12 Tags of Christmas Day 1

And here we are at the beginning... of course I've only done six so I've still got half a dozen tags to make - I started in the middle! And they only get more complex... but this first tag Tim posted is the most complex of all of them. It took three full hours for me to make!

This tag starts with a randomly-inked background that you rub onto the tag and wet down. Then snowflakes and swirls were stamped. The snowman is cut out, coloured and mounted on popdots with a cardboard swirl behind it, and the snowman has a scarf made from ribbon and wire. Lastly, Tim put a sentiment flag on the corner of the tag and painted glittery icicles on the top. He also painted the tag with crackle glaze, but I don't own any of that so I didn't worry about it.

I'm pretty happy with my tag. I used a plastic sleeve for my background. I stippled the ink on it and sprayed it with water. Then I pressed the tag onto it to pick up the ink. It came out really pretty! I skipped the stippling and stamped random snowflakes across the top of the tag. My snowman is stamped on white cardstock and embossed with glitter embossing powder, then I made his scarf from a ribbon with a cute pattern on it.
I was the most pleased with my swirls. I don't have any ready-made swirls, but I had the bright idea that I could make some from punchies. I've got assorted swirl and spiral punchies and I glued them together then I painted them with silver paint to cover up the fact that they were all different colours! Then I glued them onto the tag and mounted the snowman on top. I used a piece of wired ribbon for the top of the tag, and used a tiny sticker for my sentiment. And lastly I painted glue icicles at the top of the tag and I sprinkled them generously with a mixture of aqua and shimmer glitter. All in all I'm VERY pleased with this tag, even if it did take three hours!

12 Tags of Christmas Day 2

Working on down the line... Tim's tag for day two is relatively simple at first glance. He's stippled a coloured background over the top of an embossed frame (embossed with distress ink so that it's ragged-looking), but he's finished it with a gorgeous handmade metal flower and little metal page corners.

Here are his instructions.

My version of his tag is somewhat simpler. For starters I don't have anything that could approximate his flower so I didn't try. I used a sequin flower and leaf instead. And I don't have a 'frame' stamp to use, but I DO have some silver sticker frames... so I used one of them instead and embellished the tag with silver instead of gold. Stippling the background was easy... I grabbed about five different stamp pads and blended the ink on the tag with the stippling brush until I liked the way they looked. Then I stamped the greeting and put the silver frame over the top (it just fitted). And then I grabbed a paintbrush and made a hideous mess of my desk stippling the tag with silver. Paint flecks spray EVERYWHERE except where you want them to go! I ended up getting a little carried away with the paint and I made a few smears where the paint blobbed on and I had to wipe some of it off, but we'll just call them rustic accents, shall we?! As Tim Holtz tags go this one's super-simple... it only took me 30 minutes from start to finish, and if I'd had the proper tools it wouldn't have taken much longer. The next tag I attempted today took three whole hours!

12 Tags of Christmas Day 3

Tim's technique for Day 3 is plaid made with alcohol inks on glossy cardstock. The rest of the tag is simple stamping, with string wrapped around the tag and a dangling charm. The other technique he demonstrated was distressing brads with a hammer to make them look more like rivets. I'm having trouble loading his blog right now, but I'll add the link to Day 3 as soon as I can. And here's your link...

I do not have any alcohol inks and I had trouble thinking of a way to make the stripes work out... but I gave it my best shot using a striped inkpad swiped directly onto the cardstock. My glossy cardstock is the back of an old greeting card - I went through about six cards trying to make a usable plaid! If you press too lightly it doesn't work and too hard erases the first set of stripes. Either way, the result is not usable.

Here's my card. The plaid is pretty faint but if you look closely it IS there! I distressed the brads with a hammer and a removable screwdriver bit. It didn't work as well as I'd like but it's usable. At least they look older. The mini tag is a little pre-printed cardstock tag fastened with a baby-sized safetypin. My stamp was too big to use anything larger... I left the swirls off my tag for the same reason - the tree took up all the space!

