Weekend shots

Here is my Saturday shot. I bought this purse in Gatlinburg, Tennessee last week. I wanted something small but big enough to carry my wallet, phone, and sunglasses. We went into a leather shop and this little number called my name. It even has a little blue in it. And this sweet shot of Raven and Gizmo was begging to be immortalized. Aren't they just adorable all cuddled up together?

Tennessee Part 2

Halleluia! I finally found the usb cable that was missing and preventing me from uploading the pictures from our other camera. Turns out it was in my car the whole time. Duh!!!

This is the deck outside of my uncle's cabin. The cabin is high on a mountain side and it is surrounded by thick woods. One feels very one with nature when sitting on that deck. And those rockers are very comfortable, too! This is Logan and Josh in Pigeon Forge, TN. While I was in the world's largest scrapping store, they went go-carting.

If you ever wondered what a cicada looks like, here it is. This large bug sat on the deck railing for a long time until he decided it was time to join in on the cacaphony of noise his brethren were making.

Here is my beloved Uncle Kenny.

Here is another picture of the amazing Smoky Mountains. I love how the clouds create dark and light spots on the trees. We went to a marvelous Christmas village store. It was huge and just jam packed with all sorts of beautiful things. It was weird to be hearing Christmas Carols playing and walking amid all this Christmas stuff in July but we had fun in that bunch of stores. It was a 100 degrees outside but you never would have known it was July from inside there. I saw this lamp and just had to take a pic of it. A Christmas Story fans will know what this is.

I came across this plate on one of the display shelves and it caught my eye initially because of the blue color but when I started to read it, I teared up immediately. I wasn't even through the second line and I was crying. Jim saw me and came over to console me. He moved me on to something to take my mind off the loss of my mother but he took a picture of it so I could read it later. It still makes me tear up.

Anyone recognize this fortune teller machine? This is just like the one in the movie Big with Tom Hanks. I got lucky and just happened to snap a pic of Logan standing in front of the machine just like Tom did in the movie. Funny thing, though, Logan is almost the age that the character was in the movie.

This was on the strip in Gatlinburg. Leave it to my husband to be drawn to boobs whether they be real or not.I have more pictures yet to upload but I'll post later as Jim and I are hungry so I'm going to make us some lunch.

See you later!

Tennessee part 1

So here is my post about my trip to Tennessee, as promised.

Last Friday night we set out on our longest road trip ever. We were headed south and we had a 14 hr drive before us. Neither Jim nor I had ever driven so far so this was a first for both of us. The purpose of the trip, you ask. Well, my dear Uncle Kenny owns a cabin in the great Smoky Mountains and he invited us and to have my son spend 3 weeks with him. We just had to get my son down there so we drove.

We got on the road at 8:45 pm Friday night and drove for about 3 1/2 hrs. We stopped somewhere in PA for the night at a Comfort Inn which was nice. They only had smoking rooms available so the clerk gave me a $15 discount and we got free breakfast in the morning. We continued our southward trek about 9 am Saturday morning and pulled into Pigeon Forge, TN about 5:30 that night. We'd driven over 700 miles and then the last 4 miles took us 1 1/2 hrs due to traffic on the main strip. There were some cool sights like the Titanic ship jutting out onto the road. You can see a pic of that here in my previous post.

My uncle prepared us a wonderful meal after showing us around his gorgeous cabin. He's done so much work on it and has created a beautiful haven in the midst of such natural beauty. I was really blown away at how amazing the cabin is.

Logan had a bit of trouble sleeping the first night because of the symphony of wildlife calls going on outside his window. We were all laughing. Give him backfiring cars, screeching brakes, and jake-breaking tractor trailers and he can sleep just fine but put him in the forest amid nature and he can't sleep.

On Sunday after a flapjack breakfast at a restaurant called Flapjacks, we went to Wallyworld where I insisted on buying a bug zapper as my gift to the cabin. Trust me, he needed it! Bugs galore down there! There were moths as big as your head, cicada bugs who make one heck of a racket and every other flying creature imaginable including bats.

