fonts/headers.

a big thank you goes out to chelsea for reminding me of this awesome font website. Thanks to it, I have a new blog header. I would add pictures like I used to all the time, but I don't have any of me, Luke and Adelle all together (I know, what!?!?) so until then I don't want to add pictures. Anyway, I also approve of that website.

On a somewhat related note, I decided to email the creator of the 365 cards blog and asked if she would like a new header for the site, so here's what I came up with. She wanted me to use the same colors/font that was already there, so I did have those guidelines. Enjoy.

Be Thou My Vision

This is one of my favorite songs... a very old Irish hymn, from around the 700s. It really is beautiful and if you haven't heard it before, I suggest finding a recording on youtube or something. It's been in my head all evening.

Be Thou my vision, O Lord of my heart
Naught be all else to me, save that Thou art
Thou my best thought by day or by night
Waking or sleeping Thy presence my light
Be thou my wisdom and Thou my true word
I ever with Thee and Thou with me, Lord
Thou my great Father, I , Thy true son
Thou in me dwelling and I with Thee one
Riches I heed not nor man's emptly praise
Thou mine inheritance now and always
Thou and thou only first in my heart
High King of heaven my treasure Thou are
High King of heaven my victory won
May I reach heaven's joys, O bright heaven's Sun
Heart of my own heart whatever befall
Still be my vision O Ruler of all

it's official!

Adelle has a super cute dimple on her left cheek :)

i'm losing my hair... and my vision is shady...

Well, just the hair loss part is true, but that should give a few people a nice little giggle (it's a reference to something that you could call a guilty pleasure from the teen years). I am officially losing my hair from the whole post-pregnancy normalizing stage of life. I'm not breastfeeding (a very long TMI type of personal story that I will not be sharing) and my body is finally ... slowly ... getting back to normal. I didn't think it would bother me, but mentally, when I run my hands through my hair, only a couple of hairs at the most should come out, right? It's strange and kind of uncomfortable seeing more than that.

On another note, my sister Lori (the one who has taken the gorgeous pictures of Adelle) is starting a photography business and I got to design the header for her blog and her watermark for when she posts on the web. It was a lot of fun and I'm excited to see what she does with her exploding talent. I've linked to it on the top sidebar, so take a look if you like (and remember, she's just starting, which honestly really impresses me considering the quality of pictures she is taking).

Milestone!!!

Adelle has been trying to laugh for a long time. She'd do little fake coughs and smile, she'd open her mouth really big and squeal... today she laughed for the first time for real! She had the dirtiest diaper I have ever had to change (it was so full it leaked) and so when she was just in her diaper, I did raspberries on her stomach and she laughed so hard every time! Of course then I had to take her into the other room so Luke could see and she did it again :) What a fun milestone! Adelle is just getting too big way too fast! She'll be 4 months old in 9 days. I can't believe it.

Rock Chalk!

Luke and I were very lucky to be invited to the KU Basketball game on Saturday against Texas (we even got a pass for the parking garage)! Luke's brother Nick and his girlfriend Shelly invited us last minute and we were so glad to be able to go! And thank you to the family for helping us by watching Adelle!

Luke is a HUGE KU bball fan and this was actually the first game he has ever been to, so we took a ton of pictures/video. We were really high up, but we had a good view and had a ton of fun!


As you can see by the scoreboard, it was a great game! At one point KU was behind by double digits, so it was kind of nerve-racking, but they pulled it out in the end! I'm just glad they won because I'm pretty sure if we had lost that Luke would've thought it was his fault and he would never have gone to another game (and he probably would have burned his clothes too :P)

It was senior night, so the team all stuck around to hear the speeches of the 2 seniors (we snuck in at floor level to take a picture as we were leaving)



Also, congrats to the team for winning the Big XII Championship! They have won consecutively since 2005 and many people doubted they'd be able to do it with such a young team this year. They showed a video after the game about how they've won back to back to back to back to back and it was a great montage of moments from the past years. It was fun to see them receive their trophy too. Anyway, thanks Nick and Shelly! We had a great time!

Haphazardly Crafty

i have decided to start a new craft blog. If anyone is interested in being added as an additional author, let me know!

Sketchy Sunday

Here's my take on the Sunday sketch for 365 cards:

Card Patterns Sketch #5

Card Patterns (linked on the right) posted their weekly sketch on Saturday. Here's the sketch and then my take on it (we are allowed to alter it to accommodate our own designs...):

i'm a little bit country?

Saturday's challenge on 365 Cards was just to use a circle as a prominent part of the design. I made 2 and really don't like either very much.. I just wasn't feeling inspired by the circle. I think it's probably because I don't have any of those cool toys that make it easy to cut out interesting shapes, etc. It's not very fun to cut out circles by hand. If I had punches and cutters, etc, I think I would've used lots of different papers cut into circles... I dunno. It's just not in our budget right now to have all the cool gadgets. Anyway, here are the cards I made.

actual blogging

I know I've been doing a lot of card junk... maybe I'll start a separate craft blog or something. Or maybe it could be a group blog! Is anyone interested in doing a craft blog with me??

