Slowly but Surely

Winter is leaving us....HOORAY!   Can you tell I'm not a fan of winter, so why did we come to Canada you say?  Well, when you are young and the opportunity presents itself to step outside your box, you forget all about the geography lessons you learned at school and how Canada has lots of snow!  However no regrets, it's a beautiful country and we love all it's offered us and hopefully we have contributed somewhat. 
Did you see all the exciting things in the newsletter today.  Basic Grey, Garage Sale, Card Days, Classes and Crop Weekend coming up too!  Talk about juggling, it takes two of us to keep all the balls in the air...LOL.  Did you get signed up for everything you wanted to?  I know Basic Grey is filling up as well as the all day card class.

Speaking of that, we have seven of the ten promised cards ready and I think you'll be happy with them if you're signed into that class.  Unfortunately I can't show them to you, not even the ones that didn't make the cut and have ended up as pieces on my worktable.  It's always a challenge to put together a series of cards that can be accomplished in the allotted space of time without being too easy or too much of a challenge to each of you.  So it's heartening to see most people able to complete the cards within the five hour time frame.

I had the pleasure of having Linda's girlies here on saturday afternoon.  We didn't do a lot, but good to be together.  Rachel had me help her repair the teddy that her Oma had given her that belonged to her Opa.  It's pretty special to her now and she wanted to be sure the seams that were coming loose were secured well.  Emily found a great new place to play in our house and surprised her Mommy when she came for dinner.  Oh and they (the girlies) played a great trick on me.  Well from their perspective it was, from mine it was a little dampening.  Rachel put an elastic around the lever of my sink sprayer......have you got the picture?   They had asked for a cup of tea and thought I'd get caught at that point, but I'd already filled the tea kettle......however when I went to make the tea, I thought I'd just turn the tap on and rinse the sink and of course I was just in exactly the right position to get the full force of the spray!  I thought Rachel and Emily would fall over they were laughing so hard.  Each time someone came in after that they got the full story of how wet I was and wouldn't you know, they already knew about the trick!  So that meant Bumpa, Mommy and Daddy could have, but chose not to save me from that wetting!  Did I say pleasure of having the girlies over?

I do have a photo to share with you tonight though.  I'm still working on my craft room and have the walls painted now (can you see the colour), still some trim to finish, but the cabinets are all painted.  The wood has to be cut for the counter top that will bring the two sets of drawers and two bookcases together and a little trim work to do there, then I'll share that with you too.  In the mean time here is a before and after of the laminate bookcase that I re-purposed.  I had read on the internet that to have the paint adhere well to a laminate surface you need to put a good undercoat on it, so both bookcases and dressers were undercoated with BIN first and it seems to have worked.  Of course that meant three coats of paint including the undercoat.  You can see the top shelf I put up to pull the bookcases together.  This is a great place to display some past cards that I can look at for inspiration.  The one shelf of the bookcase looks like it has a bend in it, but it doesn't.  Must have been the angle of the camera.  I was looking at a set of drawers that Linda had in the order that came in today.  I think there were nine plastic drawers in the boxed set and could potentially replace the clutter on my bottom shelf...will have to see. 

Speaking of the order today, some lovely paper came in, along with some great Snag'em stamps for just $1.99.  The photos Linda put in the newsletter don't do them justice, you should drop into the store to see them.

Are you Silhouette users who aren't yet comfortable with your machines signed up for Friday's crop night?  My friend, a great scrapbooker, was in the store recently looking for a new punch to give her a different border.  I told we didn't have the type of punch she wanted but there was an excellent machine that would do the trick for her.  Yes you guessed it, the Silhouette of which she is an owner and which she  hadn't thought of for borders.  She's merrily cutting away borders now though.  So if you need your horizons opened, then make sure you get signed up for Friday night.  

Well it's now February and I'm off to bed....Happy Crafting...

Lilian