Kristina's Color Challenge #7

Kristina has issued her latest color challenge.

The colors are Chocolate Chip, Close to Cocoa, Soft Sky and Very Vanilla.

I used Soft Sky for base card stock, Close to Cocoa DP, Chocolate Chip as a base for the Very Vanilla piece with the pussy willow from the Blooming with Love stamp set. It was stamped in Timber Brown StazOn and the pussy willows were colored in with a Creamy Caramel marker. The sentiment is from the Simple Delights set stamped in VersaMark. The band is Chocolate Chip grosgrain and the ruffle is Very Vanilla Taffeta. All materials and stamps are by Stampin' Up! I think it will be the Mother's Day card I send to my step-mom in Colorado. Thanks for looking!

Wordless Wednesday

What is Wordless Wednesday?
On Wednesdays all over the Internet, bloggers post a photograph with no words to explain it on their blog. Hence the ‘wordless’ title. The idea is that the photo itself says so much that it doesn’t need any description.
Check out WordlessWednesday.com for an archive of interesting WW posts.

Taken from: Mom's Talk Radio formerly Mom's Radio Network) is a network of Internet radio and podcast programs for moms. It's like chocolate for your ears!

If I've said it once....

I have said it a million times:



Leave the bathroom door closed.



Cole likes to play in the water. Any water. The toilet has water! Okay, how gross is that? No matter how often I clean the toilet. Our toilets are crappy and I mean that. They are the low-flow kind that helps you "save" water unless of course you have to hold the handle down and flush it two or more times to send it away. They get plugged at least every couple of days. And the older kids are not interested in making sure the bowl is empty before they leave. I have been asking nicely for as long as Cole has been crawling or couch surfing to please keep the door closed. I have heard the warnings about how toddlers can fall into a bucket of water or toilet head first and don't have the upper body strength to push themselves out again. I hate thinking about it. I baby-proofed the house as much as I possibly could but it really doesn't matter if you don't have everyone on board with that plan.


Finally, something to illustrate my point:

These are Daddy's glasses. He was watching them while I was in the shower. He decided to go out and mow the lawn. Did he tell me he was leaving? The kids were in the bathroom with me for the moment, but were wandering freely back and forth. (Leaving the bathroom door wide open so all my nice steamy warm air was escaping while leaving the cold front right outside the shower door.) Ryan came back in and said that she couldn't find him anywhere. (Where could he be, he supposed to be watching the kids?) I told her to see if he was in the bathroom. Apparently he had been there because he left the door open. Then he went outside. YOU CLOSE THE FRONT DOOR WHEN YOU LEAVE..... same concept!!!!

I found Cole playing in the toilet. Thank God it had been flushed properly. Later on DH told me that I heard him go outside and mow the lawn. Really? Because I am pretty sure I didn't hear anything other than the sound of the shower, the kids making their usual din, and the sound of my own voice over theirs. I guess I am supposed to just know where he is and what he is doing. I think I'll try that next weekend when he is in the shower and sneak off to Starbucks. You heard me leave!

So I grabbed my camera, took a couple of shots and left them there. :D

Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris

I finished this book the other day. The author has also written Chocolat which I have not read yet, while the movie is one of my all time favorites. It will be interesting to read it and see how different it is from the book. Perhaps at this stage it is even unfair to offer an opinion on this book based on my Chocolat-the-movie expectations. I thought that perhaps this book would be like Chocolat, whimsical in nature but still dealing with the stuff that happens in every day life.

Every day life.... life is what happens when you are making plans, right? The movie Parenthood with Steve Martin had a good analogy about life. Near the end of the movie the Grandma is explaining to him and his wife how life is like a roller coaster. Steve's character thinks she is just senile while his wife truly understands what Grandma is talking about - thinks she is brilliant actually. It isn't until the school play that it makes sense to Steve's character.
My own life, and as I watch, the lives of my friends are just like the game of Chutes and Ladders. It seems financially to about all of us that just as you're about to make it to the tippy-top finish line you are dealt the spin that sends you packing all the way down down down to the beginning. Never mind the other stuff that comes with marriage and family, life and death. And you don't get to just lay there, crying about it - you pick yourself up and do it all over again. The fun parts are the rewards along the way as you make your way back up again.
Anywho, overall I liked Five Quarters of the Orange. I will read it again sometime down the road and most likely get something new and different out of it at that time. At times it made me tense: I didn't want to read further but I had to. It made me uncomfortable at spots because of what was occurring to/by the characters. The book, Like Chocolat is written in the prose of food. A number of the names are fruits like raspberry and peach, the mother's recollections are threaded through her cookbook, and the main character owns a restaurant. It is a rich book, with lots of textures and flavors woven throughout. It is not a bright and cheerful book, although there is resolution and hope in the end; I have a friend who is going on a vacation for a couple of weeks and I am not going to give it to her for her beach read, not light and fluffy enough for that kind of reading. I will give it to her when she gets back and let her choose a time to try it. And who knows, she may get something entirely different out of it than I did.
It's a keeper but won't be worn torn on my shelf.