12 Tags of Christmas Day 4

Still working backwards here... Tim's actual tag for Day 4 is very simple - just a basic stamped tag with ink sponged over it, and then a removable charm/brooch attached to the front. The charm is where all the work is. Tim used stamping and inking and all sorts of fancy techniques to make his including using a photo corner to make an icy roof on his little house. Its adorable but I don't have the stuff, so once I again, I used what I DID have and I went with the spirit of his tag rather than the exact detail.

Here's your requisite link to Tim's blog with all the details on how to make this adorable brooch tag.

And now on to my own tag. I took a photo of the tag with the pin removed, and one with it in place so you can see how it looks both ways.

My actual tag is extremely simple. I gathered my random christmas stamps and filled in the tag with black stamping, then I sponged ink over the top. I used a silvery-blue embellishment on the tag so I went with blue/purple ink instead of the traditional red/green. My embellishment IS removable - I tied it onto a safetypin with a blue ribbon, and pinned that safetypin through a second so that it dangles freely on the tag. To remove it just unclip the pin and pin it on your shirt. The little silver sticking out tag says 'happy holidays'. I didn't make the star with wires - it was in my embellishment box.
I had left the top of the safety pin plain but it was bugging me, so I put another star on it. The pin opens and closes from the back, and the front is more decorative. :) 

And that's three tags done today, which is definitely my limit. Time for bed and I'll see if I can get some more done tomorrow! It's challenging, but I'm having fun with this...

12 Tags of Christmas Day 5

Tim Holtz's tag for Day 5 is gorgous (aren't they all?) This one features a metal 'lace' border, a swirled background with a stamped pine branch and 3-dimensional dangling ornaments. The ornaments are individually stamped, coloured and glittered, wrapped with metal tops and strung on real wire so they can dangle freely. His magnificent tag is on the left of this paragraph.

Here is a link to his blog entry with full details on how to make it.

And now for mine... gold lace I could manage. Mine isn't metal, it's a gold lace sticker border. I don't have any plain swirl stamps (sounds like I should get one!) but I do have a swirly snowflake, and that was quite appropriate for Christmas. I wasn't sure what my gold paint would do my stamp, so I embossed the snowflakes instead... then I stippled the background the same way Tim did.

I left the top corner of my tag plain and drew the pine branch on it by hand. It's not very hard to do some random strokes of the marker to look like pine needles! Tim used a white rubon for his greeting. I tried but it wouldn't stick to the embossing and it just made a MESS, so I cut out a stamped word and glued it over the top. There's a reason I don't like rubons very much - they're really hard to use!

And then all I had to do was to make the ornaments... which is harder than it sounds! Tim used clear plastic ornament shapes and glued the stamping on the back. That wasn't an option for me... I had a cute round christmas stamp that looked like ornaments, so I stamped it in colours and embossed it with clear embossing powder. Then I put more powder over the top immediately and re-embossed it twice more to make the ornaments look more solid. I cut them out with a little rounded tab and wrapped silver sticker scraps around the top. Then I poked a hole in them and strung them onto the wire from an extra-long twist tie (I pulled the plastic off first.) And then I strung them on the tag, added a ribbon and I was done.

12 Tags of Christmas Day 6

I'm going to have to work backwards a bit here... sorry for that but I started in the middle! Today is Day 6 of Tim Holtz's 12 Tags of Christmas challenge.

 This picture on the left is his gorgeous tag. Here is a link to his blog entry with full instructions on how to make it.

The primary feature in Tim's tag is the vintage car carrying a snow-covered christmas tree home on its roof. He stamped both parts onto something called grungeboard, embossed them, coloured them and cut them out, then he added snow to the christmas tree with white glittery flocking, and tied the whole lot together with twine rope.
The background on his tag is a sheet of paper from a real live dictionary and he shows you how to distress it in the blog entry. Finally he finished with some inking, a greeting, a ribbon, and a metal tag pinned onto it for good measure.

