a bag of chips

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

Well, I hope you had a lovely Thanksgiving, full of all the things you're thankful for. We had a quiet dinner (well, as quiet as five kids under six can be) with Nadia's birthmother and her kids - our third such Thanksgiving. I wouldn't trade this new tradition for anything. There are few people in this world I am more thankful for than the amazing Miss B and the incredibly selfless gift of her baby.

Here's Nadia with her birth sister, Miss D, on Thanksgiving. They look so much alike and have so many things in common, especially their affinity for all things girly. They love to dig through the dress-up box together and then clop around in princess shoes. For hours. Miss D loves her baby sister and is always giving her hugs and kisses. I am so thankful they will always know each other.

Over this long, wonderful holiday weekend, I got some things done. I've been working a few scarves and other crafty things, but my big task was to make an advent calendar.  I had two projects in mind to try:  this one from Martha Stewart and this one by Ali which was also inspired by Martha.

I tried to make the stockings out of felt, but between my status as Idiot Sewer of the Year and my cheap sewing machine, I just couldn't get it to work. I tried everything from changing stitches to adjusting stitch width and tension and I just couldn't get it to work. (Any tips on sewing with felt would be greatly appreciated.) So, as a scrapper, I turned to paper:

I bought a Christmas paper stack at Michael's, grabbed some coordinating cardstock, my pinking shears, downloaded a stocking template from the internet and went to work. I did end up sewing the pieces together - I know I can sew on paper - and then stapled different ribbons to the corners for hanging. I don't think we'll end up using this idea as our advent calendar, but I'm thinking I'll use them to help display our holiday cards, or maybe use them as tags or gift-card holders. Hmmmm...I'll let you know what we decide on that.

And this is how my version of Ali's/Martha's project turned out:

I bought a cork board from IKEA and bought all the little boxes at Michael's - I found them in the gift-box section among the take-out boxes and tissue paper and chose yellow, red, gold and silver, and then the large white and shaped kraft boxes I got in the unfinished wood isle. I didn't paint any of the boxes, but chose to leave them as is (this saved on time, too). Then I arranged them on my cork board and then hot-glued them down (so far, they're staying put). I used a variety of stickers from American Crafts and Doodlebug, my circle and scallop punches, and a few Heidi Swapp journaling spots.  I'm very pleased with how this turned out and how quickly it came together. The boxes were all pretty inexpensive and I believe I managed to get this project done for about $35.00, including the cork board. I'll be hitting the dollar spot at Target and adding dollar bills and coins and candy treats to the boxes over the next few days. And our little advent calendar is mounted right by our front door to serve as a reminder of how many shopping days I have left before Christmas.

I'll also be doing my first December Daily page tomorrow, and I look forward to sharing those here as I get them done. I'm definitely feeling the holiday spirit in full force.  I even put some lights up in our front yard. Ahhhh. Hot cocoa anyone?

Happy Thanksgiving!

Enjoy a blessed and bountiful day!

Love,

The Cockburn Family

Go Elf Yourselves

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

Stampin' Up! Does it Again!

Based on previous posts, there's no doubt that I'm a Stampin' Up! fan, and have been for over a decade. I remember that glassy-eyed twenty-something me at my first Stampin' Up! party at my mother's house, excited and overwhelmed at the crafty possibilities being cheerfully demonstrated before me. I was hooked.

12 or so years, 84 stamp sets, and three kids later, the affair continues. Their Holiday Collection Stampin' Kit was created for Country Living magazine and it is awesome. Everything you need to create some awesome ornaments, tags, cards, decorations or gifts. One of the things I love about this kit is that you can either make things exactly as they have or you can run wild and create something originally yours.  Here are a few things I came up with:

I can't wait to get my Christmas tree and decorations out (next weekend, hopefully!) so I can hang these up and then make some more. I hope to share more about these when I do so you can see them in action.  I also plan on making a few of these as tags for teacher gifts this year. So many possibilities with this beautiful, generous kit.

Want to see more possibilities? Check out Elisha Snow's blog for some more design ideas using the kit.

Have a lovely weekend!

December Daily, Epson Printers and Stuff.

Ever inspired by the amazing Ali Edwards, I put together my own December Daily book. It didn't turn out quite as I had hoped (it's quite thick), but I love it. I love this whole idea so much, in fact, that I'm going to do my darndest to do a week out of each month in 2009 (One Week in January, etc.), ending up with 12 books of family goodness at the end of the year. Anyone care to buddy up with me in this endeavor?

For the book base, I used sheets of chipboard I had laying around (I save every bit of chipboard I get in packaging and such) and cut them down to 4 x 6 pages. I then gathered bunches of patterned papers in reds and greens and anything that looked remotely Christmas-y.  There are 25 pages in my book which makes a two-page spread for each of the 25 days leading up to Christmas. You can view some of the rest of my book here.

