Pictures

I found the camera, AND the charger! SO, you get to see evidence of a little of what has been keeping me busy! Here are two views of the Mother's Corsages for the wedding, with the "gilded" roses that I glittered.





Here is one of the boutonnieres. The bride already has her bouquet, so I can't show you how that turned out!

I will be busy doing wedding stuff for the rest of the week, and then I will be catching up with everything that got scheduled for "after the wedding"!

Patience!

I am not sure I have reported very much on our "kittens". They are coming up on a year old now, so they are in late adolescence, big and rangy. We have two out of the original four left at our house. They are very pretty cats--gray and white longhairs, very silky. Thor (the girl) is all gray. Storm (the male) has a white bib and boots. They are very good natured, and quite, quite stupid. This is a good thing, in a house with SmallDaughter. They love attention, and are willing to put up with ANYTHING she dishes out. She carries them about (sometimes by the neck), she "pets" them--sometimes with a shoe or a teacup in her hand at the same time--they don't mind, they are just glad she loves them!

I bring this up, because I just watched her pick up Thor, who was sleeping in the sunlight on a soft quilt on the couch, and stuff her bodily into a 3 gallon chicken waterer (fortunately empty!) and carry her around in it. This is the bottom half of a 2 part waterer. It looks quite a bit like a bucket with a lip around the bottom (that is where the water pools for the chickens to drink out of). However, there is also a 2 inch wide handle across the middle, which makes the stuffing of cats into it much trickier--but she succeeded!

Gilding the Lillies (and daisies, and roses...)

I am working of getting ready for a friend's wedding. Since the rule of life is "you can spend money or you can spend time"--I am spending time. This friend, Miss A, is beautiful, creative and fun, and she is marrying a great guy. I am excited to create a wedding that is as beautiful and fun as they are!

Last week I made her bouquet. It turned out adequate. Lots of daisies and white roses and lilies (her flower choices). Beautiful, but...lacking. So pulling inspiration from and old copy of you-know-who (Martha Stewart, darn it all!)--who in keeping with her usual ratio of one good idea every 40 pages (truly, in her books and her magazines, that is the usual!), I carefully applied glue to the edges of a few of the flowers and dusted them with superfine ("diamond dust")glitter. They look awesome! And they perked the bouquet up, and made it sparkly and bright (along with some well placed gems in the centers of a few flowers) just like Miss A!

I have also glittered the cut out letters for the hanging banner with their names on it, paper tussy-mussys for the bridesmaids bouquets, more flowers for the corsages and boutonnieres. Lots of glitter!

The down side is:

To quote my brother in law: "Glitter is the herpes of the craft world. Once you have it, you can never get rid of it!". And I have glitter everywhere.

Winter Wonderland

Today, I dropped off the car at the mechanics for an oil change (which reminded me of my favorite sign at a quick lube place: "How long has it REALLY been?") and I walked home. It is so beautiful today--the sky is a bright clear blue, all the sunlight is gold and it reflects and sparkles on the snow diamonds and all the shadows are blue/purple/gray. The time and temp sign at the bank says it's 21 degrees, which explains why it is so sparkly--it has to be fairly warm (relatively speaking!) to snow, but when it gets really cold it crystallizes all the surface snow so it is bright reflective prisms. It is very beautiful--although the wind was a bit brisk.

That last storm (the one where I could hear the flakes) was an ice storm that dropped ice pellets for hours and made a thick crust over everything. Walking across it is an adventure! SmallDaughter LOVES it--but she can easily walk on the crust--not so for me--every few steps I break through up to my shins!

Also, it froze the barn door shut, so I have to wait for the sun to warm things up a little before I can go feed the chickens!

Winter Wonders

It appears to be snowing again. That in itself is not surprising--we are supposed to have a pretty major winter storm (although we only got about 4" last night, which is not even close to the horrors they were predicting--of course!) The surprising part is the direction the flakes are coming from, and the noise they are making as they hit the house. Hmmm.

Inside the cozy house, we are enjoying our quiet snow day. BigGirl has been inspired. Over the weekend we had some of our favorite people stay over, and Miss V and I went through our fabric stashes and combined our fabric to make tops for Humanitarian Quilts. BigGirl helped me cut pieces on Saturday night, and on Sunday, she asked if she could work on a quilt by herself. In keeping with my "what the heck, why not tell your children "YES" and see what they can do" parenting, I gave permission--and by Sunday evening she had ironed, cut and layed out all the pieces for a twin size quilt! On Monday, she got it sewed into strips. I will post pix when she gets it done--it is very cute, and I am very impressed with her (I am still working on the quilt I started when I was expecting LargeBoy--so like, 13 years ago!).

SmallDaughter got to put on her snowsuit and boots and go out walking around and kicking snow for about 40 minutes. I had to force her to come back inside. She does not care how horrible the weather is, she just wants to be out in it.

LargeBoy has completed 2 Merit Badges. He was the awesomely cool big cousin/entertainment unit over the weekend. He is researching lots of exciting things that interest him.

I spent several hours on the phone, and paid the bills in bed--I find bill paying is a whole lot less stressful when I am in the softness of my cozy bed with the wonderful electric mattress pad on high!

I also read a really excellent book last week--"Coop" by Michael Perry. I just love the way he writes (I also loved "Truck--A Love Story"). I have a lot in common with him, but his humor--it just sneaks up on me, and I find myself suddenly laughing till I fall off my chair (the part about his dad joining the choir--priceless!)

I am whiling away the winter evenings by designing my dream retirement home. Not what people would expect, I'm telling you. More on that later.