And now for my challenge. I do not have a stamp for a vintage car OR a Christmas tree. I don't have any coloured embossing powder, any metal tags, or for good measure, any of the 'flocking powder'. I don't even own any grungeboard! lol The only item that I have to use of Tims is a distress stamp pad that somebody just gave me. So how did I do?

Here's my tag and you can tell me what you think! I started by finding a vintage car jpg on the web and I sized it and printed it out. My tree is a plastic sticker, and I put cornstarch on the back so it would work popped up. I printed, coloured, cut, and wrapped it with some glittery 'rope'. Then I popped it up with foam tape the same way Tim did. It didn't occur to me that I could have flipped the clipart before I printed it, so my tag is backwards! My background is a piece of patterned paper from my stash. I skipped the distressing because it was already vintage-looking and just inked it up a little.I added a ribbon, and used a mini cardstock tag with some gold paint on it to make it look more metallic, and a gold charm to finish off. The tag says 'family traditions' which seems appropriate for collecting a christmas tree! Lastly I 'flocked' the tree - I used light dabs of glue and a sprinkling of glitter embossing powder - the heat gun would have melted the plastic sticker if I'd tried to actually emboss it!

Here goes my Christmas box...

The Christmas mailing deadline for Operation Write Home is Monday November 2nd... so I've been busily working on my box this week. I mailed Fabre 50 assorted Hanukkah and general cards a couple of weeks ago... and this box is going to Sandy. All my cards are stamped with 'Operation Write Home', lined where appropriate (you have to line dark coloured cards or cards that are lumpy-bumpy inside, like my Embossed cards and the cards with brads on them), and sorted into nice neat labelled bundles to make life easier for Sandy.
It contains the following holiday cards:
- 60 'Happy Holidays
- 40 Merry Christmas
- 30 Seasons Greetings
- 20 assorted religious Christmas cards
- 25 miscellaneous christmas (no message etc.)
- 30 Wintery friendship cards (snowflakes, snowmen etc.)
- 10 Happy New Year cards (I ran out of time to make more)

That's 215 cards, and the box still isn't full! You can put a LOT of cards into a priority mailing box... I expect that you could probably cram up to 400 cards in there if they were all neatly packed. It would take me six months to make that many! 200 gives me my money's worth in postage.

And I am putting in some Any Hero cards that I got people at church to write, and doing a few more myself. It's not too late for sending in notes and cards for Christmas... the boxes of blank cards are going out shortly, but you can send in notes and cards that are written in until the end of November because they only have to go one way!

UPDATE - I finished my Any Hero cards this morning. I put 25 of them in, for a total of 240 cards in the box. And here they all are... they don't look like much, do they? But those cards are the result of a month's hard work and I'm very proud of myself for getting them done! The scary thing is how much more room was still left in the box...

Craft Sale coming up!

Our church elder just let me know that we're going to have a community yard sale/craft sale at the church in December... they're going to charge thirty dollars a table, and I'm going to have one to see if I can have any luck selling some of my paper crafts. Wish me luck - I think I'll need it! I haven't done a market or sale in at least ten years... when I was a teenager my mother and my aunt used to do markets, and I'd help mama on some weekends. It's a lot of work and she gave it up after a few years and only did special events, like our church Fair. She hasn't even done THAT for about ten years...

Anyway, I'm going to have a go... so now I need to come up with some ideas for things that are fairly quick and easy (and inexpensive) to make, and that people might want to buy shortly before Christmas. I'm going to do some of my altered picture frames with bible verses on them, (if I can get some I'll do some smaller frames the same way) and I can do some bookmarks pretty easily. And of course there are cards... I need some more ideas though. Any profits I make will be pumped straight back into my craft supplies so I can make more cards for Operation Write Home, or else given to the church (depending on how much I make.)

