January Blah!

I sometimes find the end of January to be a very boring. Early in the month is time for a fresh start. By this time, my fresh start has run out of gas.

I am fighting off the January Blah's with a new project. :o) Happiness! I have added a twist to my coin purse. I added a liner. I went to Hancock's on Saturday and found the most adorable fabrics, along with a new source for happy wool yarn. I found a beautiful yellow wool. I don't currently have any yellow, it all looks too gold in the store, so this was exciting for me! Here are three of the most adorable fabrics I found Saturday.

I only let myself get three this time (along with two remnants) because I was not sure if I would like putting linings in them. It was a lot more work. Still not really sure how I feel about it. The other"issue" is that I decided ahead of time, that for once, I wanted to make one for myself. That is right. I don't have one yet! I wanted this to be my camera case. And there was the rub. Adding the liner, tightens up the opening. There is no "stretch" or "give", and my camera won't fit! So I will be using this as a coin purse, My credit cards and drivers license fit perfectly. And will make another, slightly larger one for my camera! I was thinking about making it black with dots so that it coordinates, but is still different than this version.

Have a happy week! Blast away your "Blah's" with a fun project.

Junking with the Master Junker!

Today was a fun adventure. Amy, who lives in Bartlesville, met me between Skiatook and Collinsville, just off the Hwy 75 exit. We took her car first to Skiatook for an antiquing/junking adventure. It was fun! We saw lots of funs stuff. After lunch at Ron's (ugh! I feel fat) we moved to Collinsville. Jackpot!

I will keep the words short today, and say it with pictures. Got my favorite sister a present, just because I saw something that made me think of her. Hope she does not have one already. :o)

Chapter Two

Grams says that when we got off the airplane, Danny and Debbie remembered her from when she came to visit, they went right to her for a hug. I was too shy. I was only 18 months old and very much a momma's girl. That does not seem like a big surprise. The second part of the story is that Grams quickly found her way into my heart. Or rather, my stomach. She literally bribed me with food. Thanks Grams! My battle with weight had already begun! I have a few memories from when we lived with Grams, but I am not sure which time I am remembering. We stayed for a while when we first arrived. The memory that I think belongs there is that I would sit in the long hallway between the kitchen and the den and play with a deck of cards. I also remember playing under the dining room table while Grams and her friends played cards. Going to sewing club meetings with Grams. They used their dues to send an underprivelaged child to summer camp. Somewhere along the way we moved to some apartments. They are on 21st street in West Tulsa. Very close to the river. I remember that our apartment had stairs and I have a vivid memory of crawling up the stairs, then sliding down on my belly. I remember watching my brother and sister play on the playground from the upstairs window.

Oh yes, this is important. I learned a new word while we lived there. "molested". That is pretty much all I really remember. I guess some old pervert who lived there got hold of my sister and I. I dont know what he did. I just remember learning the word, "molested". In the true way of the old days, this was not discussed for years and years. Seems like someone would have asked us if we needed to talk about it. Nope. Many years later, as an adult, I was not sure if it was a real memory or something that happened to someone else. So I asked my Aunt Mary. She confirmed it, but did not know what had happened either. To be honest I am not sure anything happened to me or not. Maybe it was just my sister? I don't really feel scarred or affected by it, but it just seems like it should have been a monumental event. Hello? If someone did that to your kid now there would be a media circus. Oh well. I guess it is just one more short blip on the radar of my life. But at least I was acquiring an impressive vocabulary!

After that, we lived back at my Grams for a while. You will begin to notice a theme. In my life, all roads lead back to that house...always. Then we moved across the street from her. What do I remember about that? The house was tiny. I think just two bedrooms. The most amazing thing was that it had this super awesome chimney on the outside. I will try to get a picture of it to post. It was very stylish and original. Like a work of art on a tiny little piece of nothing house. I don't know how long we lived there, but I remember that our land lord was Mr. Bradshaw, and I thought he was handsome.

Thats all for today.... Have a wonderful weekend! Will add pictures later....

Decorations....down!

