Hi everyone – all of us at Paper Crafter’s Library hope you had a wonderful Christmas with your family and friends! I apologize for the longer than usual silence. Our Christmas “vacation” started on Friday at noon when we hit the road to visit our family in Ottawa. Every second year we celebrate Christmas in Ottawa at my parent’s place. It’s always quite the production when we drive anywhere because there are too many of us to fit in one car LOL! There were four adults in all: Todd and I, Irene (our nanny), and Papa (my 91 year old grandpa), our 5 children and of course our little dog Ginger. On our way, we stopped in Trenton to meet up with my sister (Soph) and her family. So when we hit the road again we were a three vehicle “caravan”.
The drive from Cambridge to Ottawa is never fun – it’s always long – 6-8 hours depending on the weather and traffic (and traffic through Toronto was pretty slow), and of course depending on how many stops we need for the kids. We arrived at about 8:30 pm – just in time for our traditional dinner of San Marino’s pizza. San Marino’s is a little independent pizza place that is just up the road from my parent’s house, and they have the most amazing pizza. Whenever we visit my parents it’s always traditional for to have pizza the night we arrive – so they didn’t disappoint LOL! After that it took a long time to unpack, get the kids settled and then eventually fall into bed exhausted.
Christmas Eve during the day we spent some time shopping for last minute gifts – despite my best intentions, things were so hectic leading up to Christmas that I didn’t manage to quite finish everything. Then of course there was hours upon hours of wrapping and then patiently (or not so patiently) waiting for the kids to fall asleep. Despite all their excitement about the imminent arrival of Santa, it still takes them forever to fall asleep.
Christmas morning we got a little “present” from Sammy (our youngest) – he slept in until 9:30 am! Pretty much every day of the year he’s up between 5:45 am and 6:15 am – so after getting to bed after midnight the night before it was a welcome treat. We had tied the double-doors to the family room shut so there was no way the kids to bust into the room and get to the presents before the adults got there LOL. Thankfully our older kids are pretty patient on Christmas morning, so Todd and I took full advantage of our “sleep in”. With the number of people in the house – 8 adults and 8 children in all – and because we open our gifts one at a time – it took quite a long time to finish. The rest of the day was spent preparing for, enjoying and cleaning up after Christmas Dinner. It was around that time though, that things started to go kind of downhill.
My dad had been feeling quite out of sorts most of Christmas Day, with abdominal discomfort, as well as fever and chills. On Monday he wasn’t feeling much better and by the afternoon was looking distinctly yellow – he was jaundiced. My step-mom took him right to the hospital, and after hours of tests and waiting, it turned out that he has viral hepatitis! Thankfully, it’s one that they feel will resolve itself, and as the week has progressed, he has been feeling better and looking less yellow. Of course on Monday morning, my husband Todd woke up with a terribly sore throat amongst other things – he was hit by a terribly bad cold which kept him in bed for almost 2 1/2 days. The same day our youngest started running a fever and had a terrible cough. Since then I’ve gotten sick, my step-mom has gotten sick and so have a few more of the children.
So needless to say it’s been a challenging week, and the reason that you haven’t heard from us. So today, in addition to my little update, I have a few more things to share with you. First off, if you are a Paper Crafter’s Library member, despite the silence here on the blog, video tutorials have been posted for members on an almost daily basis (Monday to Friday). Of course now that Christmas is over, we’ve been moving on to Valentine’s projects. Here are a couple of the ones we’ve shared this past week
The first one is this “U Rock” Card. The scalloped frame was created using my Grand Calibur and Spellbinders Nestabilities. The letter “U” is a chipboard letter which I covered in pigment ink, and then embossed using a fine glitter.
The second card is this “Smitten” card. I created this card using some papers from my My Mind’s Eye Love Me Collection. The decorative border was die cut with a Tim Holtz Sizzix Edgeability die.
Of course that wasn’t all we posted for Paper Crafter’s Library members – we had our Club 52 projects – which we are now focusing on Shimmer Paints and various ways to use them, we’ve been uploading the projects from our 2010 online Valentine’s class and had this cute truffle box which Soph designed – we put some yummy Chocolate Truffles inside and gave them to my dad as part of his Christmas gift.
Okay, so that’s what we’ve been doing on a creative front. We’re heading back to Cambridge on Monday, so I won’t be posting here again until Tuesday. If you haven’t already looked, you can check out the winners for our last Freebie Friday and Makeover Monday in the posts below.
for designing. I made sure that each project would require only one cartridge. The Fish Bowl uses the Create a Critter cartridge, and the Candy Box uses the Simply Charmed cartridge. I thought it would be fun, to alter them a bit to create some shaped treat boxes/flat cards. For Paper Crafter Library members, you will have the ease of downloading my Craft Room files, so that all you have to do is load and cut!
