My Life Craft

I thought this might be a good time to talk about something that really truly changed my life.

Eighteen and a half years ago, my mother brought me over a memory photo kit that she had purchased at Michael's.  Our son was only about six months old and I had just gone back to work.  I had always been an artsy-fartsy, crafty type my whole life, even as a child and it certainly continued into adulthood.  I was always working with some type of medium, whether it be sewing, drawing, calligraphy, stained glass, ceramics and cross-stitch AND I had always had scrapbooks, so my mom thought I'd have fun with it.

Little did she know that she awakening a sleeping giant.....LOL

I fell head over heels in love with the craft of scrapbooking.  I liked that I was actually doing something with the photos I was taking and it was satisfying the creative side of me also.

I started at a table in our attic, then I took over the dormer in our attic and here I am almost 19 years later with a small craft room to call my own.  I don't even want to try and estimate the amount of supplies I've had over the years, but I think that comes with the territory of having a hobby...hoarding supplies.  :)

I've never stuck with a hobby other than reading longer than I have scrapbooking.....going on 19 years and in that time I've done 30 scrapbooks, 26 mini albums, 12 specialty albums and countless gifts for friends and family......I would have to say an estimate of scrapbook pages would be around 1500!

As everyone else, the way I scrapbooked changed over the years also.........I laugh and laugh when I look back to those first years of pages, but I wouldn't change them for the world.  

Here's a page from the early days of Connor's 1st birthday and the cake we let him "explore"....so much fun!

When Connor was little, he loved snakes and had lots of stuffed snakes he liked to sleep with.  Here's a page a did with a favorite photo commemorating the memory.

That was during the time I was still doing an 8.5 x 11 format....I think I changed over to 12 x 12 a few years later.....I needed more paper real estate to work with...lol

Here's a page I did of Connor's first six birthday cakes.  Back then I matted EVERY STINKING PHOTO of my pages, some more than one layer....do you know how long that takes?  I finally got over that obsession with matting photos and now I rarely do it....

I've been organizing some of my photo CDs and DVD's and I came across a bunch of things I forgot I had.  Here's some photos of my first craft space.  This is in the finished attic of our first home.  It was cozy and in the winter time I loved looking at that window at the snow falling.  Connor had a play area on the other side of the attic and Fred's computer desk was up there too.....lots of evenings with the three of us, up there playing.

It was located in the dormer of our finished attic and it's fun to see what I was using a decade ago.  My craft space has certainly morphed over the years and once I get it back in shape, I'll share my space as it is currently.

Another thing about this craft that makes it more special and important than previous hobbies and crafts and that is the friends that I have made through scrapbooking, both in real life and even online friends.  My scrapbook friends are amazing, smart women and my life has been enriched by knowing all of them.  Even if I was to ever choose to not do this hobby any more, the friendships I've made would still continue and for that I'll always be grateful to the craft.

More to come.........

Operation Craft Room Week

This week (my 5th week of retirement.....I'll stop doing that at some point) it's "Operation Craft Room Week with side jobs of homework and a stack of magazine reading" week.

I've been a bit remiss in my blogging but that's because I was entertaining a longtime friend who came back to Iowa to help me celebrate my birthday/retirement.   We had such a good time and I was sorry to see her leave so soon, wish she could have stayed longer.  My father also made a surprise visit to celebrate with me, so I was also distracted with his visit too!

On top of the celebrating and house guests, I had my first college class test in 21 years, so I had to fit in studying five chapters during that time also.   I think I did pretty well, but I won't find out for a few days.

This week, I'm going to FINALLY get into my craft room!  I've been putting it off because there have been other things that were more of a priority, but I have a crop to attend this Friday at my friend Judy's office (her boss lets us use the conference room....really comfy chairs...lol), so I need to put some things together to work on.  It's quite a mess in there and since I need to get my stuff ready for Friday, I'm going to clean up too.

The table in the foreground is usually clear of stuff and as you can see, I have piles on it.

My work table has also been a mess for a couple of months.  I've been working on Christmas pages throughout the summer and the one on the table has been there forever.  I AM GOING TO FINISH IT THIS WEEK.....I'm just yelling to reaffirm my intention.  :)

I started an 8 x 8 album for my oldest long time friend Dianne in honor of our 50 years of friendship and I'm still not done with it so I'm going to take that with me on Friday to see if I can get it finished up.  It has some pretty important pictures in it.....from when we were growing up to milestones in both of our lives.  She knows I'm doing it and has provided some of the pictures, but she hasn't seen what I'm doing yet.  I can't wait to give it to her!

