we would have been dead in the water (no pun intended) until Monday with three homes without water. We prayed a lot and it held. Monday he gets to do the actual bypass and then there is just one more small leak up-line. Had we really known about this water situation we would have reconsidered coming here. But life is an adventure... or venture, and we sure did venture out on this one.

Mom mini album

I got some Adirondack alcohol inks today and I'm dying... (get it) to use them, but knew that I had to finish this little album first or it would be sitting forever. This is page 3 and 4. The ribbon had white dots and they didn't look right with the beige and colonial white, so I used a q-tip and light brown ink and colored the dots. The two little flowers on the top of page 4 were to cover a boo-boo where I smeared the red ink, but I think it looks okay. I was going to stamp the buttoms with stazon ink but it didn't come out as crisp as I wanted so ended up just stamping on the cs. It's the same effect.

First and second generation stamping of flowers

The completed album.

Mom mini album

I woke up at 3 this morning and couldn't get back to sleep. So I got up and worked on this.

Page 1 and 2 of the mini album I started Monday. I realized after stamping the flourish on page 2 that I think it is suppose to be a candle. Well, so it's an upside down candle now. The flowers on page 1 I bought at a garage sale a couple years ago. The ribbons I dyed with coffee because they were white and I wanted an ecru. The only colors in this are going to be the black, brown, beige or ecru and red. At least that is the plan right now. Each page is one inch longer than the first page, and again, each one is on chipboard.

Front cover

This is the front cover to a mini album that I saw at the scrap store. It is only four pages, all of chipboard. I cut it with the zutter cutter. Petunia update: We actually have plants! I can't believe how long it took them to get going, but now seem to be expanding daily. My little experimental pods are struggling. Most of the asters are sprouted, but very slow. The scabiosa sprouted early and then it was like they had too much fertilizer or something and shot way up until the root was growing on top of the soil, then they died. There are a couple still growing though. You can definately see the advantage of using the regular aerogarden pods. I just have to weigh now whether it is more important to have 100% success, or save some $'s and have 40% success rate.

New Technique

I didn't know which version, the scanned or photographer version would show the details better, so I posted both. I did this one for the "Take it off" challenge on 2Peas. They said you could use ink or paint so I used what I had available, which was an acrylic type paint that you mix with reinkers to get different shades to use and also gives more texture to your inks. I experimented with several things before coming up with this. I put a glob of the paint on the paper and added one drop of yellow and mixed it up a bit, then did the same with blue. Then mix them together by hand. Then I took a large daisy stamp (you want something without a lot of detail) and stamped it into the wet paint.

I stamped the paint off in between on another sheet of card stock and after they were dry I cut them out and will use them on another card. The paint (called Create-A-Shade) leaves it with a real glossy. textury look and I love it. I think that you are actually suppose to use a brayer on the paint before stamping but I thought that would mix the colors more than I wanted. I will definately be using this technique again, I really like it. I kind of hated to cover it up with anything, but then it wouldn't be much of a card...haha

Sad Daffodils

My poor daffodils are hanging their heads this morning. It is raining now on top of the snow, but these tenacious little guys will recover once again. These are REALLY sad daffs. This is the side of the road that we can't see from our front window and the kids know it, so they enjoy stomping them....grrrrr.

This little helebores that Marjie gave me last summer is right at home in the snow. If we have heavy snow it gets weighed down, but pops right up when it melts.

Yesterday we were out for most of the day, but today I hope to get some paper crafting done. We went to Scrapbook Nook and I saw a cute mini album that I want to make for Relay for Life using my Zutter Cutter.