Life In Color

Strawberries!

Tuesday Lee loves strawberries. My mom takes her to pancacks early in the morning some days and she always gets her pancakes. I thought it would be fitting to take her picking.

 

Erin, Sarah and Sciarrino joined us, quite a fun group. Tuesday enjoyed toddling around the field barefoot and sampling as she went. 

   

Aunt Sciarrino showed her how to pick:

 

Thank you to the girls for joining us. I love that Tuesday is old enough to do this kind of thing. And she wasn't even scared to go potty in the porta potty, even though I was scared to take her. I wish she would pee in the little mini potty I carry in the back of the car!

Oh you really shouldn't have!

I got my totally awesome and amazing swap package earlier this week and held off blogging about it until I had time to do it justic. That time is now!

 

Marin was my lovely swap partner (well Amysue was who I gave to, but Marin had me). She was so sweet to send my things that were right up my alley. I have to admit though as soon as I read the note and it said, "I made the cupcakes" I was riping through the package so freaking quickly! Imagine my surprise to find these little cuties:

 

Oh I was so excited. My mom was here and we were both oohing and ahhing over them. Tuesday actually bit into one when I told her it was a cupcake (don't ask me how she knew what a cupcake was, she's never had one!):

That green yarn is so yummy, I have no idea what it is, but I'm pretty sure i could just knit with that the rest of my life and be happy. Thank you so much for my package, I love everything. I'm esspecially intriqued by the vintage piece of the prom dress, I have to come up with something clever for it!

I think almost everyone has their package, if you want to see what they got you can click on their links on the side bar, fun, fun! 

In other fun mail news Making Memories sent me new caps for my paints. I never upgraded when they first came out with this free replacement plan because I liked the way the silver lids looked:

 

Which as you can see was stupid because the pliers I had to use to open them made them look terrible anyway. And it was such a chore I rarely used them. But now:

 

Much better. And no cost to me, yeah! So if you are still rocking their old tops I'd email them for a switch (I just went to their website and filled out a contact form). 

Another cool company? Uppa Baby. The crazy people in baggage at one of the airports I went to managed to rip the bumper bar off of our stroller—while it was in it's bag! Uppa Baby sent me a new one at no cost. I love that stroller so much, one of the best baby things we got (which is good because I've talked a few other people into one!). I still get to have her ride facing me if I want and we chit chat it up all day long :)

Have you had a great experience with a company like that? Doesn't it make you feel like the world is alright?

Ok so the weather was too nice this weekend, but now that I'm over the shock I should be able to get back into the blogging grove... but I am still trying to get the yard squared away, so no promises!

The Plants Problem

Lack of blogging is due to a lack of plants in my yard. Lack of plants are due to lack of budget (and some might say lack of foresight)... But I'm working on it, don't count me out yet!

The pants problem

So now that Tutu is in "big girl undies" during the day (Bj says we can't call them panties, in case we ever have a boy, for consistancy's sake :) Her small stature is made even smaller! This was no problem when there was a lot of fluff on her little buns, which bulked up her butt. So I took matters into my own hands for Miss Zero Percent and make a couple pairs of pants (using this book as a guide). It really is so easy. And hey even if you mess up it looks cool:

 

I sewed the sides of the pants together and realized the shirts hem was inside out, but it looks neat (and I didn't want to pull it out!). A favorite pair of cords wore out at the knees (mine) so I firgured I try the same technique with them:

 

It worked great! Since you use the hem of the pants that is already there, it looks pretty professional I think. I still have to perfect my pattern (made by tracing another pair of these I made earlier this year) so that there isn't as much extra fabric in the front, ideas?

Do you like cheap stuff?

Because I just dropped some of my extensive stash of scrapbooking goodies off at Paula's. She is going to be having a sale THIS Saturday only from 9-3 at her house: 17501/17505 SE 22nd Drive, Vancouver, WA 98683 and she already put a couple of sneak peeks up here and here. I'm glad I'm not going because I'd probably end up coming home with as much stuff as I dropped off! Considering my latest layout didn't use a single piece of patterned paper, that could be a problem:

 

We are going to be doing tons of projects around the yard/house this weekend. I hope we get a little sun, or at least not too much cold rainy weather!

Swap goodies

I've been working on some swap fun...

 

A little easier to paint with out my helper, though I think not quite as fun. Just wanted to put up a little reminder, also Sarah sent out an email. Monday is the last day to send things out!

Thanks for all your suggestions on cleaning out the washer, I'm still working on it (by working on it I mean letting it air out for a day :)

Embelishment maker

I tried to set Tuesday up to be my helper today while making some embellishments (this has been posted on my sidebar for a while, finally trying it out). She wanted to do her own thing:

 

Which ended like this:

 

hehehe I love toddlers. 

In line with getting dirty... Bj decided to "help" me today by doing a load of laundry (me=laundry, him=dishes). He washed some car-washing towels with some of Tuesday's clothes and our cloth napkins. They all have a petroleum like smell to them. Plus he used some weird soap (yes, I should have just tossed it). So I ran Charlies through (2 scoops in our front loader) with a few clean rags. I still have a strong smell in the machine, and I haven't tackled the clothes/napkins yet. Right now I'm running it just with vinegar and the rags. Any other ideas? I want to get the machine really cleaned out before I try to get the smell out of the clothes, and before I do a new load of diapers (since diaper laundry has to be as residue free as possible). 

