Spoon People

Lydia went through some of my craft books for kids. A couple are for 2 - 6 year olds but Lydia who is 8 still loves most of the craft projects in them. The books include The Little Hands Big Fun Craft Book: Creative Fun for 2 to 6 Year Olds and The Little Hands Art Book: Exploring Arts & Crafts with 2 to 6 Year Olds by Judy Press and Scribble Art: Independent Creative Art Experiences for Children by MaryAnn F. Kohl. I let her pick out some projects for us to do and the first one she wanted to do was to make these spoon people.

Lydia loves to create "doll houses" out of cardboard boxes so we made one of those as well. She decided it would be a school. She has an expensive Barbie house in her play room that we could have used but she prefers to use houses she makes out of cardboard boxes. Creating the house itself and the furniture and curtains and such for it is most of the fun for her. Sometimes her dad gets a little frustrated with her because she never throws anything away. She sees things she can create out of almost anything! I love that she loves to create like this and so I am a little more patient with all of the "junk" she collects for her arts and crafts. Her whole face brightens up when she shows me something she has made from these things.

I think we will pick out another project to do now. We are on vacation until the 4th of January so we can do that!

Office Redo Progress

I have been writing lately about the office redo we are working on. I have to give Ken most of the credit because he has been doing all of the real work like painting and hanging shelves. As you can see in the picture above, the shelves are now up! This is not how I plan to organize things. They just have everything from my desk piled on them so we could take the top off of my desk to remove a drawer. I LOVE THE SHELVES! Now that I have these, I will be able to see the top of my desk! Well, maybe.
Last night we taped off the stripes and...
...finished painting them. I love the stripes! The picture that inspired this room is in this post. The fabric I ordered is not supposed to ship until after January 1. I wish I had it now so I could start sewing the curtains! I am going to love my new office. So excited to finish it.

Christmas Stars

I made these Christmas stars this year for some friends. I stole the idea from Trey and Lucy. I thought it was a neat idea. Easy to make too.

Office Redo in Progress

We are working on the office redo. We have the lighter orange on the walls and WOW, it's orange man! No dozing off in this room! It still needs one more coat and then the darker orange stripes are going up on one wall. I just ordered 6 yards of this fabric from jcarolinecreative.com (pic above). I'll be making curtains out of it. The fabric is not being shipped until 12/31 so it will arrive when I am back to work. Bummer! The shelves in the inspiration picture in the post below have been purchased and will go up once the walls are dry.
I purchased this wall clock last night. I also purchased an old metal file cabinet and a retro end table from The Salvation Army yesterday. The file cabinet will get painted one of the blues or greens from the curtain fabric. I think the table will be flat black and I'm going to paint a peppermint on the top of it.

I am still looking for 2 shell chairs along this line--any color, I can have them painted whatever color I want. We had a few similar to this years ago and I think I didn't sell any of them for more than 3 bucks each at a rummage sale. Now?! Now, you can't find these for under $70 a piece!

Office Redo

I am going to cheer up my office and I'm using this as my inspiration. I found this photo via the How About Orange Blog. I was excited to find this blog because orange is my favorite color. It's a great blog and I highly recommend it. I will take a picture of my office before we start so you can see the transformation. I'm only going to stripe one wall because doing all of them in my 10x12 office would make the room feel too small to me. On the facing wall I will have shelves like the ones below. I so need shelf space. I'm going to pull the blues, greens, pinks, and purples for accent colors. That, and a red and white peppermint candy light that I have to include because it reminds me of The White Stripes which I am addicted to right now. I spend the majority of my day in my office so I want to make it fun.

Vintage Bracelet by Dawn Kristine

This is the bracelet Dawn made me. I think it is FABULOUS! She used some of the vintage jewelry I found for her this fall. I am so excited to wear it. I just LOVE IT. (Photo was taken by Dawn and I copied it from her blog.)

2009 Frost Bite 10 Mile Run - 3rd Place

The results of the 2009 Frost Bite 10 mile run are in and I took 3rd place in the 35-39 division. I'm on the left wearing number 1046.
(Photo taken by Doug Wojcik from the Stevens Point Journal.)