You and Me and You and Me and other ramblings

This is the card I created for Beate's Weekend Sketch Challenge #45. I was compelled to make it tonight. I had to because I made a card that was a good idea but not a good final product. It was a submission to No Time to Stamps: Stamp Simply #32 - Think Outside the Box: to use a stamp in some way that it was not originally intended. I thought that was a great idea. I used alphabet stamps: two B's became a butterfly, U for tulips, D & o for a ladybug, O for robin's eggs. The scribbly flower from Mixed Bouquet became the bird's nest. You get the idea - check out her blog for the creative ways people used their stamps.
I am happy with this card so I can go to bed without my mind stewing over the other one. Base cs is Ruby Red with the Weathered stamp in River Rock. What a great color ~ SU! should really add it to their Neutrals selection in their catalog once it is gone from the In-Colors. The sentiment in Chocolate Chip is from Cornish Heritage Farms: The Rummage Bin "Primitive Beginnings." The accent is from K & Co. ancestry.com. The designer paper is from My Mind's Eye: "#2 Berries" & "Just Like Us". I {heart} dp! The dp pushes me to try new and different colors. I bought the Bazzil paper because of a card that Biggan did - she has amazing colors and puts her projects together beautifully. I was in the Bazzil area trying to recreate that card when I stumbled into the Mind's Eye selection. I could spend all day and all my money on paper. Biggan is on my favorite places to go: she is the Swedish blog that I can't read! I tried to convert it but you know how well that goes... language is such a fluid thing and there is a lot of lingo in the paper crafting world.

It was a good thing to get out of the house for a while today. We were out of peanut butter and I heard that gas prices have reached another high per barrel. Yippee! Time to fill the tank and Costco has the best prices around here. I drag the kids out of the house before 9:00 am Monday through Wednesday so I can go to the gym. I feel like I owe them a morning at home. But there comes a time when you just have to change the scenery. For us, that was a trip to Costco. Ryan loves to go there because of the samples they hand out. She reminds me every time she sees a station, "Mommy, I'm hungry!" And yes, that was me, trying to act casual, holding my daughter's hair out of her face as she spit the sticky wad of almond butter into the trash can.
Kids keep you really humble.

Left Over Scraps!

The List:
1. Make a square card. (Any size)
2. Use only scrap pieces of paper. (The base card doesn't have to be a scrap.)
3. Use ribbon or fiber scraps.
4. Use only ONE other embellishment.
5. Use any colors, stamps, and tools.

My List:

1. My card measures 4.25"
2. All scraps: River Rock (base), Old Olive, Very Vanilla
3. Christmas Ribbon
4. Stamps: Absolutely Fabulous, Friendship Blooms
5. Ink: River Rock, Basic Black
6. Tools: Distressor, Glue & Pop dots

I tend to save anything that I think I might have a use for at some later date so I love a challenge like this. (Although - I don't know if this is reinforcing bad behavior or not...)

The paper was from my Easter Boxes project. I had to cut a 1/2" off the DP to create a smaller bottom box so I had this pile of pretty strips of paper. It was pretty late last night and I was just finishing up the card project I am making for my mom when I saw the pile. I spread them out and just started to weave them. Kristina recently did some ribbon weaving on her blog which looked pretty nice. The ribbon was from a gift basket of chocolate covered nuts that we got at Christmas. They were yummy!

Tire Swing

When I was a kid we had a huge elm tree in our front yard where my dad placed a tire swing. This provided hours of fun for my sister and I as well as our neighborhood friends. When my husband gets home my kids greet him in a way that any outsider to our family would think was bizarre. They both lay down on their backs with their hands and feet up, little turtles who have landed on their backs and can't roll back over. Or the little dogs in the pack showing their bellies in submission to the Big Dog. Then comes the mantra from the little boy, "'wing, 'wing!" They want to go for a swing. I swear my daughter is as tall as she is for her age because she has been stretched out from swinging. It's the stuff the doctor tells you not to do and dad does it anyway. Swinging comes in a variety of ways and all to the delight of the little ones. There is much happy shrieking and laughing and it does make everyone smile.

It's hard not to smile when you go for a swing at the park - I almost never see kids frowning while swinging. I find it is a place where you can let go of those things that pester your mind and drive you crazy. When I lived in Ohio there was a factory that had a company park with the old time swing set - the kind that would not be allowed to remain standing these days. The arc of that swing when you were really going seemed to last forever. I loved that swing and wonder if it still there.

There was a challenge two weeks ago on scs on using eyelets. The above card was my submission and these were the thoughts behind the sentiment from the Happy Hellos stamp from the Stampin' Up Lots of Thoughts stamp set.