In between cleaning up my craft room, I going to tackle the stack of magazines that has collected on one of my reading tables......I don't subscribe to a lot of magazines, but I have multiple issues of the ones I do I haven't read yet.  I let them stack up this summer......PLUS more homework and I have a feeling that my class is going to be ramping up with the homework as we will be starting to put together our 25-35 page business plans....yikes!

Here's a couple of scrapbook pages I've done recently and I thought I'd start sharing some of the things I'm working on here.

My husband and son caught me napping Christmas Day with my sock monkey that the son gave me that day.

This page was done to tell the story of a very important piece of cross stitch that my mother did for me not long after I left home.

Have a great week!  It's a great time of year!

It was a PARTY!

I've been having such a wonderful time with my long time friend Kim that I really haven't had time to do any blog posts.  It figures that my first big test is this Wednesday night in the business class I'm taking at our local community college, so I'm juggling studying with spending time with Kim and my dad who flew in from Las Vegas to surprise me at my retirement/birthday party, so time management is in full force. 

Speaking of the party........it was a blast!  I only have a few pictures because of course, I was too busy talking to all of my guests and those didn't even turn out very well and I didn't task anyone else to do it.....so shame on me!

I over bought on beer and wine, but my food estimate was perfect!  I had tortilla pinwheels, little smokies in BBQ sauce, homemade popcorn with real butter, tortilla chips with my homemade salsa, pretzels with a french onion dip, smore candycorn, peanut m & m's and my dad brought me a cake which was gobbled right down.

One thing I learned....this house has a maximum entertainment capacity of about 40 people.   :)

The Finished Task - Pantry edition

Since I obviously did a poor job of communicating that the photos I showed in my last post are from my pantry BEFORE I did a purge and reorganization, I thought I'd post the AFTER photos......but thank you to all of you that thought my pantry looked good before......LOL

Since none of us bake a lot, mostly just at holiday time or the occasional craving, I needed to move all of our baking supplies to the hard to reach top shelf.  We had been storing paper goods, light bulbs and some baking supplies up there but I had more taking up valuable real estate.

I used a Longeberger serving tray to hold all of our nuts, chocolate chips, raisins, cocoa powder, etc. and then I can just grab the tray to bring the stuff down for use.

We had our pasta, beans and rice not very accessible either and we use those items a lot so they needed to be somewhere for easy access so I moved them to a different part of the pantry.

I also have one of the turntables in the corner of those shelves.  One holds small containers of Splenda, brown sugar, a flour shaker, a cinnamon/sugar shaker and other assorted mixes.

I did get a lot of use out of my Dymo labeler during the re-do.  Some of my previous labels were so old they were peeling off, so I replaced all of the labels with the Dymo labels.

I've got all of our boxes and packages of quinoa, couscous, rice & pasta side dishes in plastic storage containers that can be pulled out.  Dressing mixes and dip mixes go in the hanging container.

I found those cute little mini bushel baskets at the dollar spot at Target and our kitty cat cookie jar came from Sur La Table when we were in the Twin Cities a couple years ago.

I keep fruits and vegetables in various Longaberger baskets and keep our canned vegies, tomato sauce, canned olives, jarred foods and tuna fish together and have those risers for cans they sit on.

On this shelf I've got our canned soups, ramen noodles, canned pasta for the kid in the house and condiments.  The turntable on this shelf holds vinegars, oils and cooking wines.
 

The lowest shelf in our pantry is where we store our bread (in a Longaberger gatherng basket), breakfast foods, toaster, grilled cheese sandwich maker, breakfast sandwich maker and more baskets of vegies and fruits.

Below the shelf is where I have plastic carts had hold potato chips (out of sight, out of mind), some of our paper goods, potatoes, onions and our soda can and bottle recycling bin (those bottles and cans are worth 5 cents a piece when returned).

I'm really hoping that this reorganization will work better for my family and I and hopefully I won't have to do it again any time soon.

But for right now.....our panty is a thing of beauty.  :)

When you have the time - why not?

One of the first things that I wanted to do once I retired was do a complete purge and re-organization of our pantry.  We're fortunate that we have large pantry, not walk-in large but large closet large, but it's probably been six years since the last time I cleaned it out.

This is our pantry prior to my clean out.

 

Since I now have a pretty good idea on what is used the most and least that we store in our pantry, I kept that in mind when re-organizing each shelf and to use the space in the panty much more efficiently.  I also knew that there was probably some things that could be thrown out also.

