Gorgeous weather still...

The weather has been so nice these past few days, it's almost like summer again with temperature being 20 to 23 Celsius each day. So nice to have warm weather to do all of this gardening that needs to be done before it gets colder and rainy, like our normal Fall weather. So far it's coming along nicely. 

I have been able to do a bit of scrapping the last couple of evenings so I was able to finish another layout with items from the Limited Edition Kit from MCS. This is a photo I took of my son and his kids back in June of 2003, in our pool that we had at our house in Richmond on the mainland, Scott was only about 6 months old here and Mikayla was 3yrs old. I look at my grandchildren now and look at this photo and I can't believe how fast time has gone by, seems like just yesterday that the kids were this small. TFL!

A few more layouts

Well one thing when it's a rainy weekend it gives you time to scrapbook. My first one I did was another one for the pet challenge layout at MCS. This is our youngest cat Lucky. He's like the perfect Halloween cat, when he sits in the window sill looking out at the world he has such a regal pose. In the one picture here he's sitting in my office and looking out at all the snow coming down outside last winter. He looks like he's looking at me and saying "Mum, make it stop", lol.

This next one is my granddaughter, Mikayla, from when they were visiting and we were camping. She was trying to keep her hair out of her face so she put a pony tail in it but put it on the very top of her head so she looked like she had a tree growing out of her head. She kept calling it her crazy hairdo, lol. 

I used a paper doily on this layout but did not dye it or anything, I just left it white. Then I cut a pink circle the size of the center of the doily and stamped it here and there with a flourish stamp. The pink flowers I believe are Prima ones that I had in my stash and in the center I glued a ribbon flower that I had made awhile ago. The other pink flower on the bottom right is another one of my tissue flowers. Did some punching and used some Rangers ink to dye the lace. I was actually pleased out how it turned out.

I figured I would use up some of the left over paper from this layout to make a card. I used this cute outline from Charmed Cards & Crafts which I took into my Paint Shop Pro program and colored. I just love this cute sleeping fairy and use her quite often in my cards. I did a lot of stitching with my sewing machine on this and the inside of the card uses the same papers but is left blank for your own personal message. I also outlined her wings and flower head band with Stickles glitter.

 This next one is one of my favorite pictures of my granddaughter, Mikayla, when she was 3 years old. She loved to wear hats and she was showing off her newest one to me that day. I just started receiving scrap kits from MCS and this was my first layout using these beautiful papers from Prima's "Annalee" collection. I don't think that Prima could ever come out with anything that people didn't just love..their flowers, paper, flourishes - I want them all! LOL

Well the weather is suppose to be nice for the next 3 or 4 days so I'll be out doing my garden trying to get everything cleaned up before winter decides to set in, so no time for scrapping at least until the evening if I'm not to tired. I hope everyone is having a great week so far. TFL!

Beach Combing

Well it's officially fall, I had to wear a jacket t his morning when I went off to do my errands. It was looking pretty black out there this morning but now it looks like the sun is trying to peek through the clouds. Yeah!

Managed to get another layout done last night. This is my granddaughter & grandson when we were off at the beach searching for sea treasures when they were visiting. The netting is actual fish netting, which I purchased from one of our local fishing stores in town (way cheaper than the craft store, lol). The starfish of course is fake. I found it at one of our little shops in town, it's suppose to be a fridge magnet. The other shells are from the beach, & the sand dollar I had to bleach to clean it up a bit. The other twine in the net is a type of ribbon they sell at our local scrapbook store which looks perfect on any beach/card layouts. TFL and I hope everyone is having a great week.

Pure Bliss

This is another layout for the pet challenge over at MCS. This is one of our other silly cats, Marshmallow, sleeping in one of her usual elegant positions, lol.

On a roll here...

It's not to often I can actually get two layouts done in two days. I usually spend more time on trying to get an idea of what I want to do, than actually putting it all together, lol.

This first layout was done for a sketch challenge over at MCS. I took this photo of my grandson and our friend playing the game "Headbands" on day when we were camping and it was a bit cool to go in swimming. They looked so funny with these things stuck on their heads, lol.

