random reflections

Many Thanks

I’m basically in recovery mode after a very busy and emotional weekend. My MIL’s memorial service was on Friday. It was a beautiful service and brought the entire family to Rochester—all 38 of us from six different states, including, of course, Sarah and her family. Sarah was the liturgist for the service, and it was wonderful to see her participating in a service in the church where she grew up and was ordained.  We had a dinner Friday night and gathered together Saturday at the Air B&B my brother-in-law rented for his immediate family of thirteen. We hired a professional photographer who did a fabulous job of capturing every possible family configuration! She sent us over 100 photos. Here's one taken of the whole group. It was supposed to be a very rainy day, but the rain held off until late afternoon allowing for photos outside and lots of running and playing by the kids.

These two cards were made last week prior to the memorial service to thank our pastor and organist for their participation in the memorial service.

I pulled out one of my all time favorite Simon Says stamp sets, Be Kind. After stamping the leaves on white cardstock I colored them with Copic markers, using two blue markers that I blended with a yellow marker. I'm really pleased with how it worked.

The sentiment is from another favorite set, Thank You Kindly, by Papertrey Ink.

These cards fit two Clean and Simple Challenges open now:  Less Is More: Anything Goes and Addicted to Stamps and More: Any Occasion.

 

 

Happy Birthday, Caleb & Hannah!

Caleb turned 11 today, and Hannah turned 6. Their birthday celebrations began as they usually do with scavenger hunts. Hannah's clue were photographs, and Caleb asked for "really hard" coded clues. They were, indeed, very hard and it took him awhile to find his gifts.

Looking for the next clue in the Christmas tree.

All in all, it was a fine day. Caleb received a fabulous Lego set with over 1200 pieces that he assembled before he went to bed, and lots of kitchen play items for Hannah--a mixer, a blender, a coffee pot and a Playdough kitchen set as well. Friends came over this afternoon for cake and ice cream. 

One of Caleb's gifts from us was another year of Grandma's Book Club. Each month he gives me a title or two and I send him the books. As I did with the three girls, I made him a gift card holder. I wasn't thinking when I chose the gift card as it's a Christmas theme rather than a birthday gift card, but he never noticed.

Both the nifty book dies and the sentiment are from Waffle Flower. The gift card holder is from Pinkfresh Studio.

Here are the cards I made for them this year.

This very fun stamp is from Jane's Doodles, and it's the first stamp I've owned from that company. I had a lot of fun coloring it with Copic markers, but had to fussy cut it as I don't have the dies. I used a full-card die from Reverse Confetti for the background as well as a couple of cloud dies from Papertrey ink. 

I added a bit of sparkle with a glitter pen as well as some white dots to some of the gifts on top of the car.

I've owned this stamp from Colorado Crafts for ages, and never used it. Like Hannah's, it was also colored with Copic markers. I wasn't quite sure what to do with the background, but decided on the star die from Simon Says which I backed with metallic silver paper. I added a few of the stars that were die cut to the card front as well.

We had no difficulty getting to Wisconsin. The NY Thruway was still closed, but we took a southern route and encountered no bad weather at all. Tomorrow we're off to Milwaukee for a musical presentation of Bluey, and then to neighbor's for a New Year's Eve celebration. 

I hope your year is ending on a high note! I'll be back with a new Color Hues Challenge on New Year's Day.

 

Merry Christmas!

Yesterday we celebrated Christmas with Matt and his family. I think the girls were genuinely pleased with their gifts—more so than any other year I remember. Here they are before our pizza and salad lunch and the opening of gifts. We’ll see them again this afternoon when they stop to say hello to all of Tracy’s family.

Skylar (11), Ella (8) and Maddy (6)

Our Christmas celebration with Tracy's family will be subdued this year. Two weeks ago, his mother fell and was in the hospital just a week before she died. She was in excruciating pain before the fall, and the family had been working with a palliative care doctor to try to increase her pain medication so she could more fully enjoy life. After the fall, it was clear she would not be able to go home again. The palliative care staff at the hospital were wonderful, but they also had difficulty managing the pain until finally, the decision to medicate through an IV was made. Just three days later she passed away peacefully. Ellie was 93 and beloved by her family. Her presence will always be missed, but it will be a gaping open hole this Christmas. 

Tomorrow we hope to head to Wisconsin to celebrate Christmas once more with Sarah and her family. The Thruway remains closed from here to the Pennsylvania border. We have an alternate route if it’s clear through Erie, but that’s uncertain at this point. If all goes as planned (we always have our eye on the weather) we’ll be there about ten days before returning home.

