Snowblowing our driveway

Wanted to add a couple of winter scenes for Kris.....my pen pal! She loves the snow, as do I. I know that sounds crazy coming from a person who grew up in the desert but I always wanted to live where it snowed! This is from a storm we got in November 2002. The picture on the left I like because of the tree hanging down in the middle and the other picture is of the house. I took this picture from the street I believe.... I love all the trees we have in the front that allow the privacy!

Concert on the Waterfront...

Went to a concert the other night featuring the USAF Rock band from Washington DC. They were really awesome!! It was down on the waterfront in Burlington. Aren't these pictures great? It was a little cool that night, about 60, and breezy but it was beautiful!

Haven't posted for a few days....

But a lot has been going on....Can't tell you the whole story now since it's about 11 at night, but I will give you a little and then tell you the rest tomorrow. Quit my job on Friday after chasing my paycheck around town while my boss drove all over the place telling me to meet her at a specific location and then leaving before I got there! I turned around on the highway 4 times before I finally met up with her. Quit right on the spot! (With Jared on the phone listening to me!)
So I am starting my own business! I got business cards made up and printed yesterday and I am designing my brochure now. I am just about done and all I have to do is get it printed. I already have some good leads on jobs so I am really excited!
Other than that we have other things going on....school is starting next week, Lauren started soccer today..how cute and last night we moved furniture around, which is always fun. Makes us feel like we moved! LOL. We took couches from the basement and swapped them with the ones in the living room. Several times I thought the couch was going to come down the stairs and squash me! We did minor damage while moving them around but nothing that cant' be fixed or just overlooked! LOL. Little dings here and there on some walls and doors. After a while we didnt' care, we just wanted it done!
So anyway, that's been my last few days. Will tell you the rest of the story tomorrow.... Goodnight!

Finally a fishy card!

Finally made a card with my fishy set! I love how it turned out! I put the blue cardstock through my Cuttlebug to get the cool embossed circles. I love how it feels! This card took some time but it was worth the frustration in the end. I used watercolor pencils to color the jellyfish and then used my dove blender to blend all the colors together. I also used watercolor pencils around the edges and blended it. Then I put in 4 brads. I cut 1 inch strips of green to lay under the blue and tore the edges. Then I poked 4 holes and threaded coordinating ribbon through and tied knots. Had to use my son's finger to tie the knots! LOL. The tag is tied on using a piece of fiber. I've never been able to make a cute boy's birthday card but I think this one would do! Too bad I don't know any boys who are having a birthday soon!

I love pink and brown...

Here are some cards that I was able to make last week or so! I love this color combination! I used all Stampin Up colors. On this first card, I used my Cuttlebug die cuts to cut out the flowers and butterflies. I also cut out the scalloped circles with my CB. I used three different colors when I cut them out. I stamped the flowers first on vanilla cardstock, inked the edges and then mounted it to pink cardstock. I then pieced together all the flowers and butterflies and adhered them to the card front. The flowers on the scalloped circles have micro beads in the centers. The butterfly wings are folded up to add dimension. The pink scalloped circle is on pop dots and then adhered to the cocoa scalloped circle. I stamped the same flowers on the the cocoa cardstock, tore the bottom edge, inked it and adhered it to the pink card front. I love how this one turned out.

This next card, was easy. The flower stamp is fron Hero Arts and it comes in a set of three. The stems are phrases, this one is "thinking of you." I inked just the stem part in cocoa ink and then the flower part in pink ink and stamped the flowers in a row on vanilla card stock. The bottom edge is torn and inked. Then adhered to two shades of pink card stock and then mounted to the card front. I used coordinating ribbon to go around the card and then tied some knots with other colored ribbon. Quick and easy! Love that!




This card took a little longer to do....again using all the same colors of paper and ink. The small sqaure on the bottom right corner is popped up from the card and is a shaker. I used a tiny piece of memory glass and foam tape and micro beads, which are hard to see but they are in the right corner at the bottom. I used my Cuttlebug again for this one to cut out the scallop square in the center. Another fun card but it did take me a while.

Wicked storms yesterday...

