A Girly Dinner Party

I was lucky enough to have my dear friend Janice (Milo's beloved "Aunt Jan") over for an overnight girly party. Food is foremost! I made a bacon-wrapped pork loin with green beans and potato duchesse, with a sweet potato-red lentil soup for starters. (Note: I got the recipes from the August 2010 issue of the LCBO magazine Food & Drink. It's an excellent source of good recipes and ideas
Janice brought our favoirite appetizer, brie with lingonberries.

I brought out the good stuff and set the table real special-like. I got the candle-holder idea from Pinterest.
These are my mini-apples pies that I'm posting on my Pinterest board:

To make them, just use your favorite applie pie recipe and  pie crust. I use the Pillsbury ready-made pie crusts and cut the dough out with a large circular cookie-cutter for the  top and bottom crust. I halved my favorite recipe and made 12 little pies ( about 3 in diameter). We love them because they're handy and cute.

My mini-book

I made this mini-book yesterday with Debbie - the only person who reads my blog. We experimented with my new tool, the Cinch book-binding tool. We had fun!
I made this with some left-over patterned paper (see bookmark tutorial) and made pages by gluing the patterned paper together with black cardstock.
Elmer's Craft Bond is a great way to adhere large surfaces. It dries nice and smoothly - you'd never know any glue at all was used!
Directions are easy: just trim your inside pages, punch with your cinch, then punch the covers. Remember to place the front cover on top of your pages, then place the back cover over that, and punch in that order. It keeps the seam of the wire-binding nice and invisibile.
Tie ribbons on spine.
Thanks for reading!

The last of summer........

Where does it all go?

One moment I'm coaxing seedlings into flourishing in pots and garden. The next minute I'm hauling their spent bodies from the soil and tossing the dry, brittle twigs into the fire.

A busy summer goes by in a flash, but on retrospection, it was filled to bursting with activities, trips and experiences.

I hate to see summer end with such abruptness as it does here. I'm not one to jibber-jabber and wax nostalgic for the glories of fall. A Florida girl at heart (the kind that gets the hell out of dodge in the summertime), I'd prefer this warm sunny weather right up until Christmas - where it may then snow briefly strictly for effect before it warms right up again. By the time Halloween gets here, however, cold autumn wind and rain will have leadened the skies and whipped leaves from branches.

In Florida, these early hollyberries would be a sign of a cold, early winter. WE'll see what the implication is here. Off to consult my farmer's almanac.

I want to include a craft here - a very easy Christmas card. I was inspired by the summer 2011 issue of Paper Crafts magazine. It's a wonderful card to use up some scraps you have, especially double-sided patterned paper.

This card is adaptable to whatever colours, sizes and/or themes you wish! The following instructions are for the card pictured.:

1. prepare card base: decide on format and score fold.

2. from several styles of double sided patterned paper, punch 4   circles and 12  squares. (I used 1.5 inch circles and 1 3/8 squares.)

3. Cut a piece from pp that keasures  4 x 1.5 inches. Arrange circles in overlapping pattern, adhering half of the circle on the piece of pp. Set aside.

4. Cut 4.5 x 5 in. piece of patterned paper, chalk or ink edges. Stamp sentiment. 

5. Fold squares into cones and adhere in a circle on pp as shown. Finish off with a button and twine bow.

Thanks for reading, and thanks to the original designer of this fun card. If you know her, please let me know. I'll research my back issues of PC in the meantime.

I lied

Okay - I am back. I couldn't get used to the new blog, so I deleted it. I'm much more comfortable here, and you might be, too, considering the hits that I continue to get. SO thanks so much for reading. I'll try to make it worthwhile.

I just got back fro,m the UK with Roger and my in-laws, Terry and Joyce. They have  long-established friendships and contacts that I was so happy to get to know & share. I  can't believe our wonderful, hospitable hosts. They were always so cheerful and gracious. That's amazing because I find hosting so exhausting; I wish I didn't, but it does drain me of energy.

I know  I want to go back - soon. I will have to if I want to get this book off the ground! You heard it here first! And that I have absolutely no clue as to what I'm doing. I have a vision - isn't that enough?