Do you see the rectangle containers with the blue lids?  Those are Tupperware containers that I purchased right after we were married 27 years ago.  They were expensive back then, but obviously well worth the money since they are still going strong after 27 years.

It took me three days off and on to get the pantry re-organized and I spent about $50 bucks on a new Sterilite 2-drawer cart from Target, some new storage containers from Dollar Tree and two new OXO turntables that I found at Lowe's.

When one of my girlfriends was over last weekend and she saw the finished product, she turned to me and said "You have way too much time on your hands".......why yes I do........{{smile}}

Stay tuned to see the results.............

It's a Keeper!

I'm married to a man who doesn't really like casseroles, stews and even most soups (except for chili and ham & bean) which makes it tough to cook something in advance for dinner or even cooking during the winter months.  That's not to say that I don't cook those things, because I do.....I like them and sometimes I hit upon a recipe that my husband says is a "keeper".

I found this recipe in an email that I get from Taste of Home and we like all the ingredients so I put it in my "to-try" basket of recipes.

Contest Winning Broccoli Chicken Casserole

It was a hit with both Fred and a good friend who came over to dinner that night.  Of course, the son wouldn't touch it, but what do you expect from someone who subsists on nothing but peanut butter, pizza, mac and cheese, French fries, cheeseburgers and grilled cheese sandwiches.

It was super easy to prepare.  I think the hardest part was roasting the chicken and waiting for it to cool in order to cut it up.   I served it with a salad and dinner rolls and there was enough leftovers for two more meals.   It was definitely reminiscent of Thanksgiving dinner.

It's a great quick weekday evening meal you should try sometime.

Weekend Thoughts and Fun!

Obviously, I haven't got to the point where my week days meld into the weekends, but I have to say I like having my husband around, so there is a distinct difference there in those days.  :)

My first week off consisted of nothing more than homework, some house cleaning, pleasure reading, internet surfing (both research and fun stuff) and getting started on my upcoming garage sale.

This is the mess I'll be organizing this week along with a friend who is bringing her stuff over in the next day or so.

I'll be glad to get that mess gone so we can re-organize the garage for winter and then all three car will be able to park inside the garage.

I found a couple of great recipes this week while surfing and I'm definitely trying this one for lunch one day soon because everything is better with bacon.

Egg Salad BLT 

Husband and son do not like egg salad, so this one is all mine baby!

I also decided while watching football today that I'm use up some of the basil I have growing and make pesto.   Pretty darn easy but I wish those pignoli nuts weren't so damn expensive!

BTW - 2 cups of basil makes 1 cup of pesto and you can freeze pesto if you want, just pour a little olive oil on top of the pesto before freezing.   I used this recipe from the Food Network today for the pesto Basil Pesto ,only I used parmesan cheese rather than pecorino.   Plan on trying it out tonight when we have dinner......New York strips, corn on the cob, salad with Italian bread smeared with pesto......delish!........and then after dinner.......we're going to go see The Eagles.   Can't wait and I'll post pictures later.

~* Making Lemonade from Lemons *~

In a previous post I told you about our home owners association threatening us with legal action if we didn't remove this shed -

which by the way, is a lot nicer than a whole lot of other sheds in the neighborhood and development, but we're tired of dealing with the assholes, and that's exactly what those that sit on the Board of Directors are.....assholes.....power driven assholes (apologies to those of you that don't curse, but you might as well get to used to it if your going to read my blog), so last Sunday my brother and a friend of us came over and took it down.  I mourned it for about a day and then I said "SCREW THEM.....I'll figure out something to do with that area and there won't be a damn thing they can say to me"....so after one trip to Lowe's and scrounging around in my gardening stash, I turned that empty lonely concrete pad (which has our son's hand print from 2005 in it) to..........THIS

The potting bench was inside the shed, the small wooden bench is from my mother's porch that sat next to the shed, the terra cotta planter on the left was a gift brought back to me from Palm Springs by my Aunt and Uncle and I just snagged the bird bath on a Facebook For Sale page a couple of weeks ago for $15 bucks.....I don't like seeing the utility boxes that our shed hid from our view but this set up hides them a bit.  Next year I'll have to put my rabbit fencing all the way around the tomato garden on the right to keep those "wasskily wabbits" away!

I was pretty please with how we're using it right now and I feel like I made lemonade out of lemons.  I also feel like I'm giving the big old finger to the jerks that sit on our home owner's association board and that folks, make me smile.