Christmas Pictures

I'm busy uploading Christmas Photos to my facebook account and supposedly the link below will let anyone look at the pictures. So let's see if this works.

Christmas pictures from John's family are posted at the link below:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=9727&l=45280&id=1450361928

They are yellow because they were taken by the light of the Christmas tree and I like the effect it gives. Also taken with my new camera lens. I'm really happy with how they turned out.

Enjoy.

October Happenings

I was just looking through my pictures and realized how far behind I am on postings. So for this entry, I'll cover our busy October.

In early October we took a trip to the East side of the state to use up some gift certificates that we had that were close to expiring. We had a free dinner at the Rain Forest Cafe where we had a great dinner and saw this guy:

Then we headed to our hotel, on the other side of Detroit. Have a few detours due to construction and got a little lost even with our GPS. Saw some seedier areas of Detroit but also got to see this:

It's the old Tiger's stadium. Picture is a little blurry as I wasn't expecting it so it was a really quick picture while moving.

We had a free stay at the hotel as well, from a previous bad stay a year ago for a wedding we were attending. This time was much better and we enjoyed two free drinks in the lounge while we listened to a great local band that I can't remember the name of and then had free breakfast the next morning. We went to Ikea and didn't get anything except a ticket for an illegal left turn. A major downer to our weekend. Thankfully, the officer wrote it so that while we still had to pay the penalty it won't show up on our insurance. After that we headed to Jackson to a cemetary that had some grave sites that John wanted to photograph for the Genealogy he is working on. The cemetary was HUGE which we didn't expect so we weren't as successful as we had hoped but still managed to find a couple that he was looking for. It really was a nice weekend get-away overall.

The weekend after was my birthday. I had a carseat check in the morning and then in the afternoon I was able to open the present John had been teasing me with all week. He had the wrapped box sitting on the kitchen table all week. He kept telling me I could open it if I wanted, knowing full well how tempting that was for me but that I like to open things the day of, so I waited. And the wait was worth it. John gave me a new camera!!! And not just any camera, a Canon Rebel xSI dSLR!! I've been considering one of these for a long time but was having trouble making a final decision and spending the mone. I was thrilled to see this one, plus a memory card, an extra zoom lens (which is wonderful), a carry case and probably most important for clumsy me, an extended warranty.

I've had lots of fun learning how to use it and taking pictures of everything...

The cats:




The plants outside (practicing aperture here..note the blurred background :-)):

My sweetest day flowers from John:

The cookies I made:

And even the kitchen sink! Actually I was trying an online photography challenge on the speed of the shutter. This was on a higher speed where you can see individual drops but you also need a lot more light. John, of course, thought I was more than a little crazy with this one.


Then at the end of October my mom, sister and I took our annual trip to Frankenmuth. We had a great time and found some wonderful deals at Birch Run. This picture is us at dinner at the Bavarian Inn, enjoying an AMAZING chicken dinner.

And at some point during the month, I knitted my very first pair of socks:

Phew! I think that is everything for October. November update coming soon! :-)

Happy Thanksgiving!!

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. Ours went very well. John was very excited to break out his new hat, that he bought in Petoskey back in September. He saw this hat at a little store downtown Petoskey and immediately decided he had to have it. He wore it to work the day before Thanksgiving and the day of, and then to both of our holiday dinners.

Here he is at Lisa's house with the hat on, having dinner. He never sits down to eat...always stands in the kitchen, close to the food. As Mark said on Thursday, it's a tradition now. :-)



I was hoping to get more of an update done today but it just hasn't happen. Watch for more updates coming soon. John bought me a new camera back in October for my birthday and I've been having fun playing around with it so I have a whole bunch of fun pictures to share.

Memories of Warmer Days

Some fun pictures of a Whitecaps game where the San Diego Chicken was there. We had a great time and definitely go back again if the chicken was there.

John and I at the game:

The chicken playing follow the leader with little chicks:

Trying to distract the pitcher:

Helping the base runner:



And John delivered me a pretzel with a bite missing. Wonder how that happened??

Treat Wrapper Tutorial

I found this tutorial on splitcoaststampers.com in their resource section. I’ve modified it a little as I found their example to be a bit narrow for my tastes. If you’d like to see the original tutorial it can be found here: http://www.splitcoaststampers.com/resources/tutorials/pull_treats/

Here is the finished result:

First a little math and a few measurements

Might be a good idea to write these down as you figure them out:

1. Measure how tall your candy bar is and add 1.75 inches
My Hershey bar was about 6.5 inches tall + 1.75 = 8.25
This will be the height of the main piece of cardstock

2. Measure how wide your candy bar is and add 1 inch
My bar was 2.5 inches + 1 inch = 3.5 inches
This will be the width of your final product

Everyone still with me?

3. This is were it gets smidge more complicated. Take the number you just figured out for the width of your front panel and double it. Have that number? Now add a 1/2 inch.
My example: 3.5 x 2 = 7 7+1/2 = 7.5 inches
This will be the width of your main piece of cardstock.

So to make the pocket I need a piece of cardstock that is 7.5 inches wide by 8.25 inches tall. If you are using a thicker candy bar, you may need to adjust the width of your paper to accommodate.