My uncle took us to a National Park called Cades Cove. It is a beautiful park filled with lots of animals but we didn't see much there. There is a one lane road through the forest and the park was packed with people so we spent an hour just staring into the woods on either side of our car and into the back of a pickup truck packed with kids in front of us. We did eventually get to see a few horses grazing and this one bear. Sorry for the grainyness of the photo. She was a ways back into the forest and with the canopy of the trees overhead there was little light so I had to enhance this picture. They tell me that she had 2 babies that were way up a tree but I didn't see them. What was surprising was that there was no barrier separating the people from her. People were out of their cars taking pictures and some brave souls even ventured into the forest to get a closer shot. It started to rain pretty hard at this point so we took the first exit out of the park. I'd like to go back there someday and see all that we missed but not on a weekend when it is so crowded. Here is Logan outside a little roadside shop we stopped at for some cold drinks. They sold vintage candy too like from when I was a kid. I bought a roll of Charms candies. You can't tell but it was hot and humid as all heck.

This is a sweet little story. We stopped in VA to get some gas and found these 2 resident cats. This one is a very skinny kitty who was not much more than skin over bones. Without me even saying anything to my darling husband, Jim, he went into the convenience store and bought 2 cans of catfood and then proceeded to feed both of these kitties. I was sitting in the car watching this transpire and I had to cry at his kind gesture. He not only bought the cans but he turned them out into makeshift dishes. He got into the car after doing this and I just had to hug him.

This is a real bear head that my uncle has mounted on the wall of his cabin.

Ready for some weird stuff. My Uncle kept telling us that the devil was dead and we were all like, "what the heck are you talking about?" He took us to this place near a river so he could show us this wood carving. It's really tall and weird. This is a carving of the devil being impaled by the carved tree complete with blood and all.

This store was in Gatlinburg. We stopped there and I got to taste moonshine for the first time. They had 3 different flavors. One was called White Lightning and it felt like that going down. They had another one called apple something or other and that was nice. Very flavorful and it didn't burn. I nearly bought a bottle of it but they didn't have a license to sell it yet. I could have bought the white lightning and they would have given me the recipe to make the apple flavored one but Jim called me away to show me something and I never got back there.

Here is a pic of the Smoky Mountains. We took this pic as we were driving by. Oh, and the mountains really do smoke. In the morning, it looks like the mountains are on fire because there are smoke plumes rising from them.

Another shot of the mountains.

I have lots more phots on another camera. I just have to find the usb cable so I can upload them and then I'll post again.

Hope you enjoyed.

My weekend shots

I'm back from the south. I was in Tennessee over the weekend which was quite an experience but more of that in a later post. For now, I want to get my weekend shots up on my blog as I'm late but in all fairness, I didn't get back until last night and we had no computer access so this is my first chance to post.

Here is Saturday's shot. This is the Titanic attraction on the main strip in Pigeon Forge, TN. It is perfectly positioned on the strip to create a wow factor as evidenced by the picture. However, it also creates one heck of a traffic jam as you can see by the columns of cars ahead of us. Once we passed this, traffic started to move a little but it took us over an hr to go 4 miles.
Here is the view from the front of it as we passed it in the car.

This is Sunday's shot. We saw this delicate beauty in a shop window in Gatlinburg, TN. What a lovely example of artistry. Imagine, someone handblew this glass ship. Amazing!

Jenn's CJ

Alrighty. Here we go - My final layout for the circle journal. This topic was not as easy as I thought it would be. I crocheted that big pink yarn flower.

Here is my sign-in tag.

And lest we forget, here is my sign-in for Courtney's 4 Things I've Repurposed for Scrapping cj. I don't know how but I didn't do a tag at the time I did her layouts. I think maybe it didn't get done initially because I couldn't think of or find something repurposed to use for the tag. The material for this tag is plastic from a section divider. I didn't need the divider anymore and it was in the recyling bin. It caught my eye when I went into the kitchen earlier and bells went off. I pulled that sucker out of the bin and went to work. I cut it into a tag shape and then I used alcohol inks for the first time. I had no clue what I was doing but I had fun playing and swirling the ink.

