So sweet to get one of these!

One of my newest scrappy friends, Tracy, over at Tracy's Treasures blog bestowed upon me the honor of one of these blogger awards! She is such an inspiration to so many of us! She made a KILLER mini album out of a Graphic 45 paper pack that will leave you with your draw resting on your keyboard I tell ya!

Now in order to accept this award I need to share 8 things about me and pass this on to 8 other bloggers. Let's see what I can come up with...

1. I am a hoarder of many things, not just scrapbooking supplies. I dabble in others crafts that help to enable this habit.

2. I love to flower garden & like to find unique varieties of plants.

3. My two children are 11 years apart, but their birthday's are only 6 days apart. My daughter was a preplanned C-section, my son was an unplanned C-section.

4. I am born on Lucille Ball's birthday.

5. I love to "curb shop", go to garage sales, flea markets, thrift stores & auctions.

6. I love to repurpose trash & junk from places listed above in #5.

7. I make home made noodles from scratch, no machine is used at all. I mix by hand, roll by hand, cut by hand & have done this since I was 11 years old - been making them for 34 years now~I'll let you do the math for my age ;)

8. I am trying to lose some weight & get into better shape. Funny how it comes off much slower than it came on! :(


I'm supposed to pass this on to 8 other fabulous bloggers, but so many of those that I read don't want to accept these awards anymore, as they've gotten so many of them over & over again. They feel like it's redundant. I'd like to pass this on, because they might get some more exposure to their blog, but it's their choice. I know I AM THRILLED to get this! Thanks Tracy! You've been one of my constant followers!

Well, I need to scoot, we have someone interested in the lost dog that we found 5 weeks ago. I'm hoping he's a wonderful person & takes her.

God Bless & have a great day!

Valentine's Day projects

Valentine's Day was a busy day for both my husband and I. First, I made some things for our 7 year old daughter, Brooke. Nothing super fancy, but I know she'll love them.

This is the card I made using A Child's Year for the card base and Celebrate With A Flourish for the heart & inside sentiment.



















Here is the inside that was made from Celebrate with a Flourish. I really liked how it turned out & I did it using the same colors they had in their example image. I used a lavender shimmery paper as well as the pink too. The red & white are just plain, cheap card stock from Walmart paper packs.










This is the card along with the wrapper cover I made for the king sized Kit Kat bar that I just used up some scraps and another heart that was cut the wrong size for the card, but worked out good enough for this! Wrapped the ribbon around it from a balloon we picked up, since she just LOVES balloons!















This next project, the hubby decided to start on another home improvement project that day. It's not a big project & yet it is. All we're trying to accomplish is installing a display cabinet into the alcove in our kitchen so that we can have a place to keep ALL his mother's Brown Drip dishes & free up a ton of cabinet space while creating something more decorative in what would have normally been a dead space.























What a mess! We tried keeping the dust down to a minimum with me spraying the blade down with water while he was cutting, but you just can't control it all. Today has been cleaning day....I might as well start my spring cleaning early! The dust is everywhere!




Here is the hubby starting to break up the bricks so they can come out.













We actually have the door frame in place, the hubs just needs to fill back in the 2 bricks that didn't stay where they were supposed to. I will get pictures posted of that later. Alan says it's my job to clean the doors, since he cleaned the mess, but I have the entire rest of the house to dust as well AND I did a finishing mop in the kitchen after he was done. I bet we need to replace the furnace filters after this mission! LOL!!

Facebook....

OK, I'm not sure if I just had a lesson in Facebook or if I just have been redeemed for divorcing my 1st husband. I think I'll take redemption.

First, I want to apologize to anyone that reads this blog and is one of my Facebook friends that may have read my ex's response to my lighthearted jab that was more intended about the mechanic that didn't fix my son's car, than my ex-husband. I guess he took it personally.

