Here's an Easter project for all the diehard Peeps fans out there. Why make a little basket out of normal bunnies when you can make it with Peeps? Click here for the printable download to run on cardstock through your color printer.
Forget "pimp my ride." Peep my basket!
I've decided to make this a special year by remembering to send a greeting card to everyone in the family for birthdays and holidays. As I was making some cards for Valentine's Day, I realized I had a special person in mind for each one and was thinking of them the whole time I was designing it, making it, cutting, gluing, finishing it, and addressing and stamping the envelope.
That's the real value in sending greeting cards. Even with the advent of email greeting cards, it's still very special to get a real card in the mail hand-addressed to YOU.
I love making my own cards, especially if they're pop-up or 3D cards, but not everyone has time to do that. It's about the only hobby I have time to indulge in, so I use it as a creative outlet. Support your local card shop by buying cards and make your family and friends happy by sending them.
I can name three industries that are in the business of making people happy--flowers, cards and chocolates. Let's keep making each other happy.
Happy Year of the Dragon! Unfortunately, I'm traveling and may miss any festivities that may happen.
I had a good time making these little dragon cards, and the most exciting thing I did was download a free "Chinese takeaway" font from dafont.com. Woo-hoo! I've been wanting one for a while but just hadn't gotten around to looking for one. The right font makes all the difference.
Eat a fortune cookie for me, will ya?
Maybe I'm accident-prone. Maybe it's because of advancing age. Or maybe it's just because I'm very active.That last excuse works for me. Whatever it is, I seem to break things. A lot.
Recently, I dropped a mug on a laptop and killed the hard drive. Saturday I got my cell phone holster caught in the door catch as I was going in the back door and broke the clip right off. Fortunately, the Otter Box for my iPhone remained intact. (I have an Otter Box because of my history of dropping my cell phone on the floor. I also got the replacement insurance when I bought the phone.)
It's a good thing I'm fairly handy. It's nice to have alternative solutions when plastic things break. Some heavy duty black webbing and sew-on Velcro fixed the problem, and my phone "clip" is even sturdier than the plastic one. It won't break and it works better on my belt. It's completely hidden on the underside of my Otter Box, so no one will ever see that it's Velcro instead of a "professional" phone clip.
It doesn't, however, answer the question, "what am I going to break next?"
I don't remember my father spouting those sayings that would guide us through life, like "anything worth doing is worth doing well." He's more of a teach-by-example kind of guy, so what I came away with is "do the best job you possibly can." He got busy and did the task at hand without a lot of fanfare, but when he finished, the job was done well, everything was neat, and all the tools were put away.
This past year I realized I needed to put our house number on our trash cans. Our driveway is the only place for us and all of our neighbors to set out the trash cans to be emptied. One day some City guy came by and conducted an audit. Six garbage cans in the driveway must all be ours, right? We got a whopping big bill. We eventually convinced them that it ain't necessarily so, but unless I make it obvious that they don't all belong to one house, the same thing will happen when the next auditor comes along.
There's a house two streets over where the owner simply took a can of red spray paint and painted his house number on his garbage can. Every time I drive by it on garbage day, I think, "oh, what a shame--his garbage can got tagged. Wait... that's his house number. Never mind--he did that himself." I decided I would prefer to do a very neat job that didn't look like someone did a drive-by with a can of spray paint. I made a template for the numbers, cut out the stencils, and hand-painted the numbers with a tiny art brush and model paint. (I filled in the stencil gaps. I spent too many years in the Army where everything is stenciled--it looks institutional.)
You know you did the best job you possibly can when every time you walk by and look at it, you think, "dang--that looks good!"
The job is neatly done and the tools are put away. My father taught me well.
At this time of year, the garden section at Lowe's is fairly deserted. There are no cashiers there and the garden entrance from the parking lot is closed. I loaded the first 24 20-pound landscape blocks onto the flatbed cart by myself. And, by the way, the blocks I want are up on the second shelf instead of conveniently located on the floor. I pushed my cart full of 480 pounds to the main cashier area. She called for someone to help me load them into my truck. Of course, once I got home I had to unload them and build the first course of the wall by myself. That meant moving that 480 pounds again.
The next day we decided to expand the area enclosed by the wall, so I had to rebuild the first course and move those blocks around. Again.
Later that day I went back to Lowe's to pick up another 28 blocks, so that's another 560 pounds. Did I mention that they're up on the shelf? And since I had removed 24 blocks from the front of the shelf where I could reach the day before, I had to stack some of the blocks onto the flatbed cart and then use it as a step-stool to reach the blocks toward the back of the shelf. I pushed my 560 pounds of blocks up to the cashier.
"Would you like some help loading those?" asked the young man at the cash register.
"I think I can handle it," I replied.
Between loading, unloading and moving blocks around, I've moved something like 3,000 pounds of blocks in the past few days. The wall looks great, and I think it will work very well. But I over-bought slightly on the blocks, so 80 pounds has to go back to Lowe's.
I was recently cruising through a huge new Walmart store. While on my way from ladies' clothing to the personal toiletries area, I happened to cruise by the party and cards section. Hold the phone....
Cool stuff! First, I saw the cupcake section. Cupcakes have been the hot new thing for the last couple of years. We have at least six cupcake shops in Albuquerque alone. What I hadn't seen before was the new line of Wilton products that Walmart is carrying. For instance, there was a nice selection of cupcake wrappers and baking papers, so you can either bake your cupcakes in regular paper baking cups and then wrap them in these very classy wraps, or bake them directly in the cupcake liners that look like flowers--they come in white, pink, purple and yellow.
They also had a very nice two-tier cake stand unlike any I had seen before. Since we are planning to host some weddings this year, I have been thinking about the presentation and service of wedding cakes. The weddings we would do would be small, most likely for 30 people or under, and I had actually thought to devise a "wedding cake" made of cupcakes. You can get special cake stands for cupcakes, but they don't hold regular cakes as well. This one can do both! I can see some further investigation involved.
The cake accessories line was actually quite extensive, and I was impressed that Walmart carried such a comprehensive line of products in such a small amount of space.