For the decorative band going around the wrapper, cut a piece of patterned paper or another piece of cardstock at about 2.5 inches tall and about a ½ inch wider than your main piece. So again for my example I made it 8 inches wide.

Alright, the worst is over!! Smooth sailing from here on out.

Step 1
We need to score the bigger piece of paper so we can create the pocket. On your shorter side (7.5 inches in my example), score your paper at the number you came up with in step 2 above (3.5) and then at double that (or the number in 3a). Turn your paper and score it a ½ inch from the bottom. When you are done your paper should look something like this (without the black lines of course):

Score the decorative piece of paper at the same numbers. It should look like this:

Step 2
To create the bottom flap on the larger piece, cut out the parts indicated below. You can corner round the edges of this flap if you would like. If you want to stamp or embellish your cardstock for the pocket at all, this would be a good time to do so.

Step 3
With the front of your paper facing you, add adhesive to the long ½ inch flap

Step 4
Flip your paper over, fold over the ½ inch flap you just added adhesive to and then fold other side over, thus creating an open bottomed-pocket

Step 5
Add adhesive to the small ½ inch flap and fold up, thus closing the bottom of your pocket.

Please excuse how crocked this looks. It's really not...just a bad angle:

Step 6
Create a slot at the top of your pocket for the ribbon to go through. You can either use a punch or I just punched two holes about an inch a part and then just cut a straight line across to connect the top and bottom of the holes. If you are using smaller ribbon, you might want to make your holes closer together.

Step 7
Now we move to the smaller piece of cardstock. Decorate your band however you please. I kept mine really simple. Add adhesive to the back of the 1 inch flap and wrap it around the pocket. While this is already scored, I’ve found I have to kinda play with it, to get it to fit to my satisfaction.

Step 8
Thread your ribbon through the slot you created on the pocket as shown:

Step 9
Place your candy bar between the ribbon and into the pocket. The ribbon will slide down with the bar.

Tie decortive knot or bow:

When the recipient of the pocket pulls the ribbon up the candy bar will come right out.

Petoskey

John and I took a short trip up to Petoskey this weekend in hopes of having a little mini vacation and also to do some geneological research for the Kuberski family tree. John booked us a very nice room at the Terrace Inn which is an historic bed and breakfast. While the building is definitely old, the stay there was very nice. John and I would definitely go back. John wants to stay in the haunted room next time though. We'll see. A few pictures of the outside of the inn, one of John and I together and a picture of part of our room.

So, we headed up to Petoskey in the rain on Saturday afternoon. It rained all the way up there, sometimes harder than others but we made pretty good time. We checked into our room and then went to a very nice restaurant called the City Park Grille for dinner. After that it was already after 9 so we just went back to our room and crashed.

The next morning we went to church at St. Francis. The church is beautiful and has amazing architectural details. Father Denny was very nice as well and let me take whatever pictures I wanted from pretty much wherever I wanted. The service was a alright. The parishoner's children were all over the place. Father Ed would have had a fit! It's a much more laid back atmosphere than what we are used to.

After church we went back to our room and then for a quick walk to a nearby beach before it started to rain some more.

We stayed in our room for awhile and then finally around 3 we went and had lunch and just decided to brave the rain and did some shopping while we were downtown. John found a very cool hat for Thanksgiving but I'll save the details of that until the holiday. We scoped out St. Francis cemetery just to see what we would be workign with and we were glad we did. It gave us a better idea of what we needed so that we could get a lot accomplished on Monday. We also made a quick stop at Greenwood Cemetery, which is HUGE. It's over a 100 acres and a beautiful setting. We actually found a few stones we were looking for and then headed back to the Inn. We spend most of the rest of the night making lists of people to look for the next day at St. Francis.

This is a view from the front of St. Francis Cemetery

Monday morning we woke up to a gorgeous day. After breakfast we headed over to St. Francis and began to work our way through the entire cemetary, taking pictures of every stone that was related to John's family in some way. This also meant cleaning a lot of them and some of these stones have not been cared for in some time. We were prepared for this and had brought a bucket, gloves and scrup brush. We took over 150 pictures in just that cemetary alone. We made really good time though and were done by around 1:30. After that we head back to Greenwood to talk to their office staff about the best way about going about finding names at that location. The staff there were VERY helpful and even gave us a printed out list of everyone in their cemetery!! So with that list in hand we spent about another hour there before heading into down for a little more shopping before heading home. We left Petoskey around 4 and made it home by 8, which included a spot in Cadillac to have Ponderosa for dinner. We so miss having one in our area so this was a very nice treat for us. I'm sure the waitress thought we were crazy when I asked her to take our picture but it was special for John and I.

Overall a very nice mini vacation. We now have to sort through all the photos and attach them to the person's record in our family tree software but that won't be too bad and we were able to get quite a bit of information we didn't have so it was very successful as well.

Cards and Layouts

It's been awhile since I've posted some of my cards and layouts. Here's a little of what I've been up to this past month.

Welcome card for our new neighbors

For a swap I'm in. The center part is stamped and then filled in with colored pencils

For our local PD after helping at our neighborhood block party. I did a similiar one for the fire department

Baby card with a unique fold technique

A few Layouts of the cats:

And one I finally finished of some older pictures