Finally, here is a Christmas wrapping project. I always have great intentions to use my papercrafting supplies to wrap gifts. This year I purchased a couple of products from The Greetery’s All Wrapped Up collection and felt compelled to put them to use. I love how the gifts turned out, but only had time to do three of them. On the other hand, yesterday was the first Christmas Eve Day when all of my wrapping was done! Hopefully next year I’ll get to this a bit earlier. 

Warm wishes from bitterly cold Rochester for a wonderful Christmas if you celebrate it and a Blessed New Year!

 

A Double Celebration

For those of us in the United States it's Thanksgiving Day, and for most of us that means turkey, potatoes, and pies at the very least. Tracy's family has a pretty set menu: turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, squash, Waldorf salad, and pies. The pies are my assignment, and this year I made two, but as I was finishing up I realized that neither pie was vegan. My sister-in-law is vegan, but luckily Tracy managed to snag an apple berry pie from a local orchard while I put my pies in the oven. My first pie was the mandatory pumpkin pie and the second was a new recipe from The New York Times -- Bourbon Pecan pie. The pecan pie was a huge hit, and I must admit, the best pecan pie I've ever had. That recipe is definitely a keeper.

After dinner at Tracy's mom's with his family, we joined Betsy's family to celebrate Ella's 8th birthday. They had a huge crowd for Thanksgiving dinner--good friends and parents of the friends, and so. much. food. Fortunately, I was too full from our meal to even consider eating more there. I even skipped the birthday cake.

Ella got a coordinated gift and card this year. It's funny, though, when I showed up with the gift both Skylar and Ella commented that I had used the same wrapping paper for Skylar's gifts in September. I'm not surprised. I love the paper, and now there's just enough left to wrap a few small gifts.

Last year I made an Out of the Box card for Maddy, and earlier this year, one for Skylar, so it was definitely Ella's turn. She loves unicorns so the theme was an easy choice. The wrapping paper has sparkly silver stars all over it. I die cut the sky for Ella's card from the wrapping paper.

In addition to the unicorns and the rainbow from My Favorite Things "Fairy Tale Friends" I die cut a cake and some presents from two other My Favorite Thing sets. All were colored with Copic markers and then die cut. I attached all the unicorns to the box with strips of clear acetate so the movement of the unicorns wasn't lost. The sentiment is also from My Favorite Things.

Here you can see the box from the other side as well as the decorated envelope. 

The stars from Simon Says "Be Joyful" were stamped in navy blue and embossed on a silver envelope.  I added three tiny rhinestone stars as well. Ella is my "sparkly" granddaughter.

And, finally, you can see that the card fits into a standard A2 envelope--and the metallic sheen of the silver envelope can be seen as well.

I'm entering this in the Happy Little Stampers: Anything Goes with Dies challenge. With the exception of the sentiment, everything was die cut.

If you celebrated Thanksgiving today, I hope your day was blessed with family, friends, and good food. 

 

Happy Anniversary to Us!

It's our 49th anniversary today---hard to believe, but true. Tracy spent the morning on the golf course, and I had lunch with a friend. We're going out to dinner out in a bit, but that's the only celebrating for today since a week from Saturday we'll (hopefully) be on our way to Scotland with friends for a two-week tour that was originally scheduled for 2020. It's not often that I go 10 days without a blog post. It's taken me awhile to settle in after our two weeks with Sarah and her family, both here and at Chautauqua Lake. Crafting as definitely taken a back seat, and although I'm busy getting some future posts ready, there won't be a lot of crafting in August either. 

I did make a very CAS anniversary card for Tracy. There's no sentiment on the outside. I tried (and failed) to get a photo of the inside sentiment which reads, "Love you with all my heart." Indeed.

The card base and all the layers are die cut from Fresh Snow Linen card stock. I cut a series of squares with Ellen Huston's Essential Squares and added a gold metallic heart cut with Hero Arts Infinity Hearts. 

Since we're celebrating our anniversary, I thought I'd take the time to share a few family photos from the last two weeks. If there's anything we're most proud of it's our kids and grandkids. First off some photos from Chautauqua Lake. The cottage there was the smallest we've ever shared, but we made it work, and there was a lovely covered patio overlooking the lake. Like some of the Finger Lakes, Chautauqua Lake is a bit murky due to seaweed. The best swimming was in the middle of the lake, off the boat we rented for several of the days we were there. 

Here's Hannah, ready to go! She would have been in the lake every minute if she'd had a choice.

And Caleb would have gone tubing every single day if we'd had a boat for the whole week!

Watching the sunset (and the moon rise) was right up my alley!

Once we got back to Rochester, it was cousin time. It's always so wonderful to watch the five cousins reconnect in just a few minutes each summer. 