Tonight I accomplished what I have been trying to do for 14 days! The Christmas decorations are down. Life can move forward now. The house does not look very festive, but at least it is season appropriate. My next big task is to clean out the middle bedroom and transform it into the crafting room of my dreams, well, maybe my thoughts. I dare not try for the room of my dreams. I would like to have a good sized table. Something that looks a bit like this.
I dont need any chairs, just the table. It is ok if it is scarred up, I can paint it. Free is best, so if you know anyone who is purging a rectangular sturdy dining room table, please alert the media. I want it. I could set my sewing machine up on one end and my burning tools up on the other. Then I want some book shelves that I can store stuff on. I have a chest of drawers that I will clean out for yarn storage. I want to paint the walls. But not sure what color. Nothing too bold, because I want the colors I work with to look true, and some wall colors affect how you see other colors.

Thats all for tonight. The boy wants the computer.

The story of me.

I have always wanted to write the story of my life. This is not the best venue for that, but I am going to try to write a chapter now and then as I remember it.

A long, long time ago, in a tiny little town in Washington state, I was born. The year was 1967. It was a Saturday in November, just two days after Thanksgiving. My Momma was Barbara, and I had a big brother, Danny, who was 4 and a sister, Debbie, who was 3. Life is strange. Most people have a mom and a dad, and so did I. But my dad did not live with us. My parents were divorced before I was born and my dad had a new family. The lady he chose, Pauline had a son and a new baby girl of her own. So my dad had replaced me before I was even born. I am sure I did not know the difference....yet.

The town we lived in was Hood River, Oregon. But I was born across the river in White Salmon, Washington. You can see Mount Hood from there. I think seeing a mountain from your home town is very cool. Later when I was a teenager, my grandparents took my cousin and I through there when we were on the way to visit my uncle in Salem, Oregon. We did not stop, but it was fascinating for me to see where it all began. Strange that it seemed so foreign. I guess I thought I would feel a connection or at home or something. I'd like to go back someday and get to know it better.

I don't have much to say about Hood River, or White Salmon, since I was a baby when we were there. When I was about 18 months old, we came home to Tulsa. My mom's parents lived in Tulsa, so she was coming home after her marriage failed. There was a lot more to that story, of course. Isn't there always? My mom was a very different person. She was the oldest of 4 children born to David E. Clark and Helen Crow Clark. Both of my grandparents were born in Tulsa or right around Tulsa. Grams was born in Red Fork, which is basically between Sand Springs and Tulsa. To tell you about me I have to tell you about my mom, and to tell you about my mom, I have to tell you about my Grams. Aren't we all very much tied up with our mothers?

Grams parents divorced when she was young. She lived mostly with her mom, Zeila Keeling Crow who was a party girl. She brought a lot of men in and out of my Grams life. Some of them abused my Grams. It makes me so sad to think of how helpless she was. It was the depression. They did not have a real home and often lived in rooming houses. Grandma Zeila would pay for a month, and leave with a man. If she came back in the next month, Grams and her mean older sister, Jeri, would have another place to live, if not they had to stay with friends. Sometimes she stayed with her dad. Grams dad, Milton Crow ran a little neighborhood grocery store, somewhere in west Tulsa, I think. Here is a neat tidbit. The Wills brothers worked for him. Bob and Johnny Lee Wills were Western Swing singers from Texas who worked part time for Grandpa Crow and part time for KVOO radio, according to Grams stories. They are famous for their western swing music and put Tulsa on the map, musicly speaking. Grandpa Crow trusted the Wills brothers enough to let Grams go dancing with them. Oh, how she loved to dance! Once, when I was grown and married, I had a party at my house and Grams got ups and danced! I could tell she was having fun! Sad that that urge stayed hidden all those years. Anyway, Grams settled down and married Gramps. They moved all over the country and had babies. Gramps was a draftsman and worked for oil companies in Pennsylvania, Texas and Oklahoma. Grams was just a little country girl with red hair. She tells the story of when she thought she was pregnant, a neighbor told her she needed to see a doctor. So she went. In the Doctors office, they handed her a cup and told her they needed a urine sample. She said they showed her the bathroom. I can picture my pretty, petite Grams, so young, only a teenager standing next to the bathroom with a cup in her hand and a puzzled look on her face, wondering what the heck urine is. She put the cup in the bathroom and left the doctor's office and never went back. Her friend told her later what urine was, and she said, "I wish they'd just said to pee in the cup!" So finally, the young couple with three kids, landed back in Tulsa. They rented a house from Grandpa's mom and dad across the street from where he grew up. My Grams still lives in that house now. But it looks a lot different. It was moved to it's current location from where TU is now. It was tiny, just two bedrooms. Shortly after they came back to Tulsa, Gramps had to go to war. It was WWII. He reparied guns. When he came back they added one more baby, my Aunt Mary. While Grams was in the hospital having aunt Mary, the tiny house caught fire! It was August and my Momma was getting ready to start kindergarten. Somewher in the family archives is a newspaper clipping asking for donations of baby clothes and little dresses for a kindergartener.

