Friday, May 29, 2009

Happy Birthday Uncle Gil-E!!

Here's to a wonderful birthday Uncle Gil-E!! This is my favorite photo of you and the boys from 4/8/2007 when you were up at OHSU. That was a fun Easter Beach Party. The boys loved all the candy you shared with them.



And now you can say there's a photo of you in a coconut bra on the internet. Perhaps there are others, but this is the only one that I know of (let's keep it that way - ha ha).

Have a great one!! We love you!

Flashback Friday

I was searching for a photo earlier this week and ran across these.









If I remember correctly I had left Mateo with my parents for a couple hours while I went to get my hair highlighted for the first time ever. The date of the photo says it was 12-08-2001. That means Mateo would have been 21 months and 2 days old. (Thanks Linda for correcting my math. I don't know why I had that he was less than a year old stuck in my brain!) Anyhow, what a cutie pie!

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

M.I.A.

It's been a little sad around my parent's house this weekend. Their beloved cat "Katie" has gone missing and they think she may have become the victim of the local coyotes. The neighbors have said that the coyotes have pups now, so I'm sure they're a little more aggressive than usual providing for their family.

Katie's been missing since Friday night and this is very unusual for her. She never leaves the property. Perhaps by some miracle she's just in hiding somewhere, but as more time passes, the hope dwindles.

She's turned into such a great part of the family for my parents. Please keep Katie and my parents in your thoughts.

What a cute couple!

My cousin Cathie just sent this link to me.

Fran & Marlo Cowan (married 62 years) playing impromptu recital together in the atrium of the Mayo Clinic. He turned 90 in February.



How cute is that!

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Newest Paper Bag Album

I had a request from one of my friends to make another paper bag album. Someone she knows saw the last one I made and asked if I could make one for a baby shower gift for someone having a baby girl. So, after a couple months of procrastinating (seriously) I finally started this one on Friday night. I got to work on it in my new craft space (more on that in a later post).

I'm sure this will be boring to those not interested in crafts, but for my crafty friends I wanted to show a little more of the process. So here goes...

I actually pulled out my Cricut. I rarely use it, but thought I wanted to try some flowers in this album. It was fun. I need to use this more often.





Started with just 3 paper lunch sacks.


Then I figured out all of the layouts before glueing them to the paper bags. It's pretty fun to mix and match all of the papers, buttons and ribbons.



Here's the final product...












This one turned out quite thick with all the buttons and flowers.


This angle shows how the bags open to hold an insert for more photos or memorabelia.


And finally a shot of all the journaling tags that tuck into the pockets.


Isn't this cute? I love how it turned out. I really need to make some more of these for our craft show this fall, but you know me the procrastinator, maybe I should start now, lol.

Monday, May 18, 2009

Most recent CTMH swap

Well, I participated in another Close To My Heart swap at the beginning of May. Each time the newest Idea Book comes out, we have the opportunity to do a swap with 42 other consultants. Once we get our assigned paper pack and accessory, we then make 44 of the same (or close to the same) item. We send them all to the woman organizing the swap, she in return sends us all 1 of each of the 42 items (including our own). She also keeps one item for herself for organizing the event and she sends one to CTMH Corporate Office to show off our artwork.

*On a side note, my last swap card was recognized by Corporate for 3rd Runner Up in the March 2009 monthly contest. I had no idea until Linda told me she saw it on the website. I won $10 in product credit. That's pretty cool!

So here was my project this time around.




I did a 6x6 mini layout. I used the new "Animal Cookies" Creative Basics Paper Pack and my accessory this time was Clear Buttons. I think it came out pretty cute. I really like the Cottage Floral stamp set I used. It was a lot of cutting of flowers and leaves, but I like the 3-D effect.

I sent one with a baby picture of Mateo on it. That's the one that will be sent to Corporate. The others are all left blank for the other consultants to add their own artwork.

Here's the obligatory photo with all 44 items in it. It's always a big sense of accomplishment when you finally finish and see them all together!!


Linda also participated this time around and I love her cards!! Take a look!

Saturday, May 9, 2009

Hello.... is this thing on?

Is anyone still attempting to read this blog? I can't believe it's been almost a month since I posted something on here! I'm sorry I've been so bad about that! I do have photos to post, but they're still sitting on my camera. So once I get those onto my computer I'll go back in time a bit on my posts.

As for this weekend, we have Forest Grove Little League photos today, so that will take up most of the morning. We also have to turn in our Cookie Dough fund raiser forms, which I only showed to my mom, so we didn't do very much to help out the league this time around. I just have a hard time telling too many people about that stuff right now with it being so tight for so many right now.

While I take the boys to the photo shoots, Chico will be off at the Free Paper Shredding event here in Forest Grove. We have boxes of shred stuff. Since Chico hasn't been working, he's been on a mission to go through all of our stuff and get rid of things. It's a good idea, but it's so much work and it really overwhelms me. We're going to have a garage sale here in a couple of weeks and hopefully our house will be in some sort of order after that. It looks awful at the moment.

One good thing that has come out of all this cleaning is that Chico has agreed that I can have the one (partially unfinished - no flooring yet) big room downstairs for my Craft Space - woo hoo!! He started painting it yesterday while I was at work. It's a yellow color. Hopefully it's the "right" color because I'll be living with it for awhile. Now to figure out how to store all my crap, oh I mean crafts, lol. I have a mish mash of storage solutions I've purchased over the years, so I'm trying to use most of them for now, but there's one bookcase that I really want from Ikea, so I need to save my $$ for that.

Well, I'd better run. I'm off to start my day. Have a great Saturday everyone. It looks like it's going to be pretty nice here. Toodles!