I also recently received a spankin' new printer. Yes, brand spankin' new. And not just brand new to me, but a brand new release from Epson:  The Artisan 800 all-in-one fantasmatron pinter.

I'm already a die-hard Epson fan with a wide-format Epson R1800 printer and an Epson scanner, and this lovely little gizmo completes an already capable collection.  But what I didn't have was a fax machine or a copier, and now I have that, too!  This printer is sleek, quite compact and produces amazing prints, with or without borders. You can upload photos directly from your media cards, edit and print without ever even using your computer. Gotta love that!!! It also prints directly on printable discs (great for us photo freaks) and is Wi-Fi compatible AND Energy Star rated. 

What else is new?

Aidan's doing great in occupational therapy for his CAPD. What a remarkable process this is.

Makena has a playdate scheduled for Saturday with one of her playmates at her school. It'll be our first Build-a-Bear experience!

Nadia is talking up a storm. Nonstop. Constantly. She says "mommy" 8,743 times a day. I love it. And it drives me bonkers. She's recently added the words cookie, bus, cracker and crap to her vocabulary. I'm so proud.

Hubby has been traveling a bunch lately and that seems to really be adding to the craziness around here lately. We miss him and we worry about him when he travels. I always breathe a huge sigh of relief when he gets home.

I'll post again later with some new Stampin' Up Holiday goodies. YAY!

Snippets!

My buddy Lain Ehmann's new book is almost ready to ship. I am so freakin' excited to get my hands on it and I'm so darn proud of my super-talented friend. (Lain is another reason why I started knitting.)

Here's what Lain has to say about her new book:

Snippets: Mostly True Tales from the Lighter Side of Scrapbooking is not your ordinary scrapbooking book. There are no layouts, no product lists, and no projects. What it does have is cover-to-cover laughs!

 

Snippets is a collection of short essays about scrapbooking and all the crazy things this hobby makes us do. Hybrid, shabby chic, artistic, traditional, digital… all of us are, deep down, doing the same thing – documenting our lives. I wrote Snippets with the intent that it would help bring scrappers together. I’m hoping people will have as much fun reading it as I had writing it!

Lain is funny. Very funny. And anyone who scrapbooks, knows someone who scrapbooks, loves someone who scrapbooks or is just plain curious about it will be able to relate. Want a sneak peek? (click to enlarge)

Have I got your attention? Good! If you're as excited to read the rest of this book as I am, head on over to Simple's Website tomorrow for the first day of our virtual release extravaganza and for a chance to possibly-just-maybe win a goodie.

Congrats, Lain!!!

Cooking and knitting.

With a bit more time in my schedule lately, I've been enjoying cooking. I'm not generally known as a good cook, but following a good recipe sure makes a big difference. Last night I made lasagna, earlier this week I made chicken and dumplings, over the weekend I made cheese tortellini soup, and a few weeks ago I bought some sugar pumpkins (also called pumpkin pie pumpkins) and made my own pumpkin puree, which I then used to make pumpkin bread. I've made such a mess of my kitchen.

Last night's lasagna was made from the phenomenal Pioneer Woman's recipe. The changes I made were that I used a combo of fresh and dried herbs, I used diced tomatoes vs. whole, I used only one egg in the cottage cheese mixture (cuz that's all I had), and I chopped up some of the tomatoes I roasted (using this recipe) and added that into the sauce. Oh, and I also used uncooked Barilla lasagna noodles. Did you know you can do that? The noodles come out perfectly with a bit of a bite to them and not mooshy at all. Hubby loved it!

And my chicken-and-dumplings recipe is just a shoot-from-the hip adventure, which is the kind of adventure I generally avoid because I could end up with something that tastes like week-old gym socks. But this one turned out really well!  I boiled chicken breasts in about six or eight cups of chicken broth to which I added some sauteed onions and garlic. When the chicken was cooked, I cut it up and added it back to the pot with some herbs (fresh rosemary and thyme, some dried sage, and salt and pepper) carrots, celery, zucchini, and bell peppers and let them cook a bit before adding a can of rinsed kidney beans. Then I made Bisquick dumplings and added them to the boiling soup and VOILA! Right out of the pot, the dumplings were fantastic and perfectly cooked. In leftovers the soup took on a more stew-like consistency (thanks to the disintegrated dumplings), but that was enjoyable too. I'm thinking of different dumpling substitutes to add to the chicken soup, and I'm thinking of adding some gnocchi. Any other ideas out there?

The tortellini soup was delish, and super easy, and was great for lunch the next day. The Pioneer Woman's pumpkin puree recipe helped me make this bread which was devoured in a matter of hours. 

Some of my other favorite recipe sites:

Anything made by Giada or Ina on Food Network

Real Simple magazine's "Fake It, Don't Make It" recipes - the Shepherd's Pie one is my fave

And Martha. Oh, Martha. I hate to love her, but I do.

