As excited as i am for Christmas to come, that is also how NOT ready for the season i am. I love how the holidays can inspire me to create things, but i never have time to create them.

I am going to attempt to make all the Christmas cards that we send out this year in order to personalize the holiday a little bit more. I really wish more people still sent out cards, but it does seem to be a dying habit. More and more electronic cards are getting sent. My kids love going to the mailbox to see what cards we got this year and hang them on our christmas card tree that we make.

Since this is "supposed" to be my craft blog i am going to work on posting more pictures of what we do at home up. If i could only figure out how to link my blackberry with my blog and post pictures we would be set. I take a ton of photos with that phone.

Today i took down all the Thanksgiving decorations and i think possibly i am one of the few people that have thanksgiving lights that go up. Nothing special but i am one of those people that if the holiday can involve stringing lights on your house i am there. The only thing left to take down is the Thanksgiving mural that we did. I have to take a photo of the gaggle of turkeys that the kids made and then it will come down.

Even though i don't get much traffic on this blog since it is in a hiatus status, i thought i would post this. I believe in the power of giving forward and i believe in giving to those that are not as fortunate as myself. I believe that what this little boy wants is not all that much to ask of anyone. So i am hoping that this post inspires just one other person to give and help him reach his goal.

"A 5yr old boy named Noah Biorkman , is in the last stages of a 2 1/2yr battle with Neuroblastoma (Brain Cancer). The family is celebrating Christmas next week and Noahs request is to get lots of Christmas cards..Lets get him some. Please send cards to: Noah Biorkman, 1141 Fountian Viewcircle, South Lyon, Mi 48178."

While i do not know Noah personally, i do know that it doesn't take much out of my day to send a card, in fact the boys all made cards and we are all sending cards to him. I am very fortunate to have four healthy boys and not everyone is that lucky. I spend time going through wishes on the Caring Bridge website to see how i can help because for me, sending a card is such a very little thing that means so much to the person getting it.

When the boys and i go outside we are constantly looking around for something to do, in my case that involves occupying their time and in their case i think something that involves lots of glue and paint. Today the boys were in love with how the butterflies were everywhere for some reason and this inspired us to create some butterflies of our own. While this is not ocean related it is a great craft.

You will need:

* paper towl roll (sans paper towels) or toleit paper roll
* Paper plates
* glue
* multi colored tissue paper
* glitter
* paint brush
* pipe cleaners


1. Cut the paper plate in half (use a dessert sized plate if doing the toilet paper holder)
2. Cut out shapes or just random squares of the tissue paper.
3. Use the paint brush to coat the plates in glue and then have fun with designing the wings.
4. Glue to the paper towel roll, you will want to glue the curved ends to the roll, like this : )(
5 Bend the pipe cleaner in half and glue it to the top of the butterfly. Add googly eyes if you like.


Depending on the type of glue you use you may have to wait a bit for it to dry. I used a glue gun and had pretty instant results.

Spending time with all of the boys at home reminds me of how they differ when we do crafts. Today we did another project for the ocean mural, we made jelly fish. Originally i was planned on making starfish out of the pipe cleaners, but i couldn't quite get the right look. The kids were getting impatient and i was messing around with several of them when i came up with the idea to make the jellyfish. We had both sparkly and normal colored pipe cleaners. First we took a pipe cleaner and made a circle out of it, from that circle we wrapped four in half around the part that would be the bottom. J, my 6 year old was able to do this project with very little help from me; D, my 4 yr old needed some help with the "tentacles" part, but otherwise was fine; and #3 needed me to do it for him, but did pick out the colors he wanted. In all it was a success and they had great fun being a herd of jelly fish and chasing each other around the house.

It was a good day free of glue and paint. Sometimes even us crafters need days like that.

One of the things that i have been blogging about over at my mommy blog is the subject that the boys and i chose to focus on this summer: The Ocean. Seeing as how this has involved a lot of crafty type things, i have decided to continue the discussion over here and leave the mommy blog for things more along the diaper rash and guess what the boys did today line.

This blog was primairly started as a stitching blog and well not a lot of that is happening lately. I am getting about 2 hours of sleep and doing needlework is just not something i can sanely do. I do miss stitching and plan to try and incorporate some back into my life and schedule. For right now i find myself more involved with paper crafts and things along those lines. I love scrapbooking, card marking and whatnot and feel that since this was created as a crafty blog, i can share all of it here.