2009 Frost Bite Run

Lydia and Ken came to cheer me on for the 2009 Frost Bite Run. I ran alone and as fast as I could within my comfort level. We didn't have chips and I started in about the middle of the pack, so I'm not sure of my exact time but when I crossed the finish line the time said 1 hour and 25 minutes. So I know I did at least 8 minute 30 second miles. The YMCA hasn't posted the results yet so I'm not sure how I placed within my age division yet.

Christmas Card Swap

My friend Dawn made me one of her beautiful vintage bracelets (see some at her Etsy shop) in exchange for some Christmas cards. I can't wait to see the bracelet. I think I got the better end of this deal! :-) It occurred to me as I was leaving for her house to drop them off that I had a "bloggable moment" so I snapped these photots with my phone camera on my way out the door. If you are a blogger, I bet you can relate to this bloggable moment phenomenon. Very often I'll see or do something and think, "note to self, this is so bloggable". Sometimes it makes it to the blog, sometimes it doesn't.

Had my first run of the year on snow today. Running the 10 mile Frost Bite on Saturday.

My Plants are Singing

4 days off in a row means time to catch up on some things that were getting neglected. Our plants are looking much better (I imagine them thanking us and singing happy songs) as is my office which was in desperate need of a filing cabinet and now has one. Even all of my paperwork is in it, within alphabetized file folders!

Today will go by too fast so I need to be choosy about what I will do. I took a day off from running yesterday because most of my joints ached. My body takes quite a pounding from all of the running I do and I would hope that is all it is. I don't think I can blame the running for sore thumb joints though?

Men of a Certain Age premieres on TNT on December 7 at 9pm Central. I really do not watch very much television but the previews for this look really good. It stars Ray Romano whose comedy Everybody Loves Raymond is based on. It's very rare I get excited about a TV show but I am looking forward to watching this one.

Tomorrow is the deadline to register for the 10 mile Frost Bite. I will be running this one for the first time this year. We don't have any snow yet and it would be kind of pretty if we had some for this run.

I hope everybody had a great Thanksgiving.

Repurposing Materials for a Christmas Card

In exchange for one of these FABULOUS bracelets my friend Dawn makes, she asked that I make her a couple of cards--one being a Christmas card for a swap she is doing and another for her daughter's piano teacher. (I wonder who is getting the better end of the deal on this exchange, hmmm? Yeah, umm, me no doubt.) I started on the Christmas card this evening. I love this wrapping paper! I've had it for awhile now and have been wanting to use it on something. The beads, from a magnetic bracelet that Lydia broke, will soon be garland. I plan to do some stitching on this too. I had fun digging through my stash for stuff to use on this but man did I make a mess of my craft room!

I Am SOOOO Inspired

Wow...Everybody Likes Sandwiches is a great blog. I am so inspired to get busy in my kitchen! Check it out people.

Plarn Anyone?

It's been so long since I've been in my craft room that it is RIDICULOUS! It always seems to be last on my things to do list these days but this evening I picked up an issue of Cloth, Paper, Scissors and it inspired me to get in there and make SOMETHING. Reading this magazine I realized I really love fiber arts and collage and would reallllly love to take some classes.

We watched Al Gore on Letterman last night and he was promoting his new book Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis. He sparked our interest so we bought this book today and I've started reading it. Now I'm inspired to make some projects out of recycled materials so I started to look around online for plastic bag ideas because I am just disgusted with how many of those I dispose of and oh my goodness, there is a plethora of things to make with plastic bags. Did you even know there has been a word created for plastic bags used as yarn? Yeah, it's called "plarn". I love that.

A Very Spooky Halloween

We carved punkins last night. Lydia's is on the left. The bat is mine and Ken carved the skull. I love the skull! Didn't he do a good job? Lydia won the carving contest again this year.

After pumpkin carving last night and much pleading from Lydia, we took her to the haunted house at the Rising Star Mill in Nelsonville. We were 5 steps into it and she said VERY sternly, "I want to get out of here RIGHT NOW!" There was no going back at that point so Ken walked through the rest of the haunted house with her wrapped around his neck clinging for life. It was put on by the YMCA and it was pretty spooky. I was scared even a few times.


We also made some cupcakes. Not as cool as the brain cupcakes we made last year but they are just as tasty.