It was really hot while Sarah and her family were here. Matt and Betsy have a blow-up waterslide that cooled everyone off in a hurry!

Better yet, Betsy's dad has a fabulous pool in his backyard. Here are the dads, the kids, and Grandpa floating along.

One big change this year, is the willingness of the kids to let Grandma get a photo of all of them. This was the last night with dinner at our house.

And another one, because I couldn't decide.
Back row: Ella 7, Caleb 10, Skylar (almost) 11
Front row: Maddy 6 and Hannah 5

I know it's REALLY HOT for many folks right now. I hope you're able to find a cool place to hang out. It's warm here, but not oppressive for which I am grateful.

 

Precious & An Unexpected Holiday

There was wonderful news at a recent extended family gathering--a baby boy is expected this winter! It's a long hoped for event, and I wanted to send a card of congratulations.

The sweet images are from Waffle Flower's "Little One Baby," which I borrowed from a friend for this card. I colored the images with Copic markers and used the coordinating dies to cut them out. I paper pieced the grid pattern from a scrap of patterned paper in my bin.

I forgot to photograph the inside before I sent this off, but it says "is on the way," from another borrowed stamp by Lawn Fawn. I liked these images so much I stamped and die cut a bunch to save for the next time I need a baby card---which admittedly, isn't very often.

This is off to two challenges: Inkspirational: Precious, and Addicted to CAS: Grid.

      

As I said in my last post, we had quite the weekend. We had planned to spend this week driving back and forth to a cottage on Canandaigua Lake to spend time with Tracy's family and a few friends. Just before we arrived at the cottage on Saturday, we received a phone call saying Tracy's sister had been scammed and the cottage was not rented to us! We were planning to celebrate the 4th with a boat ride to watch the fireworks on the lake, celebrate my mother-in-law's 93rd birthday on the 5th, and enjoy gorgeous views of the lake. In addition to renting the cottage, my sister-in-law plans all the meals for the week, and buys most of the food in advance with any average of 10 people at every dinner. 

After talking with the sheriff it became clear that there is very little recourse to such scams. It's not an unusual scam and the perpetrators are most likely not even in the country. We decided to make the best of a bad situation and are in the process of rotating dinners among the three houses where my mother-in-law can navigate with a wheelchair. So the 4th was celebrated at our house. We had a wonderful time despite no lake views and no fireworks.

I should have waited until the table was filled with food before taking the photo!

Last night we celebrated Ellie's birthday at her condominium with grilled oysters, steak, baked potatoes, green beans, salads, and a chocolate cake.

  

It certainly wasn't what we expected, but we're having a lovely week at home.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Happy Easter!

It's a cold one this year, but there's much to celebrate. After visiting the girls this morning, we attended in-person Easter services at church for the first time in two years. The beautiful music with timpani and brass is always so special, and just didn't have the same impact the past two years when viewing it on YouTube! This afternoon we're off to my nephew's to celebrate Easter with Tracy's family. His cousin and her daughter are joining us this year so there'll be eleven of us for a late lunch.

Here are the Easter cards I made for the five grandchildren. I'm only showing three of the five, two were duplicates. They went in the mail last week to Caleb and Hannah in Wisconsin.

These Easter chicks were featured on Simon Says last year. I'm not sure if they were part of a kit originally, but I purchased the chickie die cut and large yellow pom-poms separately. 

The hearts were cut from Sunny Studio patterned paper and adhered to mini-slimline envelopes which I stenciled with one of three stencils from The Trinity Stamps "Lots of Dots."

The HAPPY die cut and shadow are from Reverse Confetti as well as the Easter stamp.

All five grandchildren are very likely to have plenty of candy in their Easter baskets, and they certainly do not need any little toys, so I put some money in the slimline envelope. I know that at least some of them are saving money for something special, and none of them will be disappointed with some cash.

Lastly, I made a special Easter card for my mother-in-law. I spent an afternoon with two crafty friends this week, and one of them kindly loaned me several stamp and die sets to play with. The Greetery Botani-cuts are always wonderful, and I was delighted to have time to play with the Lily and the Palm dies. I die cut multiples of them, so I'll be able to create some other cards as well.

Stargazer Lilies are my very favorite so that's what I started with. I used a new shader tool by Waffle Flower to add some Flamingo Kitsch Distress Ink to each petal and then used colored pencils for some detail. I opted to cut the palms and leaves from two shades of green cardstock.

Although you can't tell from the photographs, the sentiment from Papertrey Ink was embossed in gold. The design of the card is a copy of one Keeway created for the release of these dies, and uses two Crimped Frames from The Greetery. 

If you celebrate, I hope you have a blessed Easter!

