snow, snow,

(click on photo for larger view)

and more snow.

does this look like less than an inch?  if so, then i think my ruler is broken, and so is the weather guy's.  

is it spring yet......mmmm, how 'bout now.................uhhhh, now........what about............now?  

i miss the warm weather

but i do love to watch it snow, while i am wearing my soft-furry-on-the-inside-oh-so-warm-tootsie-covers, inside, standing next to the heating vent. although, i did step outside the warm indoors to grab a picture of the first flakes of the season.

ok, enough winter already, i want spring back, life bursting from the bare ground, song birds singing their little hearts out, buds blooming, really really, i want spring back.....

my daughter is teaching me new tricks

this is so much fun.......my computer savy daughter found a site that lets you do neat stuff to your photos above and beyond picasa.  

new jeweled offerings up for sale on etsy this weekend

while chatting with a very dear friend who always makes me laugh online tonight i put a few new jewels together
to offer on etsy.
i probably won't get them entered until sometime this weekend.
hope everyone has a wonderful turkey day. if it was just me and the hubby we would probably just skip it and say we did it
we have so much going on around the house i wish i could put it on hold
until next month, say about the 25th! for my kids i put everything else on hold and make sure we have a thanksgiving meal, and talk about all of those things that we are thankful for, especially all of those who have been there to help us this past year.

this beauty is going to its new home

i am so excited that this piece has a new home to go to!

it is all gift wrapped and ready to be put under the tree.

this is the quote from the customer who purchased the necklace, made my day to have such wonderful feedback from someone you don't know on occasion: 
>Message from the buyer:
This is a Christmas gift for my mother and I can't wait to see her face when she opens it because it is so BEAUTIFUL! I was wondering if you could include a gift box and/or the description you used on the website as to the materials you used so that she can have a full appreciation of the craftsmanship and detail that went into the piece. Thank you!

15 on the 15th

my middle baby turned 15 years old on the 15th. every year, with each and every birthday i find myself asking the same question....how did this all happen so fast? i can still remember holding this tiny, well if you call a 9 pound 10 ounce 2 weeks early newborn tiny, baby like it was yesterday. i so miss baby sam, but i love watching him grow up and change and become his own unique person. it is so exciting. he has a very odd sense of humor, but that is what makes him sam and i would not change it for the world. he and his little brother usually just drive each other nuts, but i love watching him having fun and goofing off with his older sister. i almost feel like i am watching someone else's family. i forget my baby is turning into a man. his deep voice, hairy body, no more boyish chubby cheeks, he is now taller than i am and just a hair shy of being as tall as his sister, and probably as i am typing this he has grown since we measured him last week and i am sure he is probably a hair taller than his sister now. he seem so grown up at times, then the boy in him, which i am most familiar with, comes out.

sam hopes to be a guitar playing actor, and his is a good one at that. here he is modeling his new wallet while we were waiting for our food to come. he got to spin the birthday wheel and won a target gift card which fit nicely in his new wallet.

after dinner we left the comfort of the warm and cozy restaurant to a very cold and snow flurrying parking lot. we all chased sam to our very chilly mode of transportation with party poppers, all of us happy, cold, full and covered in streamers and teeny snowballs praying the heat would hurry up and kick in. once home we all waited for sam to become entranced by his new video game and once we were sure he was we all pounced him with silly string. boy that stuff stinks!

i look forward to what the next 15 years brings, but sometimes i just wish it would all slow down a bit so i could take it all in and file every precious memory in a safe place.

the many faces of sam

was not able to catch the serious side of him saturday....but this is how he is most of the time and i love it

available soon on etsy

pinks, yellows, oranges, salmon.
makes me think of a tropical sunrise. a warm beach. far away from everywhere. a gentle breeze.
a perfectly pink sun rising out of white clouds into a yellowy-orange-salmon sky.  i love big, chunky, colorful pieces.  this piece is a bit weighty since it is made up of dyed turquoise and swarovski.  
i set some other projects aside and created this colorful happy piece. it was yuck outside, all of the pretty leaves blowing away, the trees dead looking, the perinneals shriveled up, no song birds, and today is a sad day for reasons other than it being yuck weather.

