Saturday March 26th

I woke up to a chilly morning on March 26th. Amanda had sent me a text saying that it was snowing where she was working. A little later on I looked out the window and sure enough it was snowing here

 since this is a scheduled post I have no idea what the weather will actually be like when this actually publishes. I'm hoping that it will be sunny and warm.

The video below was taken before the picture above.

Pioneer Woman Wednesday

It seems like I had just decided to do this series then I suddenly had lots of blog material. I'm finally going to get back to it though.  How about spoon rests. 

I don't recall in what order I got these but I love them all. The red polka dot one sits on the counter next to my red coffee maker. The two blue ones alternate on the stove and the butterfly one sits on the other side of the stove..

hyacinth

I totally forgot about posting a picture of the hyacinth that Amanda bought for me when we went to Kraynak's. The day she bought it it hadn't fully bloomed but within a day or two it was sitting on my windowsill in all its glory smelling heavenly

An Easter craft

What can you do with an embroidery hoop, dish towel, some cardboard and a few other items?

You can make an Easter bunny decoration. I couldn't find a pom pom big enough for his tail so I wadded up a big clump of fiber fill stuffing instead. The hoop I used was about 10" and one dish towel would be big enough to make two of these. 

I saw this idea on Pinterest and the pin came from Just that perfect piece

Easter treats

Back when I showed you what I bought myself for my birthday, I showed you the Easter themed cutting die sets. Today I'll show you what they make. These hold a Cadbury egg. There's a  chick

 

And a bunny

I thought they were really cute and relatively easy to put together. The biggest challenge is the tiny pieces that old hands have to glue to the base. 

trip the Final Chapter

We made two more stops in Hermitage before heading home. Both were to Chocolate stores. The first was Daffin's candies. They had an elaborate display set up for Easter also. This was near the front of the store.

 

In the back they had the Chocolate Kingdom.

The final stop was to Philadelphia candies. I purchase a half pound box of assorted chocolates and when Amanda and I got in the car and went to sample them we discovered that the lady messed up what I asked for. I asked for a mixture of raspberry, chocolate cream and coconut. There were no chocolate in the box and there were orange cream which I didn't ask for. It was still pretty tasty though.

And that concludes our day out. 

trip part 5

After walking through all of the displays we browsed through the store. There were lots of wonderful items and this one I would have loved to have taken home.

Wouldn't that have fit just perfectly in the Ann cave? Unfortunately the $300 price tag told me to walk on by. 

After we left Kraynak's we went to lunch at Eat'n Park. The waitress came up to our table and I asked her about the senior citizen discount. She said that I could get it and then Amanda pointed out that it was my birthday on Monday and I would be 60 so that's why I was asking. When she brought the check she gave me a happy birthday cookie.

trip part 4

Today I'll give you the last two displays. First we have the Never Forget Garden

 

And the final display depicts what the season is really about.

trip part 3

Today I have the Noah's Ark display

Should have taken a video of this eagle. His wings were flapping up and down.

trip part 2

To continue with our trip to Kraynak's here are some more pictures

I should mention here that these displays also include a lot of animation. For example the wings on the butterflies move up and down. I had a video but was too lazy to upload it to youtube. 

Right before we got to this next display I said to Amanda that I could smell popcorn and that it smelled really good.

We rounded the corner and she said, "well that's probably the reason you smell popcorn".

 

Saturday trip with Amanda

Saturday morning Amanda and I headed to Hermitage PA to visit Kraynak's. It's a wonderful little store that has all kinds of items, they sell flowers gift items and have elaborate displays for both Easter and Christmas

 

I took about a bazillion pictures while I was in there so I'm going to break this up into several posts. Here are just a few for today

what I bought myself

I find myself in a situation where I have an overabundance of blog material. Don't get me wrong I'm not complaining I just didn't know where to start. I'll start with what I bought myself since some of you had asked. Amanda and I went out Saturday morning and I'll be talking about that tomorrow. When I got back home two boxes were sitting on my front porch from Amazon. It was raining and instead of pushing the boxes back towards the door they put them right on the edge of the porch where they got nice and soaked. Thankfully nothing in there could get ruined and it was pretty much just the box that was wet. So what was in the boxes? Well I bought myself some new cutting mats for my Cricut and two Easter related die sets

The other thing I got myself was this craft tote. This will be very handy for holding my most frequently used items and I can easily carry them from room to room. Now to start stuffing it full of all my craft tools.

