Late Summer Beauty

My immediate family knows one of my darkest secrets. It's a handicap really. I can't help it. I was born without a green thumb! I have managed to neglect a lot of plants in my day. Some sadly did not survive. OK so most of them actually. It's not that I don't enjoy flowers and plants. For some reason they are just not on my radar screen. In my defense, I am responsible in most areas of my life. I feed my kids, I'm never late for anything, and I keep my house clean. But I have a really hard time remembering to water plants. Some survive in spite of me. One time my husband had to do an intervention and rescue a rubber plant. He took it to work where it has thrived with regular watering and fluorescent lighting. He was going to bring it home while he was deployed for a year but for some reason he changed his mind and someone else in the office took over caring for it. I have a feeling he didn't trust me or something.

Still, every year I do manage to nurture a few annuals and we even have some perennials that are brave enough to visit us every summer. This past Spring while browsing at the garden shop we decided to plant some rose bushes along the back of our house. They didn't cost a lot, so I figured if I killed them it wouldn't be a terrible loss. Funny thing is, that ALMOST happened. When we set the roses and mulched around them we used some grass clippings that had been in a pile at the end of the driveway. All was well until a period of two weeks in June when we had a lot of rain and I didn't go in the back yard at all. Someone else was cutting my lawn for me and I just got busy and didn't go back there. When I finally did, I found a big surprise. The grass under the mulch had sprouted! With all the rain it grew like crazy and overtook my poor rose buses. And on top of that, cut worms had attacked two of the bushes. One was chewed to the ground and the other was almost gone. It took a LOT of weed-pulling to even discover their demise. Mike and I worked really hard while he was home for leave before going overseas and pulled all the weeds and fixed my pitiful rose garden. We treated the remaining four bushes with insecticide and waited to see if they would live.

I am happy to report that they not only survived but they have grown into large bushes full of rose blooms! They look awesome. We've had some chilly nights this week in the 30s and its time for me to figure out how to bed them down for the winter. So I figured if I want any photos I should do it before they freeze. It was nearly dark and I didn't use a flash so they aren't the best, but I wanted to play with the macro settings. Check out my pretty roses!

Stuff I'm working on

Well I really do scrapbook even though I haven't posted anything since February. So I thought I'd post some things I've been working on this week. I created this layout for a military display at church. Our Associate Pastor has been asking me about this for awhile now and I'm finally getting around to it. He really just wanted the pictures and was going to put it together himself. But the Scrapbooker in me just couldn't handle that. Haha.

I've also been playing with my wonderful Scor-Pal tool this week. Below are a few of the ideas I've found so far. I love finding awesome tutorials and recreating them using my own supplies. It really gets my creative juices going. This Mini Accordion File Folder created by Maria Bell was really fun to recreate. I did not have the punch she used on her file so I just used velcro circles. This was very easy to make. It uses #10 envelopes as the pockets. How cool is that?













I made another awesome Accordion File Purse also by Maria Bell and I LOVE how it turned out. This is such a cute file and also very easy to make.

Finally I found this really cool Tote Purse Tutorial and knew I had to try it. She used some kind of plastic boxes for the inside but with a few quick calculations I figured out how to make my own boxes out of cardstock. Easy Peasy! All of these purse totes would be great for gifts and including note cards, greeting cards, photos, chocolate bars, etc. They would also be great for exchange gifts at work or church and could be adapted for any season or holiday. The possibilites are endless!




Thanks for stopping by!

After purchasing a pocket-sized bottle of hand-sanitizer for my daughter the other day, I asked her if she wanted me to decorate it. I figured she would want her name or some flowers or something on it. But with all the excitement in the air at school over the Super Bowl this weekend, she wanted a Colt's theme. I used my digital cutter and adhesive vinyl to cut the words and shapes out. This bottle is only 2 inches wide and about 4 inches tall so my cuts had to be small. The letters are only 1/2 inch. I am continually amazed at the quality and performance of my Silhouette cutter.