Yesterday the weather was unbelievable! I was driving home from work along some back country roads and all of a sudden, I look ahead and I see this hazy area about 10 car lengths in front of me. I had no clue what it was...sort of looked like fog or smoke and it went from the sky to the ground. Actually it looked like steam rising from the road. The cars in front of me were slowing down and I kept thinking, "what is that?" When I got close enough I realized that it was rain and when I reached that area, which took all of 10 seconds really, it was like a blanket of water coming down, like sheets of rain instead of drops. It was so bizarre.....the rain wasn't like sprinkles that slowly turned to hard rain, it went from dry to down pour! The cars in front of me immediately slowed WAY down and as if the cars in front of me disappeared, I could no longer see anything ahead! Then the wind picked up and here came the hail......huge hail the size of large marbles just pelting the van. My wipers couldn't go fast enough! I tried to call a friend and she didn't pick up so I left a message and I had to yell in order to hear myself; the hail was hitting so hard and fast. People were pulling over to the side of the road to wait it out because literally you could see nothing; no dotted lines, no lanes, no cars, no houses, nothing.....in broad daylight! It was the freakiest thing ever! Trees were coming down in the middle of the road! I finally made it through that patch of rain and then the rest of the ride home was constantly interrupted by road crews chopping trees up that were in the middle of the street and fire trucks were everywhere trying to clean up and take care of downed power lines. The rain was off and on but it looked like a tornado came through which is very strange for Vermont! The picture is of a house less than a mile from me that is surrounded by trees, much like our house. There are several trees on top of this house around the perimeter of the house. It's hard to tell what you are looking at but it's the only picture I have right now. I came home to no power. It was still daylight so I gathered all the candles I could find. Thank God I was a PartyLite rep! LOL. Since we have a well and not town water, our pump (run by electricity) wasn't working so we couldn't use the sinks or toilets! Our phone was down too so we had to use our cell phones. We were told it could be two days before we got power back so we decided to go get ice and empty our refrigerators. But before that, we cooked dinner on the grill, chunky soup in a big pot! LOL. After dinner and it was getting pretty dark, Katie and I left in search of ice. Our closests stores were closed so we had to go to another town which wasn't hit by the storm and got tons of ice and a second cooler. We drove home and just as we got out of the van and opened up the back door to get the ice chest out, the power came back on! 10:00 at night and we drove to get all this ice and ended up not needing it! LOL. So we all went to bed! Today our phone didn't start working until late this afternoon. My friend came over and she took me into her neighborhood where this house is. It's simply amazing to see trees that are 50+ years old toppled over like twigs! Tomorrow I am going to take a little drive and see what other people are dealing with. We were incredibly lucky and had no damage to our house. Our house is surrounded by trees as well, that are just as big as the ones in the picture so it's quite scary to think that it could have been us! We were very lucky!

Been a while...

Boy, it's been awhile since I last posted! I have been so busy with work and home that I haven't had time for much of anything! I did manage to make some cards about a week or so ago! And I took some more pics for my pen pal, Kris!

This bridge is in Stowe on the mountain road. There are so many bridges in Vermont and this is one of the pretty ones!

Off to the river...

We all took a ride to the river today! We took Jazz with us; figured he'd have fun. So we loaded up in the van and was gone for 7 hours! We collected rocks for our table project, and the kids swam in the river. Jazz even laid down in the water close to the edge to cool off. At one point, he walked straight in and wasn't expecting the floor of the river to dip down and he ended up having to swim cuz he couldn't touch the bottom anymore. He turned around and faced us and the look in his eyes was hilarious! He was panicked! We were all laughing; poor guy! We all had a good time though. Here's some pictures...

Here's what I have been doing lately...

I have been able to make some cards lately in between painting coats or sections on our porch. I haven't had any cricut time though. Poor bug is lonely! :( The cards I did make were fast ones so that was nice for a change. The "friends" card is 4x4 yellow cardstock. Then I cut a wave on a piece of patterned paper and covered up the seam with primas and brads. The butterfly is an idea I saw on SCS. It's made with a prima and brad and then I curled some wire around my piercer and wound that around the brad underneath the prima. It's super cute in person.

The purple cards I stamped all over and then I stamped with versamark and used pearl ex powders. I love the iridescent look! Then I used a large prima, a medium prima and a decorative brad in the center.

The card to the right I saw in a magazine. It's a large prima flower folded in half twice and then attached to the card. Then I folded a smaller prima in half to use as the base of the flower and then attached a button at the base of the flower. I used deco edged scissors and cut green cardstock for the stem. Then I mounted it to white cardstock and used the same scissors and cut around the green. The little white flowers are punched out and glued on. This is cute in person too. These cards I am using to send to pen pals on SCS. Fun fun fun!

