New designs and new samples.....
Make a Wish by Cottagearts


I'm on my way to Lawrenceville, GA in the morning. Hope to see you, Tina!

Dec 9 was my last post?? I thought I'd posted my birthday dinner here on New Year's Eve. Guess it just went to Facebook :-( Anyhoo, Happy Birthday to me at 5 Guys Burgers. Bon Appetit!

And now for something completely different....

If a diagram is needed to tell you that the baby does NOT go inside the changing tray, then perhaps motherhood is not the appropriate career path for you.
Just a thought.

Yayyyy! Trader Joe's has finally come to Spokane. It was scheduled for last summer, and now it's December, but everyone was SO happy to be shopping. The Two-Buck-Chuck (which is now Two-Buck-and-Fortynine-Cents-Chuck) sold out in the first two hours, it was an hour wait in line to check out, and almost impossible to get through the aisles, but nobody minded. We just slowly shuffled with the crowd, aimlessly reading nutritional information on the labels and spending way too much money...but no one was grumpy. What a fun shopping day!

Socks for special friends....and yes, Batman has a mowhawk LOL He's a much happier dog since his dental work this year, but that's a story for another day.

Happy Holidays, everyone! Hope you all got to spend Thursday doing something you enjoyed. I was quasimoto-ed over my digitizer pad most of the day, but I had the last season of The Sopranos running in a split screen, so I was a happy camper (BTW, noon on Thanksgiving in NOT a fortuitous time to shop for a turkey breast). For some unknown reason, Dish blessed me with 3 months of free HBO, so I'm frantically DVR'ing anything that's currently playing (True Blood YAYYY!), and now that I'm home, marathoning through the older serieses(seria, serea?). Today is Season 3 of Deadwood. I am seriously going to miss www.hbogo.com when my 3 months are up, but I do not see Premium Channels in my crystal ball.
Here's a pic of my first felting -- first felting with the fuzzy bits, anyway, not crocheted or knitted. Mira showed me how to do it when I was in Finland, and it was so easy having her take me through the process step-by-step. The written directions always look to daunting for me to follow, and I never would have tackled felting without her help.

Three weeks and 4 shows since my last post, and I'm finally home for the Christmas break, looking forward to cleaning the house, working on new designs, developing some new classes, and spending quality time with Creighton and the Critters. Our planned trip down to Fort Bragg has been cancelled due to lack of funds. We'll try again in a few months. Disappointing, but I'm also glad to be staying home. Here's our booth from a huge Holiday Festival last weekend. I shared it with Melinda Melvin, another local artist.

This is one of my favorite pieces, but I have to give credit to Melinda. I did the design, but she did most of the work. Not only did she share her technique of gluing and varnishing, but she also completed most of my panels while I was globe-hopping the previous week. My half of the booth would have been pretty empty without her generosity. I'm a lucky girl.

I'm sure some of you wonder how anyone can tolerate those long hours in an airport. Well, sometimes we do this... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNYSYR2LVPs I'm pretty sure this one was at Heathrow. Something has changed on blogspot, and I can't upload a video, so I put it on YouTube. It doesn't appear to be an active link, so my apologies that you'll have to cut and paste it in the URL line. If anyone knows how to make this more seamless, please let me know.

I know you've already seen Batman in many poses, including in a suitcase, but tonight as we're frantically pressing rubber and packing, he made me smile. Tomorrow I head to the UK for a show, and Creighton is driving to Fort Bragg to deal with the mess our tenants made of our house. I'll be back in the cheap seats for many hours, and he's going to have a nasty mess on his hands....so yes, it's another picture of Batman. I hope he brings a smile to you, too.
Little does he know that a visit to the groomer is in his near future...that's another pic for next week :-)

It's been a long 6 months since my last post, and thanks to all of you that were concerned and wrote to check on me. I hit a rough patch on the Road of Life shortly after the returning from Amsterdam. I thought that if I just got through that crisis, everything would be fine, and I'd get back to posting funny pictures and stories...but it didn't work out that way; the rough bumps continue, and the light at the end of the tunnel is very dim....but I really enjoyed blogging, and want to get back to it, so I'm putting on my Big Girl Panties and will pick up from where we left off...on a happy day in Amsterdam with our friend, Jorgan (whose name must be spelled wrong because there is no "I", "U", and only one "J"). He treated us to a wine and cheese tour of the Amsterdam canals on his boat. What a very special day that was.

I leave in the morning for Art & Soul in Portland, but promise to post again next week before I head for a show in the UK.

I just got home last night from the Netherlands show, and leave for Kansas to help move Creighton's parents tomorrow morning, but I wanted to at least post this peculiar way to display childrens' hoodies at the Amsterdam open market.