A Time For Everything

Not this past Monday, but the previous Monday, I did my Christmas shopping. Sat down in my desk chair and keyed my ideas into Amazon.com's search bar. And now I'm reaping the benefits. Every day when I've gotten home there's usually been a package waiting for me, and even though none of the gifts are for me, it's still exciting to see what's arrived and for whom. It's added a festive feeling to coming home. Not only is the dog excited to see me--but there are packages!

An another somewhat exciting note, I've finished another letter in the birth sampler of love...so YAY. It's getting done, albeit slowly at the moment, but her birthday's not until March, so I'll have plenty of time after the holidays to finish it up and get it framed.


And ornaments are coming along slowly. Here's how they look at the moment...





That's glitter around the first two and metallic silver Sharpie on the third. I want to add more glitter from the top down on the red and green, but I'm not quite sure how to make the lines of the glue smooth and in jagged points. The blue one will have hand drawn trees and falling snow added in the same metallic silver. I might add a bit of glitter for snow effect.

Those are for the girls and a significant other. This is what Sonshine's looks like at the moment:



Are you ready for Christmas yet?

But just a little. Here's our tree!


Bought some new garland--I love garland and my old garland was getting pretty threadbare. Green and red for the living room and blue in the kitchen.


And the Christmas cards we've received so far.


How are your decorative efforts going??

Okay so maybe not living the crazy life, but trying to live a fun one...

For several months I'd been hearing David Bowie's song "Let's Dance" on my radio station. That song came out the year I graduated junior high and started high school. (Boy that's a long time ago!)

Anyway, it reminded me of a pair of red shoes I had back then. They were leather with some stitching on the top and a small heel. When I wore them I felt sassy and grown up and just generally good about myself and I decided I wanted red shoes again. So I bought two pair of shiny patent leather flats--one black, one red.

And I decided I wanted to do something fun with those red shoes, so I decorated them.



What do you think???

I participated in my first ever NANOWRIMO attempt. I know I mentioned it last month or something. Anyway, Monday was the last day and I'm here to report.

The NANO goal is 50K words. I don't normally have that kind of word count in me in that time frame, so I tweaked the program to suit me.

I'd signed up to participate in a fan works exchange which was due Nov. 23. My goal was to hopefully bang out 8K to 10K words based on information from my assigned recipient. The stars aligned and characters met plot met premise and I was off to the races.

Man, I poured words onto the virtual page and it was an exhilarating feeling. I did little else, not much TV, barely any visits to social media, just wrote. When all was said and done, I'd written 37,295 words and the story isn't even finished.

I got the story to a logical ending place for the exchange and submitted it on the 25th, but I kept writing and I'm still writing and I'm hope for 80K when all is said and done.

Who participated in NANO? How'd you do??

Have a great weekend.

No, Christmas hasn't been decorated for. I'm terribly lazy about it. Well, it's not the putting up, it's the taking down that kills it. But that's not what we're here to talk about...

I've been crafting!

My sister-in-law and my niece made some snow globes which I saw while visiting for Thanksgiving and which I thought were cute. So I hunted them down during my trip to Michael's and found the little globe. I also a found a cute little figurine to go in it.

But did I open the globe and read the instructions while at the store? No, of course not.

So fast forward an hour-ish and I'm sorting through my purchases. I open the globe and read the instructions. I also needed glycerin and a box of some sort of water-proofing solution. Okay. No problem. I'll go back another time. In the meantime, I open the figurine package only to find one of the birdies' little wings has broken off. It was disappointing, but then I remembered I have some Sculpey clay and I created a new little wing for the thing.

Now, the bird was originally while, but it's fixin' to go in a snow globe, so I'm thinking white's a bit redundant. I know, how about blue? A little bluebird of happiness! I made the water blue as it was also white. I get that if it's frozen over then, yeah, it's gonna be white. But again--white glitter/snow--redundant.  And it's my snow globe, so I'll fix it up the way that makes me happy.

So here's the repaired figurine. I'm sure you can tell which wing is the replacement!


Next step will be re-add the eyes and re-color the beak. Then I'll waterproof the whole thing. So more pics later.

One of our long-time Christmas traditions is buy or make ornaments for the kids. All three of them have an ornament for every Christmas they've celebrated, even if I was broke and could only afford to make them with whatever I had at hand. There were a few Christmases like that. Last year, they got these, remember?


This year, I bought ceramic ornaments at Michael's and will decorate them. I've found a couple of ideas on the Internet to play off of, so wish me luck. Luckily my Sharpies clean off with rubbing alcohol. The acrylic paint should wash off with water before it dries. We'll see how it goes. Pics later.

And of course, I realized I forgot a couple of people, so there will be yet another trip to Michael's. (It's a hardship.)

And after a month of not working on DD's birth sampler, I have picked up needle and floss once again.

Doing any Christmas or other holiday crafts?