Back from Vacation

We are back from vacation and I can finally add some explanation to the pictures I uploaded before we went away. First of all, I must tell you that part of our time away was spent visiting this sweet boy. Charlie is now 8 months old and growing by leaps and bounds. He is crawling all over and pulling himself up to stand. He is always smiling and squealing with happiness, I'm sure he must know how much he is loved. Anyway, these pictures are among our most recent. If you notice in the picture with the blue t-shirt, there is a drawing on his shirt and the words "I miss Jerry". Both of his parents and our other son Michael and his wife, are big Grateful Dead fans. When we saw this shirt on Charlie (in a 6 months size) we just cracked up! The other picture of him is with his Papa who is just crazy about him.

Before we went, I was able to finish this banner with Charlie's name. It is hanging in his room, from a valance that is trimmed with little farm animals. So cute.

This little birthday card was made for a very special little friend of ours, Amelia. I get to spend many Thursdays with her while her Mommy, my good friend Bethanie, is at work. Amelia just turned "one" so I made this card for her. I couldn't resist the mary jane stamp. The white eyelet trim on this card was made using a Martha Stewart punch. The card design was taught at a mini class at my favorite stamp store, Stamp Fanci, by one of my favorite instructors, Carolyn Dewey.

Now I mentioned in a previous post that I participated in a fun summer swap called Parasols, Pink Lemonade and Polka Dots. My swap partner was Samantha and I must say that I was so lucky we were paired together. We both like alot of the same things although my "vintage" goes back further than hers......her idea of vintage is the 60's, when I was in High School and she hadn't been born. Her blog is an interesting read and when I see the furniture and things she's interested in, I have to chuckle. It was fun to gather things for her, some of which is pictured below. Dig those crazy candle holders. They are vintage Scandanavian. The fun part of the swap was that we had to make something for our partner. Because Samantha loves Pyrex ware and is an avid collector, I made this funky collage for her kitchen in her favorite color-Green! OK-who remembers green stamps?

When my goodies came from her, this was what the outside of the package looked like. There was a wonderful assortment of goodies inside the polka dot wrapped box, including but not limited to......vintage cards and book pages, ice cream scoop, popsicle molds, the most awesome flamingo pink Pyrex baking dish complete with a recipe for Pink Lemonade Cake. There was also a beautiful paper parasol (big, too!) with directions for conversion into a ceiling light cover. Hanginf from the underside were funny tags...like the one shown with Mary Poppins. Thanks Samantha-you made this swap so much fun!

Finally, I wanted to post the pictures of the project I made for Vicki Chrisman's challenge. Each of the 20 participants received a package of papers, embellishments and an image from one of the Crafty Secrets journaling booklets. Vicki has such a good eye for selecting items that will work well together, it was a dream to make this project. I was lucky to be given an image with a robin and nest on it....you know I love the birdies! I distressed the edges of the images and both pieces of cardstock for the matting by running scissors around the edges, inking and tearing. The image just begged for music and since we could use stamps, I grabbed the little sheet music stamp from the Crafty Secrets set "altered Art", and stamped a strip of music, mounted it on cardstock and placed it behind the mounted image. These was a beautiful piece of lace in my package and I hated to cut it so I just tied a knot and fanned it out to look like a butterfly and mounted it on the corner of the frame with a glue dot. Buttons were the final touch. Did you notice that the whole little collage is mounted on the inside of the back of the wooden frame? I wanted a recessed, shadowbox look.

OK-if you haven't drifted off to sleep or wandered away to watch something interesting on the Discovery Channel, that's all I have to post for now. It's been hard not being able to upload pictures and keep my blog updated. Hopefully this will be the start of some consistancy! Now I will leave you with one final treat. See you soon.