More about Berlin and the fall festival

So, more about our trip to Berlin. I'm telling you, if you want to find some cool shabby chic/vintage stuff, the Saving Grace Salvage Company in Berlin is the place to go. It's well organized and they have a wide variety of goodies. My most favorite find was the vintage jewelry! Because...my friend Dawn makes THE MOST beautiful bracelets (and sells them on Etsy by the way) out of this stuff. I scored a bunch of pieces for her (and it just happened to be her birthday) and I was smiling the whole way home, seriously. I didn't take any close-ups of what I got for her and I wish I would have!
We met Simone Lapierre (I am probably really messing up the spelling!) who is a beautiful girl inside and out, I'm telling you, so nice. She was face painting when we met her. Besides being an artist, she is also an actress.
She also helped Lydia make a lantern.

We did some shopping too and Lydia picked out a new outfit for her American Girl.
Saw some chain saw carving...
...and of course, no trip is complete without a stop at Taco Johns!
On the way home Lydia told us she had a lot of fun. I think this is a day Lydia will remember when she gets older because we had a lot of fun as a family.

Pumpkins on Petunias Pumpkin Drop

It's Saturday morning and we're all sitting around trying to decide what to do with the day. We searched at www.travelwisconsin.com and found Pumpkins on Petunias in Berlin, WI. It mentioned a farmer's market, crafts, bake sale, great shopping in the local shops, and a pumpkin drop. We like visiting small towns and decided that would be our destination for the day. I'm so glad we went. It was a great day! We met so many friendly people.

We didn't get very lost on the way but had to stop at a gas station to ask for directions. The gas station clerk ended up being from BER-lin (emphasis on first syllable) and smiled when Ken asked her where Ber-LIN was. When we arrived in town we parked and walked down Broadway looking for where this pumpkin drop may be. We weren't quite sure exactly what the pumpkin drop was. I was picturing them dropping pumpkins all over the road and thought that would be pretty messy. When we saw the fire truck and the large crowd standing around it, we knew that was it. We stood in the front with all of the locals (and 3 lovely girls from Chicago) and watched them drop these 3 huge pumpkins on this car. [Sorry the video is sideways. I don't have time for video editing these days. I would love to have more time for that some day though.]

There's much more to tell about this day but I must get to work now so I will have to share more later!

40th Annual Art in the Park & Dozynki Festival

We attended the 40th annual Art in the Park last weekend.  Lydia's favorite this year once again was painting the cardboard boxes.  I think for Christmas I will get her a bunch of boxes and some new paints.  :-)

We each went home with some goodies.  Lydia got a poncho and this cute little dog.  He is so well made.  His legs and tail move 360 degrees.  I bought a necklace made by Wired Wimzy(?)....ugggh, I should have gotten her business card because I love her work.  I'd buy more.  Maybe Dawn knows where I can find her?

The Dozynki Festival was going on the same day so we walked through that.  Lydia picked out a punkin at the Farmer's Market.  I love the Farmer's Market and wish I could get over there more often during the summer to get fresh veggies.  It's on the other side of town though and I'm not the best planner-aheader.

Yesterday I started to decorate the house for fall.  I LOVE this time of the year in Wisconsin so much.  Such a pretty time of year.  Lydia and I are going to do some halloween crafting today.  Going to look for some bat templates for my Wishblade.

Wallet Space Saver - Card Holder

You know all of those loyalty cards and such that collect in your wallet, preventing you from buttoning it shut? That is when an extra card holder such as this would come in handy. I found the Scrappy Loyalty Wallet tutorial at the A Spoonful of Sugar blog. This is draft number one.





Think I'll keep this one for myself.

Blue Beaded Bracelet by Lovely Lydia

Lydia and I did some beading after church today. She made this bracelet for me. Now we are off to bake some of Grandma J's A&W Brownies with fudge frosting for the party at the Brandt's tomorrow!

JusticeWorks - Just Run Green 09 Half Marathon

Ran the JusticeWorks Just Run Green Half Marathon today with Dana. So nice to run again with her. We did the Portland Marathon together in '07 (can't believe it's been 2 years already). Took 9 minutes off of my last half marathon time today so pretty happy with that. They didn't have chips but according to my watch I finished in 2 hours and 2 minutes which is a 9:19 pace.