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Just before my surgery in August, I read "The Friday Night Knitting Club" and while the book was okay (think "Steel Magnolias" with knitting needles), it totally got me interested in knitting. So I went here and taught myself to knit. I've been a scarf-knitting fool ever since, and scarves will be under everyone's tree this year. If you've ever thought about learning to knit, just do it! Next year I'll be trying circular knitting for making cute baby hats.

Anyway, that's it for me today. Have a happy weekend and I'll be back next week to share some new stuff from Stampin' Up! and about a great new printer from Epson.  YEAH!

I *heart* scrapbooking.

I just picked up a few copies of the new Simple issue "Quick and Easy Photo Albums" and it's really, really good. Not just because I've got a project in it, but because it's a brilliant concept. Photo album scrapbooking is something I first heard about in an ancient issue of Simple.  And, just like what it says on the cover of this new issue, I though someone at Simple had gone mad (MAD, I tell you!) that I could scrapbook 200 photos in one night. I did my first photo album scrapbook about three years ago, and I love that this fabulous "git 'er done" approach to scrapbooking has been updated and expanded for today's scrapper.

While I did not scrapbook 200 photos in one night three years ago, I did get a heck of a lot more photos scrapped and in an album than I probably would have in an entire year. And for the project I have in this issue (you can see more of it here) the pages of mine that are shown contain nearly forty photos. FORTY photos! Given my usual tendency to scrap a single photo on each page, forty photos is huge.

Photo album scrapbooking (or PAS as we call it) can be as varied as the photo albums on the market today, and has served me well in getting my photos off my computer and into albums a whole lot faster. And I love that I can always revisit a photo or series of photos that have already been PASd and create an entirely new full-sized layout later on.

And, speaking of single-photo pages, here's one I did today:

(Supplies: Heidi Swapp flourish sticker (behind the velum) and journaling block; Stampin' Up! Big Shot,  Top Note die and vellum; Doodlebug Frills and letter stickers; KI Memories border sticker and rubber embellie; Hero Arts bling; Martha butterfly punch; Heidi Grace stickers; Fontwerks journaling sticker; flower by Li'l Davis (?))

And, for that photo of my folks and the grandkids and the head-swapping in my previous post, Nadia was the one whose head was cut-and-pasted. The one photo that was good of everyone else (Aidan's finger was not in his nose and Corin was not covering her eyes and Dylan was not looking at Nadia and my mother's mouth was not wide open and Makena's eyes weren't closed) was not so good of Nadia. The ball she insisted on holding was covering most of her face. Photoshop to the rescue! I lassoed her head and upper body on a different photo where she was the only one cooperating and then copied and pasted it onto the other image. Some minor tweaking (you "You've Got Mail" fans know that I can't say "tweaking" without playing that scene in my head) and I've got an instantly better photo.

So, congrats to Kyla for being the first to guess that it was Nadia. I'll be sending you a copy of the new Simple Scrapbooks special issue! YAY! Send me an email with your mailing address and I'll get that out to you this week.

I'll be back on Thursday!

Moving forward.

I voted for the first time ever this year. I don't know if it was mounting media and husbandly/sisterly/parental pressure to get off my expanding ass and get my vote on, or if it was that I was veering a bit more right or left of apathetic than in the past. Regardless of which, I did it.

I'm excited and a bit anxious about what things will be like from here on out. With so much change in my life - in all our lives - in the past decade and especially these last five years, such an unprecedented and radical change in our leadership has hurtled me screaming past my change quota.

But this sweet little website has made me feel a bit more hopeful about the outcome of our election and how, united, we are in this together:

From 52 to 48, with love

Peace!

Oh my goodness.

Taken on Halloween morning. I have no idea what she was upset about, but it might have had something to do with my camera in her face. Oh, what a face.  This photo is pretty much SOOC (straight out of the camera), just sharpened and resized for the web. Taken around 8:30 AM near large north-facing window. I get great light in my family room in the morning.

Camera info: Canon 5D, 24/70 2.8L lens, AV Mode, ISO 500, SS 1/125, f2.8.

Today is my mommy's birthday. And for her birthday, she bought us all tickets to see the Backyardigans, LIVE! at the Performing Arts Theater in Costa Mesa. The kids had a great time and my mom had a great time watching them have a great time. That was her gift to herself.  Her only other request on her birthday was to have a photo taken with all the grandkids. So, mom, here you are:

This was the best one. Out of forty shots. And I only had to swap one head from another image. It was my first time doing that kind of edit and I have a feeling I may try it again soon. God bless Photoshop. I'll send a treat to the person who can guess whose head it was. =)

I'm coming down from hosting the Simple Studio blog this past week, and recovering from my second head cold phlegm fest in a month. Yikes. 'Tis the season, eh?