This cj round was definitely good for me. I used tools and supplies I've not used before. I also used colors and sketches that were not in my usual realm. I feel I'm a bit of a better scrapper because of this round and if nothing else, I had lots of fun. But there is lots else, isn't there? I'm going to be getting some fabulous layouts to put into my album soon. I can't wait to actually hold them in my hands and ogle them.

Thanks to Lisa for hosting this round. It was a great idea. Thanks also to all the great ladies who participated and did such wonderful work.

I'll be looking forward to the next round.

Sunday's Picture

While I was uploading some other pictures, I just happened to glance at a shelf on my desk and noticed these floppy disks. I didn't think anything of it at first and then it dawned on me that my computer does not have a port for these anymore. Why I'm still holding on to these I don't know.

Jean's CJ

Here are my los for Jean's cj. This was a difficult yet dear cj for me to do. I'm still mourning the loss of my Mom so these song verses have great meaning for me.

Here is my sign-in tag.

Ok, only 1 more cj to go and another great swap will be done. Hmmmm, what to do for it. So many ideas and supplies from which to choose. What shall I do?

Mini Album Saturday Part 3

As promised, here are two of the 3 los I also created yesterday.

I'm so happy that I've had a surplus of scrapping mojo lately. It feels so very good to be creating and I'm getting so much done. I haven't added new los to my albums in months so when I finally pulled out those albums and actually slid the los into the page protectors, well, you can imagine how nice it felt.

These are of our trip to Niagara Falls back in 2007. There's a lot going on in these lo. Very busy paper and lots of tags and stuff.

Got to get back to creating. Hope your mojo is flowing as mine is.

Mini Album Saturday Part 2

So here's the 2nd mini I finished yesterday. As I said earlier, the actual book was started in a class last year when I went to Tulsa but I finally completed it.

These pictures are from an exhibit held at a hotel in Orlando, Florida. It's called ICE! They bring in ice sculptors from around the world and they create amazing sculptures out of ice. Not just the usual swans and dolphins one might see at a wedding but unbelievable things like life-size Nativity scenes, castles complete with slide down chutes, and toy soldiers taller than my husband and he's 6'3".

Upon entering, they give each visitor a heavy coat because it is 9 degrees in the exhibit. You can see we each donned one of those nicely colored blue coats in the pictures. I was in my glory being that it was exceedingly hot that year we were in Florida so going into the frigid place was a relief for me, to say the least. It didn't take long for our noses to get red and start running but they had tissue boxes along the way just for that purpose. I thought that was really nice that someone had thought to supply tissues because we so needed them.

It was a lovely thing to see and I appreciate the immense talent of those sculptors.
My gosh! Logan was so little back then. He had to be no more than 6 years old in these pictures because we gave him a big boy haircut when he was 6.

Even I went for a ride down the ice chute.

They had a real carriage set up with velvet cusions. The carriage was pulled by 2 ice horses.

I still have 3 other los to post but I'll do that later. Back to the cj's I go.

Mini Album Saturday

Hello, friends!

It's a lovely, sunny Sunday and I have the house all to myself. Jim and Logan are out galavanting somewhere. Who knows where they are or what they are up to. We did see on the news that a new Lego store has opened in our local mall so I'm pretty sure a stop there will be on their intinerary. Perhaps a movie might be on their to-do list as well.

It's been a another productive weekend scrappy-wise for me and it's not over yet. I created 3 los and finished two more mini albums. I still have to do the cj's but the day is not over yet.

Last year I went away to Tulsa on a girls' scrappy weekend and took a bunch of classes. In 2 of those classes, I started a mini album but haven't finished them until now. When I created them, I had no idea of what theme they would later take on but this one's colors just naturally lent itself to a wedding theme. So here it is.

Isn't he handsome? He still makes my heart go a-pitter-patter.

You'd never know by looking at us in this picture that it was a cold February day. There was even snow on the ground.

I liked these butterflies so much that I didn't want to cover them with pics so I left them visible.

So that's my little black & white album. I'll be back later with more but I want to do some journaling for the cj's now.

Hope you are enjoying your day.

Saturday Shot

I'm going to join Dedra Long's weekend shots thing.

Here is my picture for Saturday. This is my Million Bells hanging plant on my porch.

Dedra Long