if you click on the photos you can get a more detailed enlarged view.

our new old kitchen table

about 4 years ago we found this very old farmhouse kitchen table. it had been stripped and was dried out blech old wood, but it had charm. we originally planned to do our kitchen in black and white, then yellow and green, it is a long story. i ended up painting this table white and stenciling a black checker board on it. i never clear coated it, i decided to let it age with use and when it had achieved the oh-so-right amount of aging i would clear coat it.
well, it went from not aged enough to aged too much overnight.
a couple of weeks ago i found my stash of stripper and found that farmhouse charm that i originally fell in love with and decided to paint flowers on the table. i looked over my pieces of vintage china and decided from the pieces that had an abundance of roses in it that i would have to paint roses, and i also noticed i loved the pieces with a touch of blue in them, even though i think blue is one of my least favorite colors. i went down to my studio and found the majority of my paint were dried up.
when my hubby called me from work i told him i was going to forget painting the table since my paints were little bottles of colored concrete. he told me to be ready when he got home, and as tired as he was we headed to the local artsy-craftsy store and found most of the colors i needed.
i started by getting my mojo back painting on a few paper plates and then moved to 2 of the chairs (pictured below). after i painted the chairs it was 2 am, not feeling good from what the anti-biotics were doing to my stomach and i was so tired, and feeling a little sad that i could not find my painting mojo i headed off to bed.
as soon as i walked into our bedroom and saw my dear hubby sleeping i headed back to the kitchen and started painting. if this man had enough faith in me to drive me while he was butt-tired to the artsy-craftsy store to by new paints then by gosh i was going to paint him the most beautiful flowers i could. by 4:30 i had about 3/4 done and i was feeling my mojo returning.....yeah.....it was not totally back, and i was having to think about my strokes, they were just not flowing out of me but it was coming back to me. i have to say i am pretty happy about the end result. and thankful to my hubby. 

if you click on the photos you can get a larger and more detailed view

table top close ups

chair backs

i am happier with the chair backs, i was starting to get my mojo back after 2 years of not picking up a paint brush

chair seats

not so happy with how these turned out, but they will be pushed in most of the time when not covered by people seats. guess i could cut myself a break here since this is the first time i have painted in about 2 years.....
they remind me of the 'lilo and stitch' cartoon background.
by the time i painted the chair backs, pictured above, i figured out that it was the yellow in the leaves which was the cause of my dissatisfaction, so by the time i worked my way to painting my kitchen table i made some color changes.

the killer whoopi cushion......

my youngest went as a killer whoopi cushion this year for halloween. his brother was off with friends at a haunted house, and his sister sat with me to hand out treats until a friend came to pick her up for an evening of hanging out.

my trip to the emergency room and enough already people with the prejudiced comments

it again, has been longer between postings than what i would like. 3 weeks ago this coming monday i ended up in the e.r. with a ENORMOUSLY swollen lymph node and gland behind my ear and into my jaw. the pain i would compare to childbirth and the onset less than 24 hours. after a cat scan, and giving into the nurse and my hubby talking me into some pain medication being added in with my i.v. antibiotics, which i have to say was wonderful, i was sent home with a kinda-sorta-in-a-way-maybe diagnosis, a script for antibiotics and pain medication. i am on my second round of antibiotics, and now that my jaw is pain free and my mouth feels like eating food, my stomach is a mess from the meds. but....i am getting better, and pretty soon this will all be a memory!

the picture above is not human guttage, it is pumpkin guts by the way. pretty cool pic taken by my daughter. i am thinking we may have a major change in the career route. she has a huge interest in photo journalism, and i would say she is doing wonderfully.

what a week this has been. i am so excited to be a part of history and excited to see what changes are coming our way with obama elected president, but i do have to say i am sick of the prejudiced comments. my kids, my husband and i are in shock over the things we have heard, and quite saddened to think there are still so many people in the world that are so ignorant.