Under the Northern Night Sky....

We just got home from a fun weekend camping with friends. Got the camper unpacked, took a bath, and noticed the 9:30 pm view from my kitchen window had a surreal color cast to it. So I stepped outside to check it out, looked to the east (note I said EAST, this is not a sunset), then ran back in to grab a camera....

These photos are straight out of my point-and-shoot Fuji Finepix camera, shot on auto mode, and not enhanced or altered in any way....

Then since I was standing on my driveway in my pj's, I went around to the backyard and saw THIS.....

and Oh MY, THIS.....

I hollered for everyone to come out and look, the kids freaked OUT!

Is this not the most amazing sky you've ever seen? I mean, I've seen some beautiful prairie sunsets, some gorgeous rainbows, and some scary summer storm clouds...but I've never seen an eastern night sky like this one.

I miss living in the country where we could get a 360 degree view, I really hate storm season in town because I can't see what's coming.  As beautiful as this Alberta summer sky is, I'm kind of glad these were drifting

away from us.

Thanks for visiting my blog,

Lorrinda

Here's hoping it works...

TCBOTB (my free bog background supplier) is having issues with photobucket, and apparently I could lose my blog background tomorrow. I made the changes they advised, and it is supposed to work, but I guess I won't know until tomorrow! Bear with me if my blog appears naked, because I won't be around to play with it until next week. I've been toying with the idea of changing to a 3 column blog, but I don't know how to do this, maybe this is a good time to figure it out?
Thanks for visiting, please stop by again...
Lorrinda

Family Calendar Part 2

If you found my last post boring, or have trouble believing we did NOT grow up on a compound, you may want to skip this one! If you haven't read it yet, go back here and read it first.  As promised, here are the rest of the pages from the family calendar I've been working on:

June:

July:

August:

I dare you to try to fit more than 22 pictures on a 81/2 x 11" page! (Note to family...no one can have any more babies in August, there's just no more room on the page!)

















Sept:

(Please no more babies in Sept either!)



















October:

November:

December:

Thanks for looking, I'd appreciate any comments!
Lorrinda

Thanks for hanging in there!

Hello! Remember me? I guess you could say I've been a bit busy this summer!

Thank you for hanging around my blog, and I apolgize for not posting in a while, but summer is just too short to spend it in my craft room. I have been working on something crafty, just a bit different from my usual thing.

My Mother's family is having a reunion this summer. This is just for her immediate family, she has 17 brothers and sisters (Yes, that was a 1 and a 7) Big families are great, but we have to actually plan reunions to keep in touch with everyone. We have a "family calendar" with pictures of everyone so we can keep all the names straight. I got nominated to do the calendar again this year. It's a very big job just getting photos from everyone, plus keeping all the names and dates of birthdays and anniversaries straight.

Here's what I've been working on for the past 3 weeks (well, actually I've been collecting photos and dates for the past year and a half, I just spend the last 3 weeks putting it all together):

This is the calendar cover, these are my grandparents on their wedding day. If anyone told them they would have 17 kids, do you think they would have believed it?

All the people in this calendar are their children (17), grandchildren (42),  great-granchildren (26), and people crazy enough to marry into this family (38).

January birthdays:

I'll show you one calendar page so you can see how I did the months, it was alot of work so I made these last for 5 years! Each month is the same format, so I won't show them all.

February birthdays and anniversaries: 

March:

April:

May:

I'll show the rest in the next post!

You get the idea how much work this is? If it was just for me...I'd cut and paste and embellish and do it all on a nice big 12x12 format. But, in order to make 55 calendars and keep it under $20 each, I had to use standard letter size and keep it digital so the printing place (Staples) could just print my files onto cardstock for me. I'll post a picture of the finished product when I pick them up next week.

Thanks for sticking in there while I was MIA for most of the month!

Lorrinda

HAPPY CANADA DAY!

Happy 143rd Birthday Canada!

It's also the 1st of the month, which means a new challenge at Paper Cubed!

The challenge this month is to create a celebration table decoration!

I chose to decorate for Canada Day! 

Pop on over to P3 to see what the rest of the uber-talented design team has come up with! Don't forget to check out their blogs and leave them some love. While you're there, why don't you play along with our challenge? You could win some fabulous Tim Holtz products!

I am also entering this for the H2H challenge this week, which is "to get patriotic and use stars and/or stripes". Well, up here we celebrate Canada Day on July 1 and I used stripes! Canadians are patriotic too :)

(Click on the picture for a larger view)

Recipe:

CTMH papers from X7107B That's Amore and X7115B Jingle paper packs

CTMH D1291  Celebrate Canada (Retired) My Acrylix Stamp Set

CTMH Z2166 Tulip  and Z2114 Cocoa Exclusive Inks

CTMH Z679 Liquid Glass adhesive

CTMH  1385White Daisy and X5753Tulip Cardstock

4" styrofoam ball

wooden dowel

empty peanut can

florist oasis

hot glue gun

toothpicks

white satin ribbon

This topiary centerpiece was fairly easy to make, although time-consuming...

I started with a styrofoam ball and an empty peanut can stuffed with florist oasis with rocks under it to weight it (the ball can get top heavy when it's done).
I used a narrow dowel to suspend the styrofoam ball into the decorated can. Everything was secured with a hot glue gun.

Then I made many, many paper roses with various CTMH B&T duos papers in shades of Tulip and Cranberry, and white.
There are several paper rose tutorials on youtube, I modified mine to glue a toothpick into the center of each one so it could be stuck into the styrofoam ball.
Once the ball was full of roses, I filled in some of the open spaces with maple leaf stamped paper strips, also stuck in with toothpicks.

I then covered the top of the can with crinkled paper strips, and stuck in the heart shaped flags.

I plan to use this for Valentine's Day too, I'll just switch out the Maple Leaf stamped items for ones stamped with hearts!

As I post this, I realize I have been neglecting my blog for the past 12 days! My apolgies! June has been such a busy month, and we took the kids camping on the last day of school so I've been having internet withdrawal :( 

Thank you so much for continuing to visit my little craft blog!

Lorrinda

EDIT to add: I have had several requests for a paper rose tutorial, I found a very good photo tutorial HERE and a video with some shortcuts HERE. I combined the two to make my roses. I'd like to add that cardstock is too heavy to make these, printed paper works much better. If you have some that is printed on both sides (like CTMH B&T duos paper) even better!

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This project was chosen for the Friday Five at H2H challenges!  I was hoping a Canadian entry would make it into the "patriotic stars and/or stripes" challenge finalists. Thank you so much ladies!