More Hanukkah cards

I used assorted bits and pieces from my collection for these cards... the greetings were mostly printed out on my computer, and the menorahs are clipart from http://free-bitsela.com/ a website devoted to providing free Jewish clipart for all occasions. They have some really cute graphics there!.

Time for something different - Hanukkah cards

I'm feeling burned out with making Christmas cards, and Fabre put out a special request for Hanukkah cards for Operation Write Home, so I dragged out all the blue, silver and light purple card-making stuff I could find in my collection and whipped some up last night. I used some of my general 'happy holidays' type stamps, and I printed out some Hanukkah greetings on the inkjet printer. These cards were mostly decorated/stamped with a Sky Blue 'brilliance' ink pad - these are gorgeous metallic inks that don't rub off or smear once they're dry. Somebody gave me the light blue pad as a present, and I've hardly ever found good ways to use it! I got the snowflake and star diecuts from the craft store in a little 'hanukkah pack' and everything else is bits and pieces from my collection.

Without further ado, here are my cards... sorry the flash has washed out the glitter, but it's very dark out there this morning! I've got lots more stuff to play with too, so more cards will be coming. :) Please leave me a comment and tell me if these look appropriately 'hanukkahy' to you.. I'm not Jewish and I want to send in cards that are appropriate...

Challenges from the Christian Paper Crafts website

I went exploring last week and found myself an interesting new craft group called Christian Paper Crafts. There used to be a paper magazine associated with it, but it seems that that has been discontinued (not surprising given the immense amount of time and money it takes to create on, and how little return people get on it in this economic climate. I used to know a couple who published a science fiction magazine in Australia, and it was a nightmare of a job!) Anyway, there's no magazine to see right now, so the front page of the site says 'page not found' but ignore that and click on the Community or the Galleries. They're both going strong. They have a different challenge each day of the week except Sunday, they post really thoughtful bible commentaries and studies regularly, and their design team are magnificent, so there's plenty of inspiration to be had! I've started tackling some of their challenges and here are the cards I've made for them this week.

Happy Pastor Appreciation Day!

If you're a church-goer I hope you made a few moments on the weekend to recognise your pastor/s for the hard work that they do... being a pastor is very hard work! Our church elder asked me what we should give them, and I suggested that I could make some picture frame collages... he thought that was a good idea, so I sat down looking for a suitable poem on the internet. I found one or two that were nice, but I didn't see anything suitable for our worship leader, so in the end I decided that I'd just have to write them myself... that way they could be personalised! Three days later, I had them finished and here they are. Click on each image to see a full-sized version and read the verses. I wrote personalised acrostics for each pastor. They're not
identical, but they have the same general idea...

WCD - How many challenges could I do at once?

I challenged people to see how many of the 14 listed challenges they could incorporate into a single card... and then I had a go at it myself. Almost everyone managed two (a tag with an eyelet does that nicely without even requiring any extra imagination!)... a lot of people did three-in-one (eg. a red tag eyelet card). And two people managed four. I made two different cards which incorporated four challenges... and then I topped it all off by cramming no less than SIX onto a single card! So without further ado, let me show them off to you...


Firstly, a red, punched, tag card with glimmery hearts on it. I've already written about this card, so I don't need to repeat myself, and it's so simple it should be self-evident. I punched a border strip on the light red cardstock and then added the dark red strip with the dragon punched in it. There was a flaw in the edging that I needed to cover up (it's easy to slip with the border punch and to double-punch one of those little holes), so I made the tag run the full length of the card and it magically disappeared underneath... I made it a new years card because the red and the dragon made me think of the Chinese New Year. And that's it. (more cards after the break)

World Card-making Day Wrap-up

I was planning to make a post for each individual challenge I completed... but I was too busy making cards to take the time! So I decided to wait until the end of the weekend and sum everything up. There were 15 challenges posted over the weekend, and I managed to complete them all, making 17 cards in total. A few cards overlapped and counted for more than one challenge, but I managed to cover the lot. And here is the list of challenges for you in case you want to try any of them:

WCD Challenge #2 - The Envelope of Goodness

For one of the challenges this weekend, we were mailed an envlope of mystery goodness to make into cards. Here's what was in mine - two pieces of blue cardstock, three different patterned papers, a couple of big stickers, a long red ribbon, some stamped camping images, some really cute little mini-buttons, and some even cuter handmade embellishments. (note - if you can't see all the image on the screen, click on it to go to photobucket and see the fullsized version.)


