Christmas Crafts!

Two weeks ago, I was diligently working on making some more doll items with my serger & sewing machine.  I have a crafting room located in a sunroom/porch right off of our living room.  The weather has been too cold to sew in there, so I moved the table, chair, and machines into the living room for an entire week.  The little sewing heaven I created somehow managed to put a cramp in the entire house.  Over a week later, I finally cleaned it all up and got the house back into working order.  It's amazing how quickly stuff falls apart around here!

(Remember back in October when I blogged about working on Christmas crafts?  Well I don't either. . . ha!  While I was busy sewing in Lima, my sister assembled all the desks & chairs back home in Indiana.  I had completely forgotten all about this project.  Good thing I blog to help me remember!)

(Each of the 3 Adams nieces has a bitty baby  -- and after this Christmas, they'll each have an American Girl, too!  My sister found a real Bitty Baby diaper bag -- all the way on the right-- but wasn't able to find one for each girl.  I found a pattern online to recreate the bag and made 2 more!  I debated on just making 3, but it didn't happen.  The oldest niece will get the original, she can choose if she wants a "Zee made" bag in the future.)

(Since Emily, the oldest niece, doesn't get a handmade bag, I decided to make her a couple of dresses for her dolls.  These dresses were tricky because I didn't have a pattern.  I just made it up based on dresses I have for my dolls.  Not too bad!)

(Another dress whipped up out of thin air.  I had a pattern for a shirt and just extended the bottom to make it a dress.  Ironically, this little dress was made from a bad bridesmaid dress. )

(For the littlest niece -- my brother's daughter -- I made her a little apron and chef's hat to go along with her kitchen playset.  Her mom is quite the chef and really into cooking, so I figured her little helper needs to look official!)

Merry Christmas!

I'm not sure why, but for some reason, I'm on a blogging fail.  One of my New Year goals will be to blog more consistently.  You can chalk the absence up to Christmas gift making, errands, and house care.  It won't get any better during Christmas break, so you'll just have to wait for me to go back to sharing all our boring stories and updates.  

Christmas this year will be different for us.  We aren't flying out to New Jersey to see Steve's family like we usually do.  Instead, we'll be staying local, visiting his siblings in Cincinnati  and spending some time with my family in Indiana.  Christmas is our favorite time of year, not just because of seeing family and the break from work for Steve, but we love all that goes with Christmas -- lights, music, cookies, hot cocoa. . . Mmmmm

We started early this year on the Christmas music/movies.  I am not ashamed to admit I watched White Christmas at the end of October -- this snow from Sandy should count!  Christmas music has been listened to since the beginning of November.  By the middle of November, I had all my Christmas decorations up and the lights up outside; although, we didn't turn on our lights until after Thanksgiving!

Since we have been enjoying all our decorations, we wanted to share them, for you to enjoy, too!

(It is really hard to try to capture a picture of our Christmas lights & the house now that it gets dark so early! You will just have to trust me that our lights are way prettier than this picture.  We've even gotten several compliments on our lights!)

(What do you do with a little tree??  Put it inside an old fireplace!  I went crazy this year and made the fireplace in our room very festive.)

(Fireplace in the Living Room -- Look how nice that tv looks on the wall!  So glad we, well Scott, mounted it :-)!)

(Christmas tree in the living room.  Notice all my nutcrackers hidden throughout the pictures.  I now have 17 nutcrackers and hoping that number just keeps climbing!)

(It's really hard to tell in the previous picture, but there are bows above each of the windows.  They blend right into the wall, which makes them perfect Christmas accents.  My mom is an awesome bow maker & made these for me while visiting back in November.  Thanks mom!)

(No Christmas decorations are complete without a nativity.  I have 3 set-up throughout the house.)

(How better to celebrate the 12 days of Christmas than with 12 nutcrackers each showcasing 1 day of Christmas!  My grandma used to collect (not by choice) nutcrackers and I was given this set after she passed away.  What a great way to remember Grandma!)

(The windows in the kitchen are decorated with window clings.  Now the windowsill is full of Christmas pictures and cards, but I didn't take a new picture.  Washing dishes now is a much pretty process.)

(Even Ramses is in the Christmas spirit!)

