This little box is a die-cut Take-Out box from Stampin Up. I decorated it with my (favorite) patterned paper at the moment, Stampin Up’s Creepy Crawly Designer Series Paper. The stamped embellishment looks familiar, doesn’t it? I love this set with these punches!!! Endless possibilities!
I get like this before every trip I take. The day before, or two days before, or (in this case) a WEEK before I am scheduled to go, I become unfocused, mopey, anxious, and aimless. I think it’s because I have difficulty compartmentalizing my life. I can’t do my regular life today and then leave on this fantastic, life-changing journey tomorrow. It isn’t that black and white for me. The vacation has already started, I think, oozing into my today and tomorrow from this upcoming Friday. It works itself forwards and backwards in time. Do I sound as completely whacko as I think I sound?
I’m mostly packed, my house is somewhat cleaner now than it was this morning, and I threw out all the weird, gross stuff in the fridge so Chad won’t eat it when I’m gone. But I’m having a hard time being here, being present in my present. Am I throwing these before-I-go days away?
New Zealand is over 10,000 miles away. It’s about as far away as I can get. Antarctica is super-close to New Zealand, and I’ll see penguins. The time difference is 16 hours. I’m going to hike on a freakin’ glacier! And I’m going to see stars in the sky that I’ve never seen before. New stars, can you imagine? It makes me cry.
I have great fun making cello bag toppers, especially when used on bags full of candy! This particular sample uses the Creepy Crawly DS, Batty for You set, circle punches, scallop punch, spiral punch and googlie eyes! I love googlie eyes!
Carved & Candlelit is one of my very favorite stamp sets. I love it that it can be used as a Halloween set if you use the jack-o-lantern faces, or a fall/Thanksgiving set if you leave the faces out. This is a 5 3/8 square card (cut your card stock to 10 3/4" x 5 3/8"). It fits into Stampin Up’s 5 1/2" square envelopes. I’m having so much fun with this size!
I found this sample on Splitcoast stampers and adapted it for a workshop this weekend. I used the Spooky Skyline and Batty jumbo wheels, plus the Rough texture wheel. The paper is Creepy Crawly DS, and the stamp is from a hostess set called Party Punch.
I let the kids play with my point-and-shoot digital camera the other day. Lots of blurry photos of fingers, Myles, the backyard, their feet, etc. But Ben managed to take this one, and I love it! I look like a dork with my skirt and heavy shoes, but I think it captures something elusive and delightful.
Also, I am not fat, as this photo would suggest. I would like to mention that the belly bulge is my shirt being bunchy. Not Allyson being bunchy. Thank you.
Here is the layout I made of our tenth anniversary photos:
Patterned paper is from SEI. The medallion is a stamp from a set in the Holiday Mini catalog called "true friend." I embossed it in silver, then punched it out with the scallop punch. I sponged rose and garden green ink over it, then placed a black brad in the center of each. The title is stamped from the Letterpress, ABC lowers, and Short Order numbers alphabet stamps.
Mmmmmmm. . . smells like Christmas in my house today! I am making my very favorite Spice Cookies this morning, to take to Julie’s baby shower tomorrow. I usually only make these around the holidays, so every time I get them out of the oven, I am overpowered by their pungent, spicy fragrance. It is such a warm and evocative smell!
How to make your own Spice Cookies:
Preheat oven to 375 F. Line two cookie sheets with parchment paper.
Cream:
1 C shortening
3/4 C brown sugar
3/4 T cinnamon
3/4 t. ground cloves
3/4 t. nutmeg
3/4 t. ginger
Add:
2 eggs
1 C molasses
3 T honey
Stir in:
3/4 t baking powder
1 1/4 t Baking soda
4 1/2 C flour
Chill for a few hours. Scoop out with a small cookie scoop, roll in baking sugar and/or chopped crystalized ginger. Bake 8–9 minutes. Optional: Press chocolate mercken/disk into each cookie while still on the sheet after removing from oven.
Soft and chewy and YUM!!
Nobody but Faith is going to care at all about this, but Scarecrow & Mrs. King is now on DVD! Not available from Amazon yet, but at least it’s up and listed! I can’t wait! Faith and I have been lamenting for FIVE YEARS about how they need to get this show on DVD.
Doesn’t take a whole lot to make me happy, does it? Is that a good thing or not? I can’t decide.
I made these journals for Meredith and me to use on our upcoming trip to New Zealand! We’ll be doing a lot and seeing many places, and I’ve found in the past that it’s better to keep up with your journaling while you’re actually still on the trip. Trying to remember afterwards doesn’t always work, especially if jet-lag is involved. I made these out of heavy chipboard that I found at Hollo’s. The inside pages are Stampin Up cardstock, and I covered the inside covers with patterned paper. I punched the holes with my frabjous Crop-o-dile and used keyrings to bind them. The beautiful cover paper is a handmade paper that my cousins Luke & Willow sent me for my birthday a few years ago. I just printed out the inside pages, and I intend to fill one page out each day of the trip. Each facing page is blank–we can put postcards, travel ephemera, or digital photos we print out from our memory cards along the way if we find such a service. And BOOM! When we get home, we have a completed scrapbook! This does NOT mean I won’t be doing a (large and possibly multi-volume) regular scrapbook of this trip, but it will be nice to have something right away to show people. And to use to remember the trip when I start getting all those bazillions of photos I will take printed!
