I finished my project today, organizing some of my dies into the new binders.
I am really not happy with the pages that have the holes in the wrong place. My little “work around” just is not acceptable. More than likely I will have to order some more chipboard and make all new pages.
I guess you can look forward to Part 3 in the near future!
It’s official: we are going to Iceland! Not that there was any doubt, really, but having tickets in hand does tend to make it more real.
The Expedition is all paid off and the required paperwork is filled out, submitted, and approved.
Bryan worked for weeks on the flights, ensuring that we got exactly what we wanted: leaving Anchorage and arriving in Reykjavik at just the right times. The cost was a little bit more than expected, and yet at the same time not nearly as bad as we feared it might be.
For our personal time before the expedition, we will be doing a self-guided tour with THIS company: 5 days/4 nights touring the south shore. I am so excited about this part of our trip! Bryan and I travel very well with each other, so I just know we’re going to have a blast. The tour company rents a car for us, gets us lodging at small farms along the way, and provides a detailed itinerary with all the sights to see along the way.
For our last day in Reykjavik we will be going on a walking food tour, given by the same company that we got our first tour from. We’ll get to try some of Iceland’s best food and see the city a bit on our feet!
This week, he is studying the bus/ferry schedules to make sure we have enough time to get from Reykjavik to our rendezvous point for the expedition, and then back again to our hotel after it’s over. He’ll also be working on getting us a hotel room for the last night of our trip.
The only thing left to do after that is to gather all the gear we’ll need and figure out how to pack it. One tiny problem: my suitcase wheels broke on my last trip, so we are using this as an excuse to get new matching luggage for the two of us. I’m thinking something like this!
I finally got around to assembling my little project this weekend. It was both a lot more difficult than I imagined it would be - and at the same time quite easy. Having seen someone else do it ahead of time on YouTube helped: I think I would have had a lot more problems with it otherwise.
The first thing I did was bring all my supplies downstairs to the living room so I could watch TV while working. I cleared off the coffee table and put a couple pillows on the floor to sit at. That worked fairly well, except that the optimum angle for cutting things is not achieved by sitting on the floor, so I had to get up onto my knees more often than not. The huge rug burn I got on my knee from falling down while chasing after Naldo a few days ago did not like kneeling on the hardwood floor - alternately, my lower back issues did not enjoy sitting on the pillows either. Oh well, I got the job done, at least.
Cutting the roll of magnetic material was easy, with only a few mistakes made. The first cut was too small, the second too large, the rest of them all were just right. I can use the mistakes for added strips on the back of the pages if I want to. I even have some left over for if I ever want to do something else with it. Maybe a magnetic frame up on the wall to place my most-often-used tools in a handy easy-to-reach location?
Figuring out how big to make the notches required quite a bit of trial and error, using the mistake sheets made earlier to eventually nail down exactly how big they’d need to be to allow the 3-hole punch to work properly. My 3-hole punch is a bit finicky, though. The first sheet I punched came out completely wrong, with the holes totally in the wrong places. I ended up having to make a whole new page and threw that one into the scrap pile. I adjusted the punch accordingly and got it to place the three holes in the proper position.
What I didn’t allow for was keeping the screws holding the punch together tight enough so that the holes remained where I wanted them: they moved slightly with each punch so that by the end of my project they again not where they’re supposed to be. This means that some of the pages don’t fit right in the binders. I’m pretty upset about that, truth be told. I came up with a work-around so they do work – but it’s not perfect.
Adhering the chipboard pages onto the sheets was fun: I’m really impressed with the 2-sided tape I used. Time will tell if it really holds, but for now it’s great. Peeling the paper backing off once it’s placed onto the chipboard had the potential to be frustrating beyond belief – but that’s where the YouTube video came in handy, showing me a trick to getting corner tip up so I could easily peel it all off. (hint: use a pair of fine-tipped tweezers or an X-Acto blade)
I now have two binders, each with 10 pages, just waiting for me to organize the dies! But that is a project for another weekend.