Roxy love... and repeat

I love it when I get on a scrapbooking roll and have all my favorite things out... I don't want to stop. Yesterday I didn't know what to start scrapping and then I remembered, hey I have these pictures from Sarah, because we swapped photos!

 

(I kept calling her cat Winston, that's how I came up with the title). I used grandpa's typewriter, because it's cursive, how cool is that? I also borrowed this donut punch one time and made myself a whole bunch of strips to have on hand... you'll see that came in handy.

 

Gah! Look how fast they grow! 

 

I decided to plop little embelishments all over the page. I see this look around everywhere and I love it, so fun.

 

Heheheh, I was sort of at a loss as to how to scrap these pictures. I was going to go with the, "you'll be best friends thing" but I think I'll have lots of sweet pictures of them later, this series from when we visited Carmen and her family last year are just so funny! I love how babies explore their world! 

Then today I got lots of simple cards made. I needed to fill up my birthday and sympathy tabs in my card organizer.

 

This is a super simple design. You can make a ton of them from one sheet of patterned paper, or use a 6x6 pad, like I did (basic grey sultry line). The main piece is 3x6 inches. Glue that down. Then take a little scrap of paper, and embellishment (punched heart, star, or even a flower) and attach a saying (I typed out a bunch and hand cut them) with a brad or staples (I used the tiny attacher—I'm addicted). After the embellishment part is done stick it down (this way the back of the brads/staples will be covered up). 

If you make some let me know!

Weekend

We had a lovely weekend—the sun came out! This coincided nicely with Bj's parents going to the coast, so we joined them for a dinner:

 

Bayfront dinner with my two favorite people, yes please! And guess what? I ate fresh caught crab (for those of you who don't know I normally don't touch seafood). It was good, that butter helped :) Tuesday got to run around:

 

Giggling at the wind picking up sticks, rocks and little flowers. We stopped quickly at the cheese factory:

 

I'll admit this was mainly so I could get root beer ice cream, which is hard to find elsewhere. Mmm so tasty. Bj got to use the Ergo for the first time, he loved it.

Today saw us outside even more—and in our own backyard!

 

With sidewalk chalk, friends, and some squeaky cheese (cheese curds from the factory). In case you're wondering the backyard looks like this now:

 

I hope the organic mulch dried out enough in one sunny day to be tilled with our soil so sod can be laid. That's the next step. At the same time a deck (more like a little landing) is being built off of our dining room. I hope we will be planting in ten days or so! Bj finished all the electrical work (for outdoor lights, sprinkles, etc.) today and we are so proud of him for not getting electrocuted! Now he has to built the planter boxes; he's putting his "staycation" to good use :)

I also got a little scrapping in, will share soon. Hope your weekend was fabulous, what did you do?

On the road again

Oh my it's been so long since I've had a great morning of thrifting and I was able to get one today! Despite a sort of rough night with teething (or something) Tuesday I got up this morning and headed out with Sarah. 

 

I found my all time favorite towels; yummy, yummy green. And the pink floral ones I thought would be fun for Tuesday. The vintage sheets will go well with some sheets I got in a vintage sheet swap I participated in:

 

That picture is of my favorites—see the rest on my flickr. Back to today:

 

I'm so excited about this light up santa! How cute is he, so jolly! I'm always looking for cool Christmas stuff, but it's usually so expensive, he was only five bucks, and the perfectly colored green oranaments two dollars. The little shaker I'll fill up with cinnimon and sugar. The lided measuring cup and metal coasters are new "toys" for Tuesday, she loves stuff like that. The step stool she's still a ways off from being able to use. Question: what did you use before your kids were tall enough to use one of these, I think she needs to grow about a foot to get to the sink with this, and that's going to take a while! I might have Bj build something... ideas?

The other thing I've been doing is getting excited about a new community on Big Picture. I signed up for the Library of Memories community, which is going to be full of prompts, ideas, and chat about using Stacy's system (these two books talk about it). I worked on organizing my albums:

 

Updating the label holders and workign on title pages for albums/sections:

 

They are all this basic design. I think I made ten or so in the last few days:

 

So fun to look at pictures like that. And because my supplies were out...

 

A layout about missing doing fine art stuff.

 

And a layout about how much I love my little sparkle pants, or course. I finally used one of the fun half circle stitched pages Sarah and I made. 

 

Sarah's mom made me some of these crocheted hearts. Yes, you can all be jealous she is my friend now :) Actually it's funny because we were going through my albums and she saw this layout. She said, "Oh I wanted those socks so badly" (I gave them away on here because they were too big for me) and I replied, "well why didn't I give them to you?" And she said because we didn't really know each other then. Sometimes it seems crazy I met a good friend like that online! Thank goodness she commented (hint hint) :)

Also if the person is out there who got those socks... where are they? I never got pictures... I miss them!