You know that part in Monsters, Inc. where the little green guy Mike is on the cover of a magazine, and he’s like, "I’m on the cover of a MAGAZINE!!!!"? Well, I’m not on the cover, but I did make it inside! Check it out! Scrapbooks, Etc. published a layout I made in an article about scrapbooking the sports in your life. It is, not unusually, a cycling layout. 🙂 I submitted it last spring. When I got the email from them saying they’d like to publish it, I just started hooting and hollering, all by myself in my house. They sent me a check and everything.
Look! I’m published in a MAGAZINE!!!
We took Chad’s mom and dad to the Yankee Peddler today. It’s an arts & crafts festival with a colonial theme, complete with entertainments (puppet shows, melodramas, folk music, roving magicians & storytellers) and better-than-fair-food food. I wasted no time in finding and devouring my favorites: apple dumplings and onion rings bigger than my face. (and you know my face; it’s pretty big!)
Chad and his dad bought a "medium" sized bag of kettle-corn:
And we ran into these little jokers along the way, in the butterfly house. Olivia was so funny when I called her name. She looked around, like "no way!" And then she saw me and started shouting, "Allyson! Allyson! Mommy, Allyson is here!" Made me feel like a million bucks. And then Emma flung herself at me, and Ben acted shy and flirty. I love those kids.
A butterfly landed on Liv’s backside, much to everyone’s glee.
And then Ben got one:
It was a good time for everyone, but now I’m starting to regret all the weird combinations of things I ate: apple dumpling; onion rings; kettle corn; funnel cake; a strange assortment of leftovers for dinner. Ergh, my tummy is a bit unsettled now.
When I read today that you had died, I burst into tears. Another shining light, another excellent woman, lost to us here on earth. I know that someday we will be friends, when we meet in heaven. (That’s such a great perk of salvation–knowing you’ll meet your heroes someday.) But I need to thank you now, for writing what you wrote, for inspiring me to create, for celebrating the infinitely small as well as the infinitely large, for the idea of kything, for the sense you infused into all your works that the universe, while supremely logical and scientific, is also wildly mysterious. I know you are enjoying that mystery now, Madeleine.
I am having a rough day. Rough week. Rough month. Rough year. SIGH. I almost had a nervous breakdown in Giant Eagle today, because not only are they ENDING their coupon doubling, but I could NOT find corn syrup to make caramel apples. I almost just started wailing right there in the middle of the baking aisle! So I dumped everything I already had back on the shelf and went to Buehlers instead. So THERE, Giant Eagle, you Grocery Game Scrooge, you!
And then. I think I wrecked my apples! I got the caramel too hot, or something, and they’re really hard. And there’s no time to make anything else today for our flock group tonight. Sorry, flock, about your broken teeth. Don’t send us the dental bills, everybody else already has all our money.
Anyways, in the midst of all my complaining and weeping, there is this: Fingerpainting. THree completely happy children, one messy table, something to smile about.
I have been stressed out of my mind for the past week or so. It’s starting to really affect me, too. Yesterday, I opened the back door right into my face. BAM! Big old goose-egg lump on my temple. The door was a bit sticky, too, so I really had to pull hard. You’d think I’d move my face out of the way, but no, I didn’t. And earlier, I had opened the medicine cabinet door into the side of my nose. Nice! And you’ve already heard about me ordering tickets for the wrong night. I’m not confessing anything else.
So last week, discovering that I was *gasp* out of good tea, I placed an emergency order to Porto Rico Importing Company, my ultimate tea source. I ordered 1/4 lb of my VERY FAVORITE BEST TEA EVER, the sublime Vintage Himalaya Darjeeling. If tea could be gold and purple and smell like hot wet stones after rain in an herb garden, and remind one of grapes and fall leaves and make one want to cry because it’s just so lovely, it is this tea. Absolutely divine. At $22 per pound, it had better be that good! And it is. I buy it a 1/4 pound at a time and save it for when I really need my tea fix. I ordered two other teas as well, as my ordinary every day teas. They are really good too. The first is called Golden Yunnan, and it is indeed golden and smooth and fragrant. The other is Golden Nepal, which is a Darjeeling blend. It’s rather smoky, which I love, like the dark side of Darjeeling.
So this morning, I’m guzzling my Vintage Himalaya, knowing full well that drinking an entire pot will give me the caffeine shakes later on. I don’t care; it’s worth it today. Hey, at least I’m not plying myself with liquor or potato chips. Or daytime tv. It could be worse.
I always feel rich after I get a fresh shipment of tea. gloat gloat gloat. . .