And here's what I did with it... I still have half the goodies left, but I made three cards.


I've always liked doing collage cards and when I saw the caravan sticker it seemed like a natural to me! These two cards use a landscape border strip that I have had lying around for a long time. I cut it in half and it was just long enough to do two cards. The one card is finished with handmade paper that someone gave me, and the other has a couple of strips of torn cardstock to make the 'grass'.I cut a few of the images out of the patterned paper and coloured in the stamps to make my camping scenes. The one thing that my envelope of goodness was missing was people, so I used a cute little stamp that I happen to have to round things off. I may possibly add a greeting or some tiny flowers to these cards but for tonight they're finished...

And then I made an entirely different style of card.

This one uses the brown patterned paper with writing on it, some punching, and the gorgeous little pair of handmade embellishments that was in my envelope. I was going to use the red ribbon to finish it off but I forgot to glue it down before I put the dragonflies on... oops! so I finished the card off with a pair of sticker strips that happened to match nicely.

WCD Challenge #1 - make an entirely red card

This one was a bit trickier than I anticipated... the rules say to use red and ONLY red. Not red background with a coloured pattern on it... it has to be red on red. I rummaged through my scrap box and found that I had more pieces of red paper than I thought I did... and in the end I came up with two very simple cards. Sometimes simple is the best.

My first card plays off the New Year theme - I have a nice big dragon punch in my punch drawer and I found a negative image I'd punched out for something else (the darkest cardstock is nice thick textured CS), which gave me the idea. Red is the traditional colour for good luck to the Chinese people, and you'll see a lot of red and gold around the Chinese New Year. I had to skip the gold here... but the card works anyway. I wanted to stamp on the tag, but I didn't have any ink that would show up effectively on the red cardstock - my red ink is too light and it just faded into the background, and darker colours just looked black or brown. Not to mention smeary because acrylic stamps work best with the quick-dry black ink! So I grabbed a red pen and hand-wrote my tag, and then I finished it with a couple of little red hearts for a touch of bling, and a tangle of shiny red fibers.

Cards for Heroes is now Operation Write Home

They changed their name and website... still the same group and the same valuable role, just a different name. They are also now officially a 401C group, so any donations you give to them to help support their operations are tax deductible!

http://www.operationwritehome.org/

I gave them my own support just last week - I mailed off my third box of cards, and this time I used a BIG priority box. I sent in 200 blank cards with assorted themes, plus 20 Any Hero cards... and the amazing thing was that the box was still not full. There would have been room for another hundred cards in the box, but I was out of time to make them before the Halloween mailing deadline! The smallest size priority box only holds 40 cards, and you can squeeze 60 into the priority envelopes, so a bigger box is a big cost saving if you have time to make more than about 50 cards.

If anyone wants to make cards for them, here are their mailing deadlines for the rest of the year - Thanksgiving October 5 (so you've got one week left!)
- Hannukah Nov 1
- Christmas Nov 1

Any Christmas/Hannukah/Seasonal cards mailed in before October 15th will go into a special challenge and somebody will win some lovely stamps to play with... so start creating!

Of course you can send in birthday, greetings, 'thinking of you' etc any time. They ALWAYS need cards that say things like 'I love you' and 'I miss you', especially in seasonal colours... I just bought a rubber stamp on Ebay that says 'Thinking of you and missing you too' so I'm all set.

A scrapping frenzy!

