Sunday, March 10, 2024

Happy 70th Birthday HWNSNBP

One of the things that I made sure to take care of before my surgery was to get this card done for HWNSNBP's big 70th.  I tried to include some of the things that have brought him happiness over the years - the black and white striped paper refers to all the years that he spent as a basketball official, something he loved to do and only gave up after Covid hit.  The basketball paper attributes to that also, but also to his love of playing the game, whether as a player, spectator, or as a coach.  The fish refer to his love of fishing which continues each summer and hopefully he'll get back to some freshwater fishing this year. The woodgrain paper refers to his newfound love of woodworking on big projects.  I could have included more of what he loves, but there's only so much you can fit in one space, as I try to remind him of what he tries to fit into his days, always wanting to get more done.  Hopefully he'll stop hemming and hawing about retiring so he can get those other things into his daily schedule.  



I am so lucky to have him here to be taking care of me as I recuperate and regret that I don't get to give him the proper celebration that he deserves for reaching such a monumental birthday.   

Happy Birthday my love.  And many, many more!

Thursday, March 7, 2024

Flying Pig Day Clarification

It came to my attention last week that currently the official Flying Pig Day is actually September 9th and not March1st as I have become accustomed to celebrating it.  In my defense I have to say that I started celebrating Flying Pig Day prior to 2009 and if you want to read the story behind it you can click here. Unbeknownst to me someone actually made the effort in 2020 to make it an official holiday to be celebrated on September 9th because that's the day they got married and they thought that they never would (and this does not refer to friends of ours who actually did get married on September 9th in the 70's).  I will just say that I will continue to use March 1st as Flying Pig Day and hope that my "Pig Ladies" don't mind sticking to that date.  

Friday, March 1, 2024

Happy Flying Pig Day



Just a few of the little flying pigs on my windowsill.

Thanks to an inspiration from my blogging friend Sabrina, and the coincidental finding of a container of glass microscope slides in my craft room, I decided to make these little suncatchers/ornaments for my Pig Ladies this year. 


I purchased two flying pig infested stickers from Redbubble and went about fussy cutting those little piggies out so that I could fit them onto the slides.  Now, I do have quite an assortment of flying pig stamps, but none of them were small enough for this so I was glad to find the sticker option.   I cut some background rectangles from an assortment of papers and did stamp the "Believe" onto white and cut that out.  The papers, with the stickers and message, are sandwiched between two slides with a length of ribbon for a hanger and held together with double-sided tape.  Another think that I have in my stash is a load of glitters and microbeads.  I opted for the microbeads for this application around the edges where the tape is.  I did put a seal coat of Crystal Effects over the beads to hopefully keep them from prematurely releasing from the tape.  The last thing I did to them was added a stick-on jewel where the tape didn't cover at the hanger point.  

The sticker procedure in process below.  I have to note that when I looked up the directions for these, it did mention using a sealer for the beads or glitter and mentioned clear nail polish as an alternative.  I don't recommend that. I tried it on one of them and the nail polish reacted with the tape adhesive and the beads were starting to lift off the tape.  There is also the odor of the nail polish involved although these won't be worn as jewelry and will not be adding much to the room, after five days I can still smell it when I sniff them.  (I know, so stop sniffing them - got it!)


I got some small boxes and did use a stamp to add a little pig to the outside.   I had intended to mail these boxes but realized too late that they were an inch to short to be mailable so I had to put in padded envelopes.


Remember - "A pig that has wings does impossible things!"

Monday, February 26, 2024

Back Door Visitor - And a Few More Pics and Preparations

We made a day trip to Delaware a couple weekends ago and as we usually do when we're away for the day, turned on the camera at the back door.  It wasn't until we were almost home that I noticed that the camera had sent a notification of a person at the backdoor earlier in the day.  I was totally surprised to see this..... make sure to turn your sound up..............


They do come and tap at the windows when I'm sitting in the dining room so I guess they missed seeing us that morning.