Tomorrow I'll start showing you where Amanda and I went yesterday. I took a ton of pictures and I don't want to overload the posts so our day out will be broken up into several posts.

What shall I do today? 

Day one

 The first day of my 4 day vacation was quite enjoyable. I actually did quite a lot but accomplished very little. I'm throwing in some random pictures to help break up a longish post.

It started with sleeping in and then spending the next 3 hours sitting in front of my computer, in my pajamas, drinking coffee. I got a text message from my boss asking me to look up a code he needed for a tax form for a new hire. I responded with "Sorry but this user is currently unavailable". Since I was already sitting in front of the computer and looking up the code would only take a few seconds I then went a head a did that. He said he thought I needed a nice wake up text to start my vacation.

Then it was time to get off my butt and get dressed. I cleaned up the kitchen then spent some time working on removing a very old wallpaper border that's in my bedroom. I've been wanting to do this for a long time but keep putting it off. It's not coming off easy and I managed to put a nice gouge in the drywall. One wall done and I called it quits.

Next I moved on to the craft room and did a little cleaning in there. That job is a little overwhelming because I have way too much stuff in there so I didn't get very far. I did manage to clean the desk off though.

Lunch time and back to the computer to do a little Amazon shopping to buy myself a birthday present.

I made a quick trip to the store to buy some potatoes and then back home to make dinner. 

The weather was beautiful with temps just above 70. 

Today I'll be heading out for a fun day with  Amanda. 

On cloud 9

 That's exactly where I'm sitting right now. Starting today I have 4 days off. I scheduled a couple vacation days so that I could have a long weekend for my birthday. I have no idea what I'll do for 4 whole days but I know I won't be hearing the alarm go off and I won't be going to work. The boss threatened to blow my phone up with text messages all weekend.

Since I'm off for four days, my favorite co worker brought me a birthday present yesterday. She gave me this card

There were two instant lottery tickets in the card but I didn't win on either one of them.

Then she gave me this. I can't remember exactly what it was called but you are supposed to give it 2 ice cubes once a week.

happy Saint Patrick's Day

I kind of messed this up. I should have saved the leprechaun project for today, and yesterday should have been Pioneer Woman Wednesday.

Oh well, I'll do Pioneer Woman Thursday this week.

These are the dishes I have.

When Wade and I got married and combined households, he came with a set of plain white dishes. When I got these he didn't like them and wouldn't eat off of them. When we had dinner, mine was served on my pretty Pioneer Woman plates and his was on his plain white plates.

Something sweet.

There's just gnome telling what you will see on this blog. But as promised I'm going to show you what I made now that it's finished. A little sweet treat for my favorite co-worker. This cute gnome holds a Hershey candy bar

 

The belly band, which is the hands and shamrock on the front of his beard, slides off so that the candy bar holder can unfold.

This cute guy was a free cut file from My Scrap Chick The free cut file at the moment is an Easter bunny candy wrap. If I get ambitious, everyone at work will get those.

as lazy as it gets

That is the best way to describe my day off yesterday. I had absolutely no ambition to do anything. The  majority of my day was spent either playing on the computer or watching TV. 

After dinner I decided that I would attempt to make something for Saint Patrick's Day to give to the deli manager. Naturally she gets one of my little leprechauns, but since she's my favorite person to work with, I wanted to give her something else too.

When I sat down to write this post I didn't have it finished because silly me cut parts in red instead of green. Here's what I have so far

 

Tomorrow I'll show you the finished project.