How sweet is that? I'm loving these free overlays from Pugly Pixel via True Love Found, which I just now realized is run by Buggie & Jelly Bean. Gah! I can't keep up. I'm lost. I need GPS for bloggers.
Anyway, the point is I really want to make these ornaments with Max this week.
I started a Pinterest inspiration board for all the handmade gifts I want to make in the next two week. Time to get cracking!
OK, I clearly need to get out the tripod, find some cute paper punches, and play around with this some more. But look at those hearts! And this was only my first try. So easy, thanks so my fancy macro lens. And thank goodness the tree is up.
easy bokeh technique via Kevin & Amanda.com
Is that a crafty project I spy? Wow, has it been a while - I've gotten pretty rusty. You should see the mess I made on the back of that thing! What tangles webs we weave. At least the front looks good (so far.)
The winter village has outgrown the mantle and moved to the TV armorie-thingy - and it looks pretty great this year. We are all enjoying it. I need to take a new pictures, since I've hung little swags of vintage lace binding over the top. Pretty dreamy.
The christmas cards are going out before 2010 and that is a major achievement for me. Yippie! And my super cute cards came with a super adorable gift:
Happy! Speaking of christmas ornaments, I've got a dilly of a How-To craft project to share with you. It's almost ready, I'm hoping to have it on the site by Wednesday. Here's a teaser:
Easy to make, inexpensive supplies, and overwhelming cute factor. It's a crafting trifecta, and I'm really excited about it! I was inspired by a vintage, handmade ice cream cone ornament I found at a thrift store. I will have kits available for making these, though probably not in time for this Christmas...we'll see.
How are everyone's Holidays shaping up this year? I still have a bit of shopping/making to do. And I said I'd be done with all that by Dec. 1st! Ha!
The Witching Hour has come and gone, but I can't resist sharing a few pictures of our Haunted gingerbread House Making party last Friday!
God bless google. I had vague memory of a free Halloween banner print out from years ago, that I spotted on someones blog. After a speedy internet search, ten pieces of cardstock, and 20 minutes of cutting: I had a fantastic, free banner that looks perfect on our mantle! You can find the free print-out letters here on the Allsorts blog. It's neat that all the letters & numbers are available so you can make up your own, spooky messages. Max is working on his own mini-banner that just says "BOO!" I used black ric rack to string the letters (just like Jenny did,) because it looks great and I actually had some already in my notions stash.
Making this banner is the first real crafting-for-fun I've done in a long time. And that is just a crime, don't you think?
If you've seen it, you know. Love.
Sunday was like a dream. (I'm choosing to ignore the weather forecast, which is predicting snow for this Tuesday.) We had a nice, little lunch on the back porch, and then the boys played Frisbee while I puttered around the front flower bed, trimming old lavender stalks and digging around to find new strawberry plants.
Max suggested we have lemonade with our sandwiches. I told him it was a great idea, but we didn't have any lemonade. He looked over to the fruit bowl on the kitchen counter, then back at me.
"Well, you have a bunch of lemons."
This immediately induced a restaurant-flashback. I waited tables for many a year at various restaurants through my late teens-early twenties (and then some.) And I'm sure a bunch of you out there have, too. Did you ever run across that person? The customer that requests lemonade, and when you tell them it isn't available, they ask you, "Well, do you have lemons?" "Do you have sugar?" "Then you do have lemonade, don't you?!" This is such an annoyance, not just because they are asking you to go out of your way to make them a custom drink, but it's in the way they go about the questioning. Like they're tricking you into it....like you don't know how lemonade is made. Like you don't have about a million other things you need to be doing, and you have time to make a drink that isn't on the menu that will probably be really good, that the customer won't expect to be charged for at all. I mean, come on. It's just water, and lemon juice, and sugar. What's the big deal? Really industrious customers will order an ice water and ask for a bowl of extra lemons and a sugar caddy. Just make it up themselves. I actually have no problem with that. Go for it. Stick it to the man.
Well, I did make the lemonade for our lunch, and it only took a few minutes. It was also amazingly delicious and I had to thank Max for the suggestion. I haven't worked at a restaurant for a long time now, and it's strange to feel so completely happy to be finished with a certain phase of my life, and also deeply nostalgic for it at the same time. It was a great gig. Good money, entertaining co-workers, and when I went home at night, albeit reeking of the tilapia special, there was a wad of cash in my pocket and not an ounce of work to bring back with me. The slate was clean. Asleep before my head hit the pillow.
I was lucky to spend most of my waitressing career at a wonderful restaurant called The Wild Monkey, (I hate that it sounds like a strip club when it was actually a charming little bistro-type restaurant with a stupid name.) It's gone now. New owners, new menu, different name. I do miss the characters I met there, and the hustle and bustle, and the BBQ scallops. I don't really miss the customers that wanted their checks split to the tenth of a penny, or the morons who ordered soft shell crabs and screamed in horror when they saw their plate, "It's a whole crab???" they'd shudder. And I'd have to be nice, and apologetic, and accommodating. Taking the plate back to the kitchen, and getting yelled at by the cook for wasting a $28 dollar entree. And don't get me started on the side work.
I'm nothing but grateful today, really. Being able to stand where I am now and gaze back at where I used to be. Working for yourself has it's own challenges, to be sure. The lemonade is sweeter, but it's hard to sleep at night.
Since my last post was about biscuits, and the one before that was about cookies that look like biscuits, I'm thinking it's time to switch gears to some crafting. Before all of us gain five pounds from all of these baked goods. (Just me? Oh, never mind.)
Hello. What do we have here? Would that be an over sized basket of freshly felted sweater sleeves? I wonder what will become of them.... Perhaps, they will turn into a small litter of varmints, like this:
That's what I'm hoping for, anyway. If I can remember how to make them, it's been so long! I've done a little bit of sewing since we moved, but only a couple of dresses for me. (I need to post about those, too.) We did some serious thrifting while we were in Virginia last month, and I simply could not resist filling the trunk of the car with old, wool sweaters. Over 35 usable sleeves total! I would love to make the big-eyed passel of 30+ critters that I see in my mind into a realty. I would also love to finally write up and create the pattern/tutorial for making them. And I'd really love to stop blabbing all of my grand-old pipe dreams here on the blog, before I've even started working on them. I always think that it will motivate me, but it just ends up making me look like a deadbeat when I don't follow through.
Look at them up there. Staring me down with those wee, beady eyes. Do you think they are accusing me of something??
I better get to work.