Here are a couple of friends at the suet feeder....


We had almost 11" of snow and these flower pots were just asking for faces with their snowy pompadours....so I did a little editing........


And one more picture that I tried to capture late one afternoon last week when the setting sun illuminated part of my gypsy rod and caught my attention....

I don't have a picture of it, but a couple of weeks ago, in a routine e-mail from the state, we were encouraged to visit the Unclaimed Funds site and I did.  I was totally surprised to see that there were, indeed, unclaimed funds in my name so I put in the claim and received the check late last week.  I would caution anyone doing this to not speak of it in front of your appliances, because not 10 minutes after I spoke with my son on the phone last night about it (because he also had a claim), our microwave got so excited it dropped dead.  I don't have the time today to go shopping for a new one so I sent HWNSNBP to get a replacement - he's going to have to make due without it for a few days until it can be delivered......we really only use it to steam vegies and to reheat food, so he can get by with what I've already prepared.  Having an air-fryer now that can do most of the same thing I might forego getting another microwave but ours is not free-standing and I don't want to have that gap above the stove.  

I wrote a little tongue-in-cheek info segment on dealing with abdominal surgery after I had my hysterectomy 15 years ago (find it here) and I'm revisiting it to get ready for my back surgery coming up tomorrow.  I already know that I won't be allowed what the doctor calls "BLT's" - Bending, Lifting, or Twisting so some of that advice will also apply for this.  What's new to me is the preparations that the  hospital has in place - I have Gatorade to drink at certain times that they provided at my pre-op admission appt. because they've found that staying hydrated improves recovery, and I have special "wipes" to use after showering this evening (not the morning of) to help prevent infection.  We are washing/changing all the bedding today because instructions say - clean pajamas and clean bedding tonight, clean clothes tomorrow.  I usually shower in the morning so this is throwing me off a bit and adding to my anxiety.  HWNSNBP moved one of the single beds from upstairs downstairs because I won't be able to climb the stairs for 1-2 weeks and we had to rearrange all the furniture to accomodate it and a new chair that we picked out that has arms.  A friend is going to lend me a dining room chair with arms again like she did for my last back surgery.  I'm thankful for that and also that we thought ahead when we redid the bathroom downstairs and made it safer for "seniors" with a step in shower, built in seat, and grab bars.  Still, I'm sure there will be a learning curve but it will all be worth it if I can walk without pain again.  Fingers crossed!

I have some posts pre-scheduled but I'll mostly be absent for a bit while I get myself in recovery mode.  

PS - Remember to celebrate Pink Shirt Day on Wednesday - wear a pink shirt to stand up against bullying!  

Saturday, February 24, 2024

Jingle Belles - Text Me

Jumping in with my cards for the Jingle Belles Challenge of using Text as the star.  I found some red and green texty background in my stash for the layers and this new-to-me die that features "Merry Christmas" in the scroll.  I decided to add in that piece of green and gold ivy paper behind the die and used some matt gold paper for the frame of the die.  I decided to use the red texted paper for scroll portion of the die and highlighted the sentiment by using shiny gold paper for the letters.


The shiny gold paper became an inlay and I had to remember to keep the little centers of the e, a, and r's to be able to close up those openings with the red scroll also so I saved those red letters when I die cut the red trying not to have them pop out in the process at that point.  I will say that this was easier to do by adding two sided tape to the back of the gold before die cutting it.  That made those letters into stickers and no gluing was necessary.  But those centers only needed a dot in the opening so I was able to  lay the red letter over the top and use my needle tool to just press the centers into place.


And since I had the ingredients out I did two of them.


