Weekend O' Fun

I'm back from a quickie little trip to visit my Oregon girls. The lovely Nicole (see above) picked me up at the Portland airport on Friday night and we headed to Tim and Jessie's house, arriving just minutes before they got home from a wedding. We spent the rest of the evening chatting and catching up with each other. Saturday morning Tim made us pancakes and we enjoyed a lazy morning. We eventually rallied ourselves and headed out for some shopping and lunch. We hit the usual spots...Target, where I found some summer clearance in the clothing section while Jessie and Nicole loaded up on the household necessities...Michael's, where I made a yarn purchase for yet another baby hat...shoe shopping, where Jessie got these lovelies:

I too love these shoes and decided I really wanted the chocolate brown ones...I know, not the RED ones you say, but seeing as how I have like 9 pairs of red shoes already....so my dear Nicole bought them for me as an early birthday present. Nice, huh? She was excited because she got to check something off her to do list and saved on shipping to me.

After our shopping adventures we returned to Jessie house for some knitting (Nicole and I) and napping (Jessie) before Nicole had to head out to a work function (hence the orange sweater and OSU bling in the above picture) and Tim to a gaming party. So Jessie and I settled in for the night to eat our fancy gourmet dinner, watch a movie and knit. I managed to finish the most adorable pumpkin hat you ever did see (I'll post later this week) and start a new baby hat before Nicole returned. More knitting and chatting and snacking .....

Sunday morning we (well, except those with church choir commitments) had another lazy morning before heading to lunch at the Roadhouse, where I received some photography pointers from Tim, who took this cute photo:

Jessie was kind enough to be my test subject during my photography lesson yet again. You like a moustache (pronounced moo-stawsh)?

At my request we headed to Aspinwalls after lunch for milkshakes, where we enjoyed the warm weather and yummy treats.

Seriously, who can resist milkshakes made with fresh fruit? I always have a hard time choosing between peach and strawberry...peach won out this time, but luckily Jessie had a strawberry one for me to taste!

Sunglasses are the key to pictures with me and Nicole....guaranteed one of us will have our eyes closed...we didn't need 8 million shots this time!

After a brief stop back at Tim and Jessie's house, Nicole and I headed up to Portland for some shopping on NW 23rd St and a visit to the brand new Paper Source. It was heavenly, lots of paper goodness, one of my favorite little areas in Portland, beautiful weather, great window shopping and people watching and it was nice to spend a little one on one time with Nicole too. Sadly, I had to head to the airport by 6pm on Sunday and return home. I miss my girls everyday, but am so glad we squeeze in some girl time whenever we get the chance.

Baby Love

On Tuesday I went to visit Stephanie and my "niece" Amelia to bring them the hat I knitted. It's a little bit big on her, but looks cute none the less. We also later rolled the brim up past the ribbon and button and gave her a cute little "popeye" looking hat that doesn't fall over her eyes. I can't wait to see her in her pumpkin hat, which I am hoping to finish this weekend. She's the cutest!





I will be enjoying lots of girlie time this weekend with this girl and this girl. Hope you have a lovely weekend!

Crafty goodness

I've returned to knitting almost nightly the past couple of weeks. Here's my first baby hat project. Made this one for little Amelia and am totally hooked on baby hats. I think I'm going to add "obsessed with knitting baby hats" to the growing lists of reasons why I have baby fever. I've already started another baby hat. I'm working on the "Pumpkin Hat" (as modeled by Ethan here) for Miss Amelia's halloween costume. She's going to be the cutest pumpkin around.

As promised, here's another mini album I made recently. This one is a simple one. An ode to my scrapbooking stash and love of scrappy products. I've almost used up my stash of these Collage Press papers too. Bummer, there some of my favorites!

Mini Album Mania

I've been making lots of mini albums lately. I've made 3 in the past couple of weeks. Today is the deadline for my 2nd round entry in Scrap for a Cure's "So You Think You Can Scrap" contest. The challenge was to lift a project from one of their design team members. I was inspired by Meridette's mini albums. She uses lots of sizes, shapes, textures and embellishements, which I love. Here's my lift of her gorgeous minis. An album about my life and my thoughts "right now." I used the fun Teresa Collins album and papers, plus lots of Collage Press and other bits and pieces of red/white and cream goodness from my stash. I love how it turned out....makes me happy!

Birthday Wishes

Today is her birthday


and I'm just now getting around to posting her birthday wishes. Wishing I could be there to give her this

and sing her this

Happy Birthday to you,
Happy Birthday to you,
Happy Birthday dear Ellen
Happy Birthday to you!

I hope you had a wonderful day!

Good Things

Here's a little list of my "good things" for today:

• made the top 10 in the "So You Think You Can Scrap" contest at Scrap for A Cure!
• on a knitting kick again, starting something from this book and working on this blanket
• drinking half a strawberry milkshake after dinner....we'll see how the reflux does tonight
• watching Obama's speech at the DNC
  
• thunderstorm warnings tonight
• very nice thank you gift from my students and parents at Chrysalis Academy
• new kit and gallery goodness at Studio Calico
• scrapping with her, her, her and her on Saturday.
  
• a date with Edward and Bella and the last 200 pages of Breaking Dawn

Enjoy your good things.

Happy Mail

I've been a lucky girl the past few days and have gotten some lovely happy mail treats. Today my happy mail from this swap arrived. Here are the lovely red contents:


Thanks Bethany! I love, love, love it all! The fish salt and pepper shakers are too cute and perfect for my red/black/white kitchen and I adore that lovely red bag you made! So fun!

A few days ago this box arrived...and sat by the front door, as boxes tend to do in this house when they aren't for me...funny thing though, this box was for me, but I didn't realize it. Shawn told me I had a package when I got home, so I went and grabbed the box from Portland Sheet Music full of lesson books I had ordered for work and figured that's what he meant. Well, there was another box sitting there for days...until this weekend when I realized it was for me from my "Jar of Whimsy" swap partner, Traci. Oops! I finally opened the box this weekend and loved what I found. Here's the contents of the jar after I started pulling things out to investigate the goodies it held:


If I were planning ahead, I would have photographed the jar all full of goodies, so you could have gotten the full effect...but I didn't...so here's the jar after most items had been pulled out. The bottom of the jar contained tons and tons of fun buttons and sequins.


In today's mail I also got a package from Home Studio. My free pendant, a thank you for blogging about how much I loved the pendants I ordered from them. How fun is that?

Yeah for happy mail! Needed the smiles after spending a fortunate to replace the AC in my car on Friday. Hopefully, it means this week is going to be a better one!