So, Fridays are hard. It's the first day off we have after working 4 12-hour days, so when Adelle decided to wake up at 5:45 a.m, it was kind of hard to be excited about it. Luckily she went back to sleep for a little bit after I fed her, but I guess we have to officially say goodbye to sleeping in, huh... I really can't complain. We have been extremely lucky. Typically Adelle will sleep 9 to 10 hours a night without waking up. Maybe that means she'll be an extra challenge in her teen years :P

Adelle is at a stage where she loves when things crash together, so I've been doing "If You're Happy and You Know It" with her a lot... I tried to take a video of it, but I was holding the camera, so couldn't use both of my hands to crash her hands together. She's still pretty stinking cute though. Take a look.



And a cute picture: She looks surprised a lot when the camera goes in front of her :)

(from Wednesday 3/4/09)



I feel all tech-savvy ever since I realized the laptop has a memory card reader...

Flashy Friday

Today's assignment for the 365 Cards challenge is to make the card flashy, whether with "bling" or glitter, etc. So, here's my take. I'm not sure about the striped paper... I think if I was to redo it, I might just leave that out. I accented the paper on the left with red glitter paint just on the stems and centers of the flowers. I really don't use bling or glitter, so this was a stretch for me, but I had fun!

more cards (get used to it i guess)

These are the cards from the last 2 days on 365 Cards.

Wednesday's challenge was to create a card based on an advertisement and I chose to use this vintage Bell Telephone ad:


Here's the card I came up with.... I really need to get some more sentiment stamps. All I have is "thanks" and an alphabet. I don't want to always have to use stickers. I wasn't as 'inspired' as I'd hoped... but maybe you'll see my interpretation of the ad...


The other challenge was Thankful Thursday, to create a simple thank you card that could easily/quickly be recreated for when I would need to make many thank you cards. I think the key is just finding nice paper that just kind of speaks for itself. Here it is:

more card challenges (card box, Tuesday Trio) ... (2nd post of the night... read below)

The very first challenge on 365 Cards was to make a card box, you know, for all the cards we'd be making. I kind of cheated by using a basket, but I did make the dividers... I like being able to see the cards sticking out of the sides of the dividers, but I decided to put foam on the bottom of them to better separate each section.



Then, this is yesterday's challenge... still 365 Cards. The requirement was to use 3 things: ribbon, flower, button. I don't usually use buttons and not many flowers either, but here you have it. Not the best I've ever made, but it's fun I guess. I'm still learning. I do really like the colors though (have you noticed I like brown?) And now I wish I would've stacked the flowers then put the words at the bottom of the column. Oh well.

technology, who'd have thought...

I did something dumb today. I accidentally deleted all the pictures off of my camera. Regular readers may have heard me say "I can't upload pics because I can't find the cord to hook up my camera to the computer." Yeah, there were a LOT of pictures on there that I had never uploaded... mostly of Adelle, pretty much since we left the hospital. My dad is trying to find some way to retrieve as many as he can from the card, but we'll see what happens. I bawled and bawled... so, then I learned today... guess what! This laptop has a memory card reader built into it! I could've been loading pictures all this time. I never even thought about that.

So, to make myself feel a little better (momentarily), I took pictures of some cards I've made for sketch/challenge sites.
Yes, I already showed you this one, but now you can actually see it. This is from Sketch #4 on the Card Patterns blog (link to the right). I tried to make it the right coloring to show the green of the paper, but I don't know if it's quite right. Ah well.

This next one is sketch #1 for the 365 Cards blog. I like using sketches. It's a good springboard.


This last one was a challenge instead of a sketch... This is the Monday challenge on 365 Cards. The challenge was to use no more than 2 embellishments, which is easy for me... I don't use a lot of embellishments. So, my embellishments are ribbon and... ribbon I guess.


Anyway, enjoy! And don't feel too sorry for me about the pictures. I'm coping... and praying that daddy can fix my screw-up :P

Pay it Forward Challenge

My sister Lori posted a Pay it Forward Challenge on her blog, so now it's my turn! The first 3 people to comment on this post will get something homemade by me within the year (and maybe sooner than later if you're lucky). The trick though is that then you must pay it forward and do the same thing on your blog (or facebook or email, whatever you use to communicate with people). I thought this would be a fun thing to do since I have all this "creative" energy. (I use the quotes because I always wish I was more creative than I am) Anyway, I look forward to it and hope that you like whatever I make for you!

Happy commenting!

Crafting

I can't stop myself. Ever since I started working on Adelle's quilt again, I've been crafting like crazy. I've been making a whole bunch of cards and finding all sorts of challenge blogs where they give you a challenge or sketch or something and then you make the card according to the challenge. I've made all the ones I've seen, but I still can't find the cord to hook my camera to the computer... booo! So, here's a picture of one I made from the Card Patterns (link to the right) Sketch #4 that I took on Luke's phone. Sorry about the poor pic quality.

And since then, I added a tiny rub-on that says "happy birthday to you!" (white). I like the added touch, but was too lazy to take another picture, especially with such crap quality.

Oh, and thank you to LynAnne for loaning me her sewing machine!!! I can't wait to really use it!

3 months!

Adelle turned 3 months old on February 19th. The following Saturday (the 22nd), we went by mom and dad's and took some pictures of Adelle. So, here's Adelle at 3 months! It's really hard to get her to smile at the camera because as soon as it's in front of her, she just stares at it like some strange foreign object. (Lori, recognize the fabric on her outfit?)