I was looking something up on my Christmas card list yesterday and noticed that part of the file had become corrupt.  It was fine several days ago.  I keep my list in an excel spreadsheet and I usually add a picture of the card that I send to each person/family so I don't duplicate anything year-to-year.  It also helps me when someone tells me they love what they got so I know what they like and can work with that in the future.  So I was very upset and annoyed when all but three of the pictures that I had copied to that file for last year all had errors in them.  My resident excel expert was consulted and he couldn't explain what happened, why it was happening or how to fix it.  To top it off, in my process of doing this at the end of the year, I take a picture of each card with a little post-it note attached and then, after I add it to the spreadsheet, delete the picture from my phone and computer.  Thankfully I had forgotten to delete them from my Amazon photo storage, otherwise I don't remember who got what.  We did determine that I could copy and paste in a different way but it involves a lot of resizing which takes more time...... but I will get it done eventually.

At this point I have 7 Christmas cards finished and will probably be taking a break from card making for the next few weeks because I won't be climbing the stairs to the craft room for a while and I dare not send HWNSNBP up there to find anything.  (I may have said that before in a previous post - sorry - it is playing on my mind.)  

If you want to check out all the other texty cards on the Jingle Belle blog (and you should really, because our hostesses have made some beautiful and clever samples) click here.

Monday, February 19, 2024

The100DayProject 2024

These flat folded pentagons, when inflated by pinching, become....


Origami wish stars of which I've been keeping my hands busy with whilst watching the last few Portrait Artist of the Year Series' on Prime.  


So what's that got to do with The100DayProject 2024?  Well, there's always a little bit of a paper tail that is left before you get that little pentagon and I've been saving them in the cap of the jar that I've collected the stars in thinking that I would find a use for them someday......maybe.  I wanted to keep this challenge as simple as possible for me while I go through the recovery of my upcoming surgery so I looked through my stash and found these 1.5" kraft colored round labels and decided that I will use the little leftovers to make a little geometric collage of sorts on a label each day.  My plan is to also make a 10 x 10 grid on black posterboard so I can stick the labels to it as a finished product.


These are all the tools I'll need, although I think that I will need to replenish the scraps periodically as they get low.  Luckily I have plenty of unused origami star paper to help me out with that, and this shouldn't take too much time or energy to complete.  It will also be easy enough to catch up on from those days when I'm totally unable to engage in artist endeavors.

Oh, and the official start of the project was Sunday, February 18th - so you see the first 2 days here.

Wednesday, February 14, 2024

Happy Valentine's Day

 




We picked up some chocolate covered strawberries yesterday after my PT session.  It snowed here - about 5-6" but the roads were clear enough to not have to cancel my appt.  We have some errands today and will probably have our traditional heart-shaped pizza for dinner.  

GS1 was with us on Saturday and I wanted him to help me make these penguin Valentine's for GS2 and GS3 but he had other things that he was interested in and I wanted him to pick the things he wanted to do since they'll be moving at the end of the month and we won't see him for quite some time.  He brought a school project to finish - I had gotten a head's up from his mom on what we needed to do.

He used salt dough to create landforms on a paper plate at home the day before and I supervised the painting portion of it.  


That's a snow-capped mountain with a waterfall into a lake with an island along with a volcano, some grasslands, and a river.  I think he covered more than 4 land forms with this.  He has to make labels/flags identifying each one which he'll do at home in addition to filling out a worksheet.  


He spent some time outside with HWNSNBP riding the tractors and we played a game of OINK.  The last time we were at his house he was interested in me doing some origami with/for him and he brought some paper with him, but he saw the stars I had started and I tried to show him how to make them, but they're a bit fussy for small hands and he just asked if he could have all the red stars in the jar.  Of course I said yes.  




He found some interesting things in my art cart that I keep next to the dining room table and he did some drawing.  There was an interest in my battery-powered eraser and I promised I'd send him one for his birthday in April.  He also wanted to see my Cutttlelola - the electric dotspen that I have but we had to cut that short as we had to get him back to his parents for dinner.  I'm going to miss those art explorations with him.  It was a 10 day for the three of us until we pulled away from their house for the last time.  

I totally forgot that Saturday was my blogoversary.  Sixteen years full of lots of memories.