Last hint!

Today's hint!

I'm not in Canada, Memphis was almost right, Elvis did spend a lot of time here!

Guess where I am and win a free cupcake pin cushion!

I will provide a hint each day until someone guesses correctly. People are exempt if they are on the trip with me or I have told them already!

Today's Hint:


A little bit country and a little bit rock n roll.

Send your guesses as comments. Good luck!

Would you want invisibility as a superpower?

My bee keeping friend, Lori, turned me on to ephemeral art (art that is made from nature) last year.

I love gardening and I love making stuff. This is a little something I did last fall.

    It reads "some- \  times I feel  \  invisible"

 It was a pretty interesting experience figuring out how to get the grass blades to stick to the web. Then I pissed off Mr. Spider. He marched out to the middle of the web and cast off,  in a very discussed way I might add, a single blade of grass. Then Mr Spider marched back up to his hiding spot, so as to say "there I showed her!" Hhumph!

Truth be told we all feel invisible sometimes. Ocasionally we want to be invisible and other times all we want is to be seen and heard.

What do cupcakes and soap have in common?

I've been a busy bee working away in the studio making cupcake pin cushions (with handmade resin specialty pins) and some fun LEGO and Space Invader soap! What brought this on you ask? My good friend Linda (the one who used to smuggle and swap quilt and garden magazines into animation class for me) for a number of years has been hosting a craft fair at her house in North Vancouver. She is having another one this weekend, Friday, November 12th from 7-9pm and Saturday, November 13th from 1-4pm. She always does such a wonderful job of putting it all together, she's such a brave soul! I'll be there with my stash and my Mission buddy, Cynthia, will be there with her goodies too!. I'm looking forward seeing Marie with her Frost Collection and Lesley with her Smidgebox purses (I think she is doing some stockings too!).

If  you want in on the action send me a comment and I will forward the address to you, all has Linda requested is that you introduce yourself as someone who knows me and that you don't bounce a cheque! =)

I'm proud to announce, "I am no longer a virgin!"

I've been a peeping tom for quite some time, I even go so far as to say a lurker! However, I finally took the plunge! Don't get me wrong it wasn't peer pressure or anything like that. I just took my time until the moment was right!

Deep breath I finally made my first online Esty purchase-tee hee! A clock for my studio from uncommon and a little change purse from Oktak, just because!

Then I was feeling really brave so I went and did it again and made my first online fabric purchase!
Starting in the back, I bought check-a-dot in Aqua and Red (designer Cosmo cricket., one of my favourites for paper too!) Next in my totem pole of fabric I bought  Full Moon Polka Dot in Lime (designer Amy Buttler). Both I bought through Hawthorne Threads.

The bottom three are fabric test swatches from Spoonflower a very cool online shop that prints fabric that you design. However, you can also buy other peoples designs too, like  I did!

The tattoo one (which I love) is a design by my friend Cynthiafrenette . Seriously, if I had the guts (which I don't!) I would totally get this tattooed on my arm!

The other samples are called spot the BIG bug and Christmas_quarter.


So there you go! I am no longer a virgin and it wasn't as nearly as painful one might have thought!

Lookie, Lookie what I made!

This past Sunday I took a Resin Pendant workshop at the Fraser Valley Bead Show from Mikel Lefler. I'm pretty tickled with the results, tee hee hee!

Mikel provided lots of great photos and doodads for the class and she also encouraged us to bring anything else we wanted to use. I recently inherited my grandfather's watchmaking bench, stuffed full of teeny tiny treasures! I randomly brought a small case full of watch parts and used them in combination with Mikel's photos of birds.

For this one I used a watch back for the bezel and I also used a watch part for the finding.

For this pendent I used a pewter bezel. I picked it from a local Maple Ridge store, Kellie's Beads Boutique.

This was the bezel that was provided for the class. It's much larger than the other two above which meant it took me double the time to layout the design...decisions, decisions!

I know which one is my favourite, which one is yours? I'm curious to see if it's the same!

Oh and they're having another Fraser Valley Bead Show in the Spring; March 25, 26 and 27th. Maybe I'll see you there?

Whoa there little doggies, hold your horses!

Our kid's growth chart: an ongoing project since... they keep growing! I've painted this on the inside of a narrow closet door, I thought I'd be sensitive to their teen years. On the right of the sunflower is our eldest son's growth chart, on the left is our youngest. It started off with just bugs but as both my boys have gotten older they've delved into fictional critters too. For example, our eldest son was really into Spiderwick when he was 8; actually that series is still a staple in his reading list.

SIDE NOTE: the Spiderwick books are GREAT! The movie not so much :(

As our boys grow, I try to represent each phase with a bug or creature that will remind us of what they were like at that age. Our eldest son loved slugs when he was 2. He used to collect them up in the yard. For some reason he would name every slug Pippy or Poppy? Slugs... yuck, I know, but at least we learned that salt helps remove slug slime!

It's been really fun watching how much they grow each year!

Our youngest son just turned 7 in September and he decided he wanted something from Aurthur and the Invisibles: the creature the king sits on, which kind of looks like a miniature yeti!

He also loves that he is taller than his brother at  7!

















For his 2 year mark  I painted a fuzzy bee since he had the hair to match and he's the only one of us that's blond!

Which leads me to the end of the stalk, where you can see I've painted our son's names in orange. I also used orange to mark dots for the official heights up the sunflower.

When they were babies everyone told me they would grow up fast! I have tried to document and seize every moment and I realize they aren't done growing yet...now if they could only slow down a little so I could catch up!