Bryan and I decided to pamper ourselves for this month's Weekend Getaway. We got ourselves a room at the Alyeska Resort instead of renting a cabin. This made our typical packing a lot easier as we did not have to deal with food - so my car was more than adequate for the trip.
The hotel is such a nice place, with a beautiful setting and very comfortable common areas. The entryway is a very big space with the Northern Lights & a Polar Bear greeting you at the front door. The comfy blankets & pillows invite you to sit in the window to gaze up at the ski slopes, and the moose head in the lobby adds a very Alaskan touch to the decor.
Our room was up on the 7th floor and had been just recently redecorated. The lady checking us in said that it was one of the nicer rooms they had. The bed was HUGE and it even boasted a big bathtub to soak in after a day of skiing.
Being up so high meant that we had a great view of the mountain - even with the rain/slush coming down all day. Had it been ski season we would have been able to watch all the people enjoy the slopes, but everything was shut down. We still had enjoyed the view, regardless.
The one thing our room did not have (and I had neglected to bring our own) was a table - so we packed everything up and took it all down to the common room and set up shot at a corner table. It worked out really well down there, with plenty of room for my cardmaking and his computer work too!
I got myself some new dies the other day so had to play with them. What do you think?
Here are the dies. There's actually a few more than what is shown in the photo, but you get the idea: words with a shadow background. Small enough for cards, yet big enough that you can play with the pattered paper and still get a nice effect from them.
The paper I chose to work with was a very bold/bright set - I used all different patterns within the color range to come up with some interesting results. I also used solid colored velvet paper for the shadow behind each word, and a coordinating shiny metallic paper for the sentiments.
I am rather pleased with how they turned out! I think the pink one is my favorite, followed by the blue, the green, and then the purple - leaving the red one as my least favorite.
I attended a free online event a while back called the Paper Crafters Get Organized Summit: 3 days of presentation videos, live Q&A sessions, product giveaways, and Facebook community parties.
It was interesting, I’ll say that much. If you know me at all, you’ll know that I am just a teensy bit OCD about being neat and tidy (I am my mother’s daughter, after all) so one might ask why I was interested in the summit at all. Most of what I saw that weekend was things I already knew and was doing. I did learn some new things, however, so all in all the weekend was a success. Since most of it was pre-recorded; I could watch the presentations on my own time. I did not attend any of the live Q&A sessions, but I did attend one or two of the Facebook events.
One of the presentations I watched was on ideas for storing dies. I have a lot of dies for my die-cutting, and the system I currently use for organizing and storing them all works perfectly well – but I think one of the techniques I saw might be a great addition to my Craft Room. So, I logged in to Amazon and ordered the supplies I need. Now I just need to assemble everything.
First, I’ll cut this 12” wide roll of magnetic material down to 9” sheets; I’ll need 20 of them. I should be able to do that easily enough with a straight edge and my X-Acto knife, although once I have one cut, I may be able to use that one as a template and cut the rest of them with a pair of scissors.
Then I’ll punch holes in them with my 3-hole punch. This will require me to notch half an inch off the side of each sheet, since the 3-hole punch is not 9” wide. Being the anal OCD person that I am, I will of course measure out the notch so that it’s perfectly a half inch on each side, but again – once I have one sheet cut, I can use it as a template to cut the other 19.
Next, I’ll take this double-sided tape and adhere the chip boards to the magnetic material – or maybe adhere the magnetic material to the chip boards? I’m not sure which will be the easiest to do. I want the boards snug to one side (the side without the holes) but centered so that there’s half inch of overlap on top and bottom. I might even adhere strips of magnetic material onto the back of each page to be able to use both sides of the pages!
Once I have all the pages put together, I can put 10 pages into each binder and start arranging my dies! Then, of course, I will have to rearrange my existing storage system to accommodate the absence of all the dies that got moved into the binders.
I'll make sure and update you all on how the project goes when I actually assemble all the pieces/parts!