I haven't done a scrapbook layout for well over a year... but we had an empty bulletin board to decorate at church, and I've been meaning to make a Church scrapbook basically ever since we joined the church! I've just never had the motivation to get started and do it until now. I asked about old photos of the church and our Elder told me there was a whole box of them in the office, so I grabbed them last night after Bible study and took them home with me. Talk about a bonanza! It's a big jumble of course... but it's fascinating to see pictures of what the church was like long before we joined it. We've only been members for five years, and the church has been established for over fifty! It was originally in an entirely different location, and alas there weren't any pictures of what that church looked like, but there was a picture of 'our' building when it was up for sale, and photos of them putting in the gardens etc etc. I started working on the photos at eight this morning, and by the time I called it quits and went to the church to put up my finished pages it was four o'clock... and I had seven completed layouts in my hand, plus one that I made earlier in the week. Because I was in a hurry the layouts are pretty simple and I'm not entirely happy with the last one I made, but I'm still pleased with myself for getting them accomplished at all! Our new inkjet printer is as cheap as we could get, but it prints out very reasonable results. I've attached the page that I'm the most pleased with - our church history. I pieced the history together from a couple of old church directories (one from the 60's, one from the 80's, and what I was told about the move... but what I'm most pleased with is how far I stretched a very small piece of dark blue cardstock. I used blues/yellows on all the layouts and I tried to use the same papers on more than one page to help tie them all in together.

Altered Tissue boxes and picture frames

I haven't forgotten about this blog... but I've been busy doing other things and I haven't had time to sit down and do anything noteworthy. I'm thinking of trying a 'card a day' project to get myself into the habit of blogging more regularly.

The visitor counter on this thing must be way out of whack. I just can't believe that a blog that's only been running for a month and that has as few entries as this one could possibly have had so many visitors. Last time I looked at it it was sitting at about 100 and now it's magically jumped to 11000 and something?! It's feelgood but I'd rather have something accurate!

And now for my crafty project of the day... I decided to make some altered picture frames for our church. I got a pair of frames from the dollar tree. One of them had a broken glass but that's okay - I didn't want it anyway because my collages aren't flat. I pulled the glass out of the frames and glued a sheet of cardstock straight onto the cardboard backing for the frame. Then I pulled out some co-ordinating papers, a couple of rubber stamps, and some stickers, and fired up my laser printer to print out a couple of well-known verses.

It didn't occur to me to photograph the creation process, but here's the finished articles. Two pictures to hang on the wall, and I used the scraps and leftover paper to decorate a pair of matching tissue boxes to go with them.


Here's the front side of the tissue boxes... the coloured butterflies are cut from a wallpaper border and the square flowers are a recycled greeting card. The other decorations are stickers.


And here's the other side of the boxes...

Lastly, here are the pictures.

Found Furniture is the best!

I haven't forgotten about this blog... I've just been very busy for the last week doing some baking for Church, so I haven't had any time for crafting. A friend's husband died a few weeks ago and his memorial service was on Saturday, and I offered to bake for it. Now that the funeral's over my catering responsibilities are at an end (for now) and I'll have some more time to get back into my craft room.

I signed up for an inchie swap last month and I whipped up the inchies yesterday, and dropped them in the mail. On the way back from the post office I noticed what looked like a bookcase out by the skip behind our building. Closer investigation revealed it to be a large shoe-rack. Hooray! I've wanted one of those for ages, so I dragged it upstairs and cleaned it off. It's not in perfect condition, but you can't tell when it's shoved under my desk in my craftroom, and you won't be able to tell at all once it's filled up with craft supplies.



Ignore the mess on top of the desk... the relevant part is the storage shelf underneath. As you can see it's the perfect size to fit under the desk! And the total cost to me was zero dollars and just a few scrapes to my shins as I dragged the thing up the stairs. It's not heavy, but it's tall and the back has come off it, so the rough presswood was scratching me up at every step. But it was worth it. I keep most of my craft supplies in those el cheapo shoeboxes you get at the dollar tree, and they're piled up all over the place in my craftroom. This rack will store twenty of them at my fingertips! That's a LOT of supplies! Plus it frees up space on my bakers rack for more awkward-to-store items. I'm going to have fun figuring out how best to rearrange everything.