Lima bean stuck in Hershey's hair...

I love this picture of Hershey! We were eating dinner one night and we had lima beans in our veggie mix. We all hate lima beans so we were giving them to the dogs. I tossed one down to Hershey and instead of catching it in his mouth, it got stuck above his right eye! Can you see it? He had no idea where it went! We had to pull it out of his hair! LOL So goofy!

Beaded Curtain I made for a client...

Well, here is the famous beaded curtain that I ranted about on SCS!! I hated this thing after about the 3rd day! Katie helped me do it and together we put in over 100 hours! We used over 22,600 beads! I never want to look at another bead! LOL

We originally wanted the curtain to be much fuller, but the doorway is almost 80 inches so it would have required 80 strands of beads. This is 53 strands on it now. We liked the spacing because it reminds us of a waterfall. So I lucked out and didn't have to make anymore strands!

We were also expecting them to hang perfectly even but since a lot of them are glass beads, they all have slightly different dimensions and getting them to hang perfectly even is impossible! So in the end, we love how it turned out, never made one before and will never make another! LOL

Another day of painting....

We did another few hours of painting this afternoon. We probably have another full day or two before we are done. Actually 3 because we have the upstairs shutters to do.
We went to a local park/lake this afternoon and grilled burgers and played in the lake. Katie and I looked for pretty rocks to use on a table we have that is iron and rusty. I plan on doing a mosaic pattern on the top with all the rocks we found. Of course we have to collect a ton more because it's a big table! It was a nice relaxing afternoon! Tomorrow we plan on going to Stowe on some nature walks and rock searches! Maybe some swimming as well. Should be a fun time. I will try to remember my camera next time! I forgot it today. :(

Greeting Cards for Vermont Soldiers...

I have been collecting cards for Vermont soldiers who are currently deployed to Iraq. I started almost a month ago and I have received over 300 cards to date from wonderful women I have "met" on SCS. One box with 268 cards was delivered to the Vermont coordinator last week who will in turn ship them overseas. I packaged the cards so that each soldier would get 4 different cards, with 4 different greetings on the outside like Happy Birthday or Thinking of You, etc. The soldier can then sign the card and write a little note inside and send that card to someone they care about back home. Greeting Cards overseas can be hard to come by. For the group who is receiving these cards, it is rare that they will find one to purchase over there. These cards are free and come in a care package filled with other needed supplies, like toothpaste or shaving cream. Each soldier receives a care package once a month from the Vermont coordinator until their deployment is over. So my goal is to have cards in each box every month!
When Jared was overseas, I sent him a box once a week but some soldiers as young as 19 don't get anything from home! That is why this program was set up. There are many volunteers who "adopt" a soldier and send him/her a care package once a month for their entire deployment. I think it's a wonderful program and I intend to do what I can to make sure cards are available to those who want them. Some of the cards I am receiving are made by children, and those are a favorite overseas!
If you would like to see the thread that I started on SCS, click on this link. http://www.splitcoaststampers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=265864&page=9.

Painting the porch...

Katie and I worked on the porch again today. Changing it from blue to green. It's been a long time since it's been painted. We've been in the house for 6 years and we've never painted it. I think the previous owners painted a couple of years before we bought the house! So the blue trim looks really bad! So bad that I am changing it to green! LOL. Even the white spindles on the railing are going green! We are really blending into the woods around us now! LOL. I tell Jared that we are camouflaged.
We managed to keep the dogs off the paint this time. The first time we painted, last week, we painted half the porch floor and of course the dogs had to walk on it! This time we finished the other half and we were able to keep the dogs off! We have the steps left to do and then the second coat on everything. Then we move on to the garage doors, lightpost, and mailbox post. My next project will be to re-stain the wood floors in the dining room and hallways! Not an easy job but one that has to get done, and I have always been of the mindset that "I can do it!" LOL. Most of the time I am right and have been able to figure things out that I have never done before...thank God!
Anyway, that was the majority of our day. We then ate dinner and walked to the creemie stand! Yum!
Off to bed; after midnight here! Good night!

Still working...

Well I am still working on my very first blog! Don't laugh at my layout and content; it's a new toy! LOL. I am learning all about Html. So far, I have learned that it takes a long time to add in all the elements I want! Well the copying and pasting doesn't take a long time but picking and choosing and re-wording things takes time! Anyway, I am sure in a couple of weeks I should be a little faster and my blog won't look so dorky! LOL