The second layout was for another challenge at MCS - to do a layout on one of our non-human family members. This is my sweet kitty Rosie that I had to put down the other day. I took this about 5 years ago. One of his favorite things to do when the sun would be shining in February and March was to lay in my big wooden planter barrels enjoying the sunshine. This brought a few more tears to my eyes doing this layout and I'm sure they won't be my last. I will miss him so much. :-(

A new layout

Through all of my tears yesterday I did manage to finish a layout I was working on. I think scrapping is very therapeutic, it's relaxing and takes away a lot of the stress of everyday life. In my case it kept my mind off of how sad I felt, even if only for a little while.

This layout is pictures of my grandchildren learning how to shoot a pellet gun. I don't really like guns at all but my dh always likes to take the pellet gun when we go camping as there can be a lot of bears, cougars and wolves in the areas around where we camp. He feels at least this might scare them off if they did get a bit to close rather than killing them with a real gun. My dh thought the grand kids should learn how to use this just in case we were not close by and something were to happen. So here is my layout. TFL and have a great day.

R.I.P. Rosie

It is a very sad afternoon for me today. I had to take my poor 16 year old cat Rosie in to the vets today to be put to sleep. This is always one of the hardest things to do and I think this was worse than any of my other animals. My pets are like family to me, like they are one of my children.

Rosie was one of the sweetest most lovable cats you will ever meet. When we got him we thought he was a girl but after a few months he was running down the stairs in front of me and I was like "Okay so you're a little male kitten" - so I would tell people we named him after Rosie Greer, the football player. He was the biggest suck you've ever seen, anyone who came over Rosie would immediately be over rubbing himself all over their feet and legs. If you invited him on your lap you had a friend for life. He would be so happy purring and rubbing on you.

I had to take Rosie to the vet last week as he wasn't eating or drinking. Turned out he had a huge infection in his mouth and it had gone up to his eyes. They gave him an antibiotic shot and some stuff for his eyes, but it just didn't seem to help. He got sicker and weaker, he could hardly walk. Even feeling as sick as he was, when I would pick him up to clean his eyes and put the medicine in it he would look so sad but he would still be purring at you. I was crying just phoning the vet up to see when I could bring him in. I held him in my arms while the vet gave him the needle and told him it would be okay. The vet said it looked as though the infection had spread all over his poor old body and things were just shutting down. I just stayed there holding him in my arms and crying. Just typing this out has me crying all over again. I know he is in a better place and out of pain now but it is still so very hard. I love you Rosie, you were my sweet little snuggler, I will miss you forever!

Fun Trip

We sure had a great time on our mini vacation up to Telegraph Cove and Alert Bay, BC. We left on Saturday morning and were up there by noon. It was icky and raining the whole way up there. We decided to set up camp and while it was raining we just stayed in the camper and played cards. It finally stopped raining about 4pm so we wandered down to the pub and got some dinner and drinks. It was quite mild out when we got back so we lit the campfire and sat out and had a few drinks - it's just not camping if you can't have a campfire. It poured down rain through the night so I was saying my prayers and asking God to just let it not rain and not be windy the next day.

In the morning we got up about 7:30 and went off to the marina with the boat and were out on the water by 9 am. The sun decided to co-operate and came out and it ended up being pretty nice, with no wind. Not good to be on the ocean in the wind as our boat is only a 17½' Boston Whaler - they are suppose to be unsinkable but that doesn't mean we couldn't get thrown out of the boat in a big wind, lol.

We could see the small island that Alert Bay is on as soon as we pulled out of the marina. It was only about 5 or 6 miles away. We decided to do some fishing first and while on the way to the area we wanted to fish at we ran into a big group of Stellar Sea Lions - OMG those things are huge! Here is a pic of them.



As we were pulling around the other side of this little island where the sea lions were when you looked at the water there was all this splashing going on, it looked like huge raindrops or something. When we looked over the side of the boat into the water for as far down and as far out as you could see there were millions of herring - and I do mean millions! They were all about 5 or 6 inches long and if we had a net with smaller netting we could have scooped up enough herring in one swoop to can 2 dozen jars of pickled herring. It was unreal, I have never seen anything like that before. My husband said it was most likely caused by some predator lower down where the herring usually are so they've come up to the surface to get away from it. Here's a pic of what the water looked like.