Happy Birthday, Matt!

Today is my son's birthday, and I had a lot of fun creating his card this year. He's a fan of graphic designs so I'm pretty sure he'll enjoy this card. Although I've been an incredibly lucky winner with Pinkfresh Studio in the last several months, this is a hot foil plate I purchased along with the coloring stencil knowing I'd get a lot of mileage from it.

I used gold to hot foil this fabulous "Geo Blocks" design on white paper. I gave a bit of thought to leaving it as is, but am very happy I changed my mind and used the stencil to add two shades of gray to the blocks.

I die cut the stenciled pattern and a gold border with the Gina K Designs "Master Layout #1). That die set has turned out to be a staple for me. Then I added both to a dark gray card base.

I wanted a sentiment with a simple font and chose this one from My Favorite Things "Greetings Galore." I used one of Pinkfresh Studio "Basic Label Frames" and embossed the greeting in gold, adding three matte gold pearls for some embellishment.

I'll be posting this in Just Add Ink where the challenge is to use two of three items on a list. I chose texture and layers. It's also going to the Time Out Challenge where they are celebrating their 8th birthday. And, finally, it's off to Darnell's NBUS challenge since this is the first time I've used that wonderful hot foil plate.

Happy 50th!

It's amazing to me that our nephew turns 50 today! I remember well when he was born. After using the Ellen Hutson "HB2U" stamp for an earlier masculine card, I decide to give it another try using some different stamps in the set as well as different colors of Concord&9th papers.

The stars came from an old Simon Says set that arrived as part of Card Kit called "All Boy." I'm being more proactive about going through my stamp sets looking for smaller stamps that might work well with another set. I like these a lot. 

It's impossible to tell from the photographs, but I added just a touch of glitter to the tiny opening in each heart.

A favorite add-on to Photoshop Elements will no longer work with my computer. I recently got a new laptop when there wasn't enough memory to update to the latest operating system. It's a sneaky way to force you to upgrade even when you weren't planning to. It's proven to be worthwhile since my old laptop's battery ran way down during one of my Zoom/GoogleMeet meetings. This one barely notices. At any rate, I'm giving the RadLab replacement a trial run. It has more features, but has to be used (to the best of my knowledge) as a separate editing tool. I have mixed feelings about it, but it does streamline the editing process, and uses many of the same filters I was used to. I have a week to use it before purchasing, so I have some time to play around before making a decision.

We're head home from Wisconsin today. The virus is so rampant we considered driving straight through, but there's also the weather to contend with. It appeared two days ago we'd miss the snow, but it looks now that from eastern Pennsylvania to home might be a bit snowy. We'd rather not drive that in the dark, so we'll split the trip up into two parts. I had an email chat with a friend today, and admitted my Covid fatigue was increasing. She replied that she's now in Covid despair. I'm not quite there yet, but I do understand where she's coming from.

 

 

Happy Birthday!

Each year when we're lucky enough to travel to celebrate Christmas with Sarah and her family, we're also able to celebrate with Caleb and Hannah when they celebrate their joint birthdays. And today was the day! It started early with (requested) scavenger hunts. Caleb asked for a challenging hunt, and his coded clues were definitely that. Hannah had photographic clues, and was very quick to identify the details in the photo to lead her to the next clue.

After lunch their good friend, Evie, and her parents arrived for cake and ice cream. It was a Harry Potter cake (another request). The 10 candles on the left are for Caleb, and the five on the right for Hannah.

Caleb is a huge fan of Super Heroes (and Harry Potter). The older Papertrey Ink set "Zappy Birthday" seemed like a good fit for his birthday card.

The coordinating paper pad, "Comic Strip" was the perfect background to which I added a variety of die cuts and stamped sentiments. Some of the die cuts were layered for dimensional, some adhered with dimensional tape, and I added a bit of  white glitter paper for the lightening bolt.

 The inside sentiment came from another older Papertrey Ink set. (Can't remember the name of the set; it's now retired.)

"Birthday Buds" by My Favorite Things has always been one of my favorite sets, so I pulled it out again to make a mini slimline card for Hannah.

I die cut the mini Polaroid frames by Mama Elephant, and added three of the cute animals colored with Copic markers.  The sentiments on each frame are from Papertrey Ink's "Birthday Balloons" and the patterned paper is also from Papertrey Ink. Six tiny stars were the last addition. 

The inside of her card features the hedgehog from the set with the very appropriate five candles with a greeting from The Greetery's "Sentiment Suite: Birthday."

It's been pretty dreary here, but luckily no significant snow as yet. Our trip home will be determined as much by the weather reports as anything else so I'm hoping there's nothing BIG on the way!