(We've been having lots of issues with Ramses drinking bottle.  The blue one -- in previous picture-- would just drip out all the water and make his bedding all wet.  He doesn't like wet bedding -- we'd find him all the way on the opposite side of the cage hiding under the dry food dish.  So we bought a new bottle.  The wire is too small and wouldn't stay attached.  So we gave Ramses a new friend -- The Viking Nutcracker to hold up his water bottle.

 (Last but not least, I have to brag on my husband.  A few weeks ago, he came home with this beautiful winter mix.  These flowers were absolutely beautiful for almost 2 weeks!  No he wasn't in the doghouse, he just simply got them "just because"; and yes, he did score big brownie points for these flowers!)

Mischief Managed

Thanks to my favorite brother & husband, the "picture storage full" conundrum has been solved.  I don't really understand the solution other than that some how the pictures are shared between google+ and picasa. I don't know.  I'll have to go back through the 901 photos already on the blog and upload them the new way to empty out the storage.  So that's kind of ridiculous. . .

Also, in solving the issue, we discovered there's new storage available on my picasa account, so we're hoping we aren't being charged for that :-/.

Here are the pictures from Gabbie's visit last week!

(Ha ha, she loves taking pictures with my camera.  Most of the pictures are of random things like sippy cups and fingers.  This was the best picture with us in it -- thanks to front facing phone cameras!)

(She begged to take baths just so she could play with some McDonald's toy Chipmunks.  She played with them for over an hour in the tub one day!  Her poor little knees aren't used to playing on a ceramic tub & she came out with some burns & bruises :-/)

(Whenever a niece comes to visit, I'll let them chose some little special craft.  She chose to paint your own tea set, only she painted about 3 pieces.  I think I'll save the rest and have the other nieces paint the left items.)

I know, I know

I know. . it's been waaaaaaay too long for a real blog update.  Part of the hiatus has been because I've been busy and the other part is that not much is going on that is blog worthy - ha!

All last week I was knee deep in a new house project.  I was going to just repaint a spare bedroom, when I discovered that it there was wallpaper underneath the current paint.  I wasn't going to take the wallpaper down, but I noticed a spot that was peeling up.  Before I knew it, half the top layer was off; however, there was at least 2 more layers stuck on the wall.  So all last week I worked on soaking and peeling off layers of wall paper.  You will have to wait for pictures in a later blog post.

Last Friday, Steve and I got all dressed up and went to a P&G Lima Plant Christmas Party at the Inn at Ohio Northern University (Steve's parents' Alma Mater!).  We were not thrilled about the party in the beginning because it started at 8pm and Ada is 30 minutes away.  By the end of the week, Steve is burnt out and the last thing he wanted to do was dress up and go schmooze at a party.

When we first got there, none of his close co-workers were there.  So we did the awkward chat with some people until people started to show up.  The theme was Casino Night and there were lots of games set up.  We hadn't planned on staying long, but we jumped in with some friends to learn how to play Craps.  Steve was a great roller and we both got in on the action.  Soon, we found ourselves up (we had play money to gamble with) at the Craps table, so we headed off to Black Jack.  The dealer at the Black Jack table was pretty funny and we had a good time, but we started to lose quite a bit there.  We were debating on leaving halfway through, but more people got into the games and pretty soon it was 11:30pm, the tables were shutting down and we were bidding on prizes with our earnings (which by the way, on the last black jack hand, we both put all our money down and the dealer had Black Jack and we lost everything.  The dealer quickly changed his hand and gave us a bunch of money instead of following the rules -- ha!).  At the prize auction, we one The Shawshank Redemption DVD!  What a fun night with work friends!!

We spent this week with a little visitor from IN -- Gabbie!!  While she was here, we took her to see Christmas Lights in Bluffton, saw our Owl friend, went shopping, colored, played Nintendo  and much more!  I have pictures from her visit, but I'm having issues with the blog.

Who knew that you were only allotted so many photos to put on the blog for free?!  I definitely didn't know and am now out of photo space.  Hmmmm, what to do, what to do.  I could go back and delete photos from previous posts, but what's the fun in that?!  The whole point of the blog is to document our lives, and taking off photos doesn't achieve that purpose!

Apparently all the photos on the blog are stored in my picasa albums which are maxed out, so we have to figure out how to resize those photos without screwing everything up.  Steve is doing some research to see if there's a loophole, so if anyone has advice we'd appreciate it!

So for now, you're stuck with words and no photos :-/