My mom grew up. Quiet. Odd. Different. Schitzophrenic. Of course they did not know that. They thought she was quiet, odd and different. She went off to college at OSU. I think that lasted one semester and she came home. Grams knew something was wrong and took her to the doctor who said there was nothing wrong with her. Momma met my dad, Don, a bad boy. My grandparents detested him. He wrote hot checks and drank too much. Not exactly a parent's dream! But they got married and moved to Oregon, away from her family. Momma had Danny, and things got dicey. My dad said she would use all the grocery money to buy a leather bound bible, or she would give the money and the bible away. He kept writing bad checks and spent a little time in jail. I have to confess, all this is hearsay. Most of the people I know are too young to remember any of this, or they were not present when this happened. Finally, dad left, met Pauline, helped make me, and married Pauline. Mom came back to Tulsa, so we are back to me.

Next time.....less ancient history, more me

New Year, Back to Work.

Back to work today. We finished the year at work with only very slightly better numbers for 2009 than we had for 2008, so at least my boss had to give us props for finishing strong. Oh how I wish, I wish, I wish I could make a good living at home. I so want to be a homemaker. However, we have bills to pay, and we do like to eat, so to work I go. Today was not too bad as far as my job goes, I had a life application that I had saved from last month that I submitted today, so that starts the month and the year off on a good note.

Here are some pictures that I took during December and never posted.

Abbey's birthday gift, commissioned by Jacob (above)

A gift for a friend.

These are from inside the house on Christmas day. I have to tell you I was thrilled to have a white Christmas. A serious, real, white Christmas. Not a whimpy dusting of snow thingy. The real deal. Loved it. I had no where I had to be, so I stayed home and knitted, read and cooked my favorite things.

This was an awesome sight! Beautiful!

Bonnie and Clyde loved playing in the snow, as long as they got to sleep in the garage.

Hope you had a good day if you had to work, if not, well, I still love you. Now I have a serious problem. My decorations are still up and I dread taking them down. How trashy would it be to leave them for next Christmas? Trashy, or forward thinking?

Begin Again in 2010!

I have been gone too long! But as an excuse, I was very busy, knitting, felting, embellishing, burning, staining and cooking. I also have this little thing called a day job that keeps interfering in my fun. I think I would be a fabulous rich person. I would get to have so much fun knitting, with never a worry about paying those pesky bills. Alas, God has something else in mind for me. He knows best, so the pesky day job is back for the new year. Joy.

Here are some of my projects, can't show you all, because some people have still not received their gifts!

I also forgot to take pictures of the gifts I gave Gina and Amy, so I will have to ask them to send me pictures so I can post them since those gifts are something totally new for me. Gina has still not gotten hers, but Amy got hers tonight. So excited to give Gina hers so I can talk about it. :o) I am not so good with secrets.

I hope you had a very peaceful fun and exciting New Years Eve. I helped out at the teen lock in at church for a few hours. Then came home for the last 15 minutes before the ball dropped. Then I went straight to my nice warm bed. I am not such a great night owl.

Tonight was Bunko, and Amy came along to fill in for one of the ladies who could not be there. Of course she won... sort of.... she lost the most games so she got $10. Woo hoo Amy Loo! She also helped wash dishes and clean up afterwards. What a great friend. I was the hostess tonight, and I had to provide a gift for the last Bunko of the night. Here is what she got, along with a vanilla scented candle.

I am sleepy again, so I am signing off and praying that all 2 of my blog readers have a wonderful, blessed and successful 2010! Just in case there are more than 2 of you, I wish it for all of you! Crud, I just remembered I have to wash the dishes before I go to bed. Ugh!