However, even though they've never made a comment on my facebook page ever before, he & his wife finally decided to do so this time and it wasn't pretty. I apologize because I'm sure this was done at 3:30 in the morning after a typical night of his drinking. I'm not making excuses for him, good grief NO! I'm just sorry that the rest of you had to witness his ignorance and I'm sorry that innocent people were involved. I could have gotten really nasty with him in response, but I've always told myself that I would never stoop to his level & God is going to help me through this like all the other times He's had to with this man. He just proved that what I said about him in my post was all too accurate. But, as my luck will probably have it, he will take me to court & he will probably win. It's not that I don't want to pay for my son's education, if I had the money. My parents did not pay for my education after high school. And I think if you pay for it yourself, you are more likely to try harder to succeed than if your parents are footing the bill.

Thanks for just listening to me here. It's not a happy post, but unfortunately, it's a part of my life & my biggest regret is that I gave one of my children a father like that....

God bless & have a great day!

It's heading our way.....

There is a winter storm that is supposed to be heading right for us, but I just wonder what we'll get....snow or ice? Clearly, I'd rather have snow than the ice, but I'd rather it just be SPRING already! Of course, around here, too much spring too soon with all this snow can mean flooding & that's not good either.

I wanted to share a layout I made of when my son was just 3 years old. Boy, this really takes me back, because my son is 18 now & preparing to graduate from high school. I'll tell you that back when he was 3- 15 years from then seemed like an eternity. Fifteen years later, it seems just like yesterday.

I made this page for a challenge that you can participate in at an awesome site called: For the Luv of Art! They have great challenges & this week's challenge was pretty simple, make a project using blue, green & some stitching. I believe the stitching has to be authentic & not drawn or by a rub-on, but I'm not 100% sure on that. Check it out HERE!

So, with my page, I used all Pebbles Inc. that I won in a prize pack from them last year. I have to admit that I was kind of having a hard time with it when I got it, but when I seen the challenge at FTLOA, it hit me that this could work! I thought that since it had some orange in the design I used over the photo, I could use it as a slight accent color too, & I do like a touch of orange with blue & green when they're not pastel tones. I had a bit of an issue with the original stitching plan though. I did a test run with the stitch pattern I wanted to use and then I started out doing OK at first on this page, but after the first inch was done, my machine started screwing up - BIG TIME! It started to bunch up & then it started running backwards & I did not have the reverse stitch mechanism set. So before it started to tear up my page, I stopped & had to think up a new idea to hide the bad stitch pattern. I wouldn't say this idea was perfect, but I had to make it work, since this was the only length of the closest matching green card stock I had left & it wasn't very wide to punch the tiny border either. Ugh! I used some fill in pattern paper so it would be wide enough to cover the width of the bad stitching. So needless to say, I used the holes from the punched edge to create my very simple design of hand stitching of X's and O's. I keep coming up with other ideas to add to the page, so it may evolve some more from this design, just a little though. I just hope I don't ruin it by trying to do so. I have a tendency of doing that, ya know.

Speaking of screwing things up, I have been trying to work on several other projects to share, but it seems like everything I touch turns to trash, because it gets messed up beyond repair or cover-up. I am doing a little project for my daughter's room at the moment that hasn't been ruined by me yet, but then again, it's not done either. :-S

Oh! I think I may have forgot to toot my own horn once (*snicker~snicker!*). Well, only because I didn't realize what actually happened. Anyway, if you read one of my previous posts telling you that I was getting 2 projects published in a magazine called Create: Cricut, I was wrong. Yes, it turns out that one did not get published in there after all. Nope. It was published in the very first Cricut Magazine instead!!! You have no idea how disappointed I was when I learned that there was even this magazine coming out & I thought I missed out on the chance to submit for it. Now I find out that one of my projects IS in there! So, if you have this magazine, check out page 81 - that's mine! I still have not gotten this magazine to check it out, but a good friend of mine has a subscription & she informed me that she found it in there. I am so thrilled to discover this!

Oh, and that storm we're supposed to get....it's here & so far, it's snow, lots of it & blowing pretty good, if you want to call blowing & drifting snow with wind chills below zero Fahrenheit pretty good. :(

God Bless & have a great day!