More One-sheet cards

I had another go at doing some one-sheet cards... and this time I took my time about it and ruled up a guide sheet on a piece of blank cardstock so that it can be reproduced at leisure! Last time I got ten cards from my one sheet - this time I managed fourteen, and there are two tiny strips of paper left over that I didn't find a use for.

Here is my template, hopefully large enough for you to read the measurements. (Click on the image to see a full-sized version.)


And here are my fourteen cards. I kept them very simple and let the paper be the star... they're just embellished enough to finish them off neatly. It was a sheet of 'back to school' paper so I made it into general 'hello' and 'just a note' cards that the Heroes can hopefully use any time.

Fall challenge - one sheet, ten cards

I tend to be a patterned-paper hoarder... I get something pretty and I think to myself 'I'll save that for something special' and I never actually cut into it because I don't want to 'waste' it, especially for something small like a greeting card that I could make out of scraps. I don't toss out any patterned paper or cardstock that's more than about an inch square unless it's hopelessly mangled. I put it into a set of iris drawers sorted by colour, and I can pull out whichever colour I feel like using that day and rifle through the scraps at my leisure. But that doesn't deal with the paper stacks that are sitting on my shelf almost unused, or the beautiful Debbi Mumm holidays stack that I just bought! So today I set myself a mini-challenge. I took one sheet of paper from last year's Fall stack and started cutting, and when I was done I had ten cards to start my Fall collection for Cards for Heroes.

From this -


To this in an afternoon -


The cards were embellished with various stamps, stickers and other bits and pieces from my collection of 'stuff'... The three dark brown cards were very lightly dry-brushed with gold and copper paint because they needed a little brightening up.

And now I give you a challenge - how many cards can YOU make from one sheet of patterned paper? You can use as much cardstock as you like and any other embellishments or decorations you want, but only ONE sheet of patterned paper. Cards for Heroes can use any kind of greeting card you care to make, but especially Halloween/Fall/Thanksgiving and holiday cards. Start creating! Then link back here and show us what you've made... if I get enough responses somebody will get a prize!

About Me

Okay, I don't expect this particular entry to be of much interest to anyone else besides me... I've been trying to get my new blog set up, and the important stuff (like links) transferred over from my other one. It's a lot of fiddling around but I THINK I've got it now. I also made myself a banner for my heading... doesn't that just scream 'Kajikit' to you? I'm a very girly girl and I always have been - if I ever get too old for heart and flowers and butterflies, it'll be time to bury me! That doesn't mean I'm one of those people running around trying to be 15 forever - I'm well aware that I'm almost 40... lol! But you're only as old as you feel on the inside, which I think leaves me at about 25 forever. I hope I never lose my love of innocent things...

Here's a photo of me and my husband. It's a little old, but it's the most recent one I have of us together - this was taken at Thanksgiving last year.


And here are our three furfaces... Scouty and Silver are sisters and we adopted them from the animal shelter when they were six months old (and much MUCH smaller than they are now!) and Tessie adopted us a year later. I went outside one day and found her wandering around the building mewing pitifully and running up to everyone she saw to try to get SOMEONE to rescue her! I couldn't possibly leave her out there when she was only a kitten, and I couldn't find anyone looking for her, so I picked her up and brought her upstairs, and a week later she was officially ours... Tessie and Scout hate each other so there are very few photos of the three of them in the same place at one time. Most of the time Scouty sees Tessica coming and runs, which is Tessie's cue to chase her around the apartment until Scouty finds someplace to hide. They never actually HURT each other, they just make a lot of noise, but I don't blame Scouty at all for disliking the sister who does that to her several times a week!