In studying the ocean with young kids, they really learn best visually so i took a portion of our dining room wall and covered it in marine blue and sand colored 12x12 scrapbook paper. It took about 27 sheets of blue and 14 sheets of the sand to cover a section of the wall. I used some of my Fiskars scissors to shape waves into the top layer of the marine blue and a rough scalloped Fiskar scissor for the sand. We have had several different projects involving painting fish and dolphins. We made jellyfish out of pipe cleaners today and i am really amazed at how much my 2 yr old is enjoying this and remembering the different animals we make. He loves to point them out to everyone when they come over.

Right now the only photos i have of the ocean are posted via my Blackberry onto my Facebook page, but i am working on loading my digital camera software onto my new laptop and hope to have some pictures up here soon. I also want to share the many cards that i have been working on as well as the teacher gifts i made for the end of kindergarten in June.

Today i hope to work on organizing my stickers and taking pictures of my new scrapbook organization, although i could probably do with 4 more cubes, i think my hubby would kill me as he is already less then pleased to see most of it out in the open. But hey it is organized and i think that is majorly important. I was always frustrated in making things as i could never find anything i needed and would just buy new stuff. That's great if you 1) have the money and 2) have the room, both i am short on, but i would do it anyways.

I have been ADDICTED to watching YouTube videos of people showing their scrapbooking rooms and have actually come across some people who also have some great tutorials for scrapbooking and card making and stamping, all of which i love and hope to share some of here as well. I am also going to be holding some drawings for free stuff as well. Time to get back into the crafty side of me because it really does make me happy!

Over the last few days i have been working on organizing the monster that has become my craft area. When i started crafting, i was really just into stitching and have tons of kits and patterns all ready to go for me to stitch. When i started having kids, i thought how great it would be for each one of them to have something hand stitched from mom. Yeah that would be great, now if i can only find it under all the mess! From the stitching it grew into beading and jewelry making and really that has been great. I never have to buy jewelry anymore unless it is something silver since i haven't ventured into the metal element yet. And of course being the paper loving person i am, naturally i had to get into scrapbooking and card making. It is scary just how much crap i have acquired over the years and just how messy the area is. I really need my own room, then i could close the door and hubby could not think about just how much crap i actually have.
When we moved into the house, i swore to hubby that i wouldn't let my crafts escape this huge TV amoire that we bought for them. Yeah here it is 4 years later and well, escaped isn't so much the right terms as exploded maybe since wow i have a lot of stuff and it is everywhere. I don't even have a half of the things i need for stamping and whatnot, i just kinda make do.
Target in our area has been clearancing out their Itso cubicle boxes that come with shelves or doors or fabric bins, similar to the Cubix, but they are 14x14 so much bigger and able to accomadate the 12x12 pads and whatnot for scrapbooking. So i banked on these and bought everyone that the store had to offer, which was around 8. I bought 4 doors and all the shelves that they had which wasn't a whole lot, 6 i think. I have cubix fabric boxes at home from other stuff so i planned on using those in helping organize the area. I like too that those are smaller and so i can put other things in the cubes as well.
So i am working hard at getting organized finally, but really all it is doing is pointing out the things i NEED to buy in order to complete something on my enormous list of things to do.

Ahh it's good to be back and ready to post again. I cannot figure out how to get the following widget on my sidebar. It says go to the layout page and select follow, umm what if you don't have a layout tab? So frustrating. plus all the blogs i had added in the follow section are no longer there and if i select follow on a blog, it doesn't show up. It's nuts. Good to see that some things never change in terms of technology and my blog.

I have had lots of time off and no time to do anything. Lots of personal stuff has kept me from doing any stitching or scrapping, but i am ready to get started again. Sometimes it is good to get away and take a step back from what you were doing. Sometimes you get involved in too many things and in over your head and don't quite know how to tell people that. But i returned all the RR's i had in my possession and while i didn't get all of mine back, that's ok. It isn't the first time i have had one not returned.

This blog has always been a great source of sharing what i have done or working on with the internet so while i had decided to get rid of it, now i am thinking i will keep it open. I like having something different from my mommy blog. So stay tuned lots of updates to follow.