So my dh didn't even have his fishing line in the water for 5 mins and he caught a rock cod. Just gets that off and in the boat and not a minute later he caught another one - talk about great fishing. While we were doing that we here this big loud noise and look out and there's a young transient grey whale. Very cool to watch. We were a little ways away from it but I did get a shot of him as he was going back under the water. It sort of looks like a big black blob on the picture but it is the whales body going under just after he came up for air.




We fished a while longer and then we took off to Alert Bay and tied up at the government wharf and wandered around town - it's pretty small so it didn't take long. Our old house had been torn down but we did find the old telegraph/customs house where my Dad worked - it was now a restaurant and B & B. We also saw the worlds tallest totem poll, which is 175 feet high. I was little disappointed though as the Indian Band had not done any upkeep on it so the paint was almost missing etc. I didn't recognize anything (not that I thought I would since I was only 3 when we moved) but it was good to finally see the place I was born. Here's a couple of pics of Alert Bay.





After our little walk about we left and went out fishing again. This time we got to see a pod of white sided dolphins and then we saw the gray whale again. We caught a whole lot more cod and then we headed back in. Now our freezer is full of salmon and cod for fish and chips - yummy.

It was a super great day and turned out sunny and warm. We got to have another campfire on Sunday night and then got up Monday morning and headed for home.

Tranquil Moments

Here it is the middle of the week already. I tell you the older you get the faster the days go by - don't think I like this getting old thing, lol. It was a beautiful sunny warm day again today and I did manage to get out an do a bit of yard work so that was good. Unfortunately it's suppose to start raining by Friday afternoon which sucks since my dh and I are going to take a trip up Island to see the town I was born in. The town is called Alert Bay and is on a tiny Island called Cormorant Island , which is about 3 klms off the east coast of northern Vancouver Island. We moved from there a month before I turned 3 to the home I grew up in in Richmond, BC. I don't remember anything about Alert Bay so it will be kind of cool to see if anything seems to be familiar to me. I'm quite looking forward to it, so I really hope it doesn't rain as we'll be camping in our camper and hope to take our own boat over to the island rather than take the ferry over (which will be a lot cheaper).

I did manage to squeeze in a little scrapping time tonight and did this page for a picture I took of my dh while we were camping the other week. He just looked so relaxed, no stress, no worries, just enjoying himself casting out his fishing line. The flowers I made using a tutorial by Gabrielle from MCS, you can find the tutorial on her blog here. Thanks for the great tutorial Gabi!

I hope everyone enjoys the rest of their week and TFL!

School Days...

Summer's coming to an end, the beginning of a new school year. I don't have little ones going off to school anymore but when I see all the Mom's and Dad's walking their kids to school it makes me sad as I know that summer is over. I am a summer person, I live for sunny warm days, being out in the yard, camping. I always seen to get so much more done when spring and summer roll around. I guess it's because I feel like if it's dark outside I should be in bed, lol.

The one good thing that comes with the colder weather is that I will have more scrapbooking time so that part of it I like. I have lots of pictures to scrap after the summer with grand kids and friends camping so this should keep me busy for awhile. I did manage to get another page done for a couple of pictures from our daughter that's working in Australia. Justine is getting some awesome pictures so I am scrapping them for her and adding them to a scrapbook that she gave to my dh before she left on her trip. The page below has a couple of pictures from the botanical garden in Rockhampton. This is my take on a sketch by Liz Qualman, you can find it on her blog "My Little Blook".

Where did the time go...

I can't believe it's September already, it seems like summer just got started. We had a great time with the grand kids visiting us, lots of pictures from our daily jaunts here and there and from our camping trip with friends. It's so quiet here without them but I'm going to be busy scrapping a whole lot of pictures. I have managed to get two pages scrapped for a couple of challenges we had over at MCS. One was a color challenge using blue, yellow, green and white (which just went perfect with a picture of my grandson on what we call "The Party Boat") and the other one of my two grandchildren searching for crabs at the beach was for a sketch challenge.

I hope everyone has some great plans for this Labor Day weekend. Enjoy this long weekend before the little ones go back to school (I know you are all doing the ":Happy Dance", lol) and TFL!