I have always been amazed at how messy Bryan is in the kitchen. He does most of the cooking around this house (okay, let’s be honest here: he pretty much does all the cooking around this house!) and somehow manages to use pretty much EVERY pot and/or pan in the house every time he makes a meal. We have an unspoken agreement between us = he does the cooking and I do the cleaning up afterwards. I’m not complaining at all: he’s a great cook, and I am not. But come on, really? Every pot?
Just the other day, however, I finally met his match.
Cousin Bob and his girlfriend Meg came down from Fairbanks last weekend for a Pickle Ball Tournament in Eagle River. Bob asked if it would be okay for him to take over my kitchen one night so that he could cook dinner for everyone as a way of saying Thank You for letting them crash in our bunk room. Well, who would say no to that? The meal he decided to make for us was a scrumptious Shrimp Scampi with Angle Hair Pasta. While he cooked that, Meg made a Mixed Green Salad with Roasted Beets.
We put the invitation out to the family and got RSVPS from both Noel & Hank and Laurel & her kids. Reed had thought he might come for a visit, but he is still recovering from a rather nasty surgery on his nose/throat so ended up not joining us after all. Mother even stayed up for dinner – she’s normally in bed well before 6:30, so that was a pretty big deal for her.
I actually had to sit on my hands as I watched those two at work, just to keep myself from tidying up while they did their thing. They had so many dishes and pots and pans and containers and measuring spoons and glasses and cups and ingredients and knives and who knows what strewn all over the kitchen from one end to the other. Poor mother was just beside herself, stressing over it all.
But oh my gosh – how good it was! Really a great meal, made all the better by having such good company to share it with. And, since I am the “cleaner” I told them to just sit back and relax afterwards. I washed some of the pans by hand, ran three (3) loads in the dishwasher, and spent about a day and a half tidying up!
The more I think about it, the more I think that they might actually have Bryan beat.
It’s been a long time since I last had insurance that covered Vision so when the company I work for finally switched to a plan that includes vision care I quickly decided to take advantage of it. It had been well over 6 years since my last eye exam, so I was pretty sure I needed to update my reading glasses. Plus, I wanted to talk about some options for dealing with my migraines and their aversion to flashing lights.
First thing I did was put a text out to the family asking for recommendations on Optometrists here in Palmer. Then I looked online to see which doctors my new insurance company will work with and compared that list to the one my family gave me. My decision was made for me, since there was only one name that appeared on both lists: Lodestar Family Eye Care.
The exam went quite well, with a trainee doing most of the initial intake stuff and the Doctor handling the exam itself. I then went to the showroom to talk to the tech there and pick out what I wanted. Everyone was very nice and easy to work with. Dare I say it was even enjoyable?
What I ended
up with was:
Now that I’ve
had a few weeks to try them all out, I can say a few things:
My presentation to the Palmer Historical Society went very well last week. I’m quite happy with how it turned out!
It was held at the Palmer Moose Lodge. One would assume that since I have lived in Palmer for well over 30 years, I might have at least once actually been inside the lodge before – but I really don’t remember it and didn’t recognize anything about it. I didn’t even know where it was and had to look it up on Google Maps. But since it’s right downtown Palmer, it was very easy to find. I overestimated how long it would take to get there so we had to sit and wait a good fifteen minutes for someone to arrive and let us in to the space where the meetings are held.
Once we got in, however, setup went very smoothly and quickly. I had a table up front to display my photo albums, and another table for the computer equipment. Sheri manned the projector for me during my talk – which was a bit weird at first. I had to remember to tell her each time I wanted a new slide up on the screen. She did a good job, however, so I eventually didn’t even have to think about it.
The audience was predominantly the “Over 70s” crowd, but I did have a few classmates show up. I recognized more than a few of them, and all of them came up to talk to me afterwards. One lady thought I was selling the books, so I had to explain that they were my personal photos – not story books.
I even got an invitation to give another presentation! This time to a classroom for Earth Day. That was on Monday of this week – and was another great presentation. I showed the same slideshow but modified my talk to make it more interesting to a classroom of kids.
