Easter Spoolies!


I'm having a good time making spoolies! They are new to my list of favorite craft projects ... and I think they get cuter each time I make one! I use the Cricut Ribbons and Rosettes die to make the background ... then fill in the rest with any of a variety of goodies I have stashed! This one is going to one of my friends! She loves ladybugs!


The rest will be used to decorate ... well, something! Miss Phoebe and I still have to decorate the dining room, so they will probably end up in there!




I always use double sided card stock paper for the rosette, so it looks good on the back, too. These glittery rabbits came from HL! I added some of the elements from card making kits.






I'll be sharing my post with some of the parties listed in my sidebar! Make sure you visit my home page and see all my egg creations ... before you move on to the parties!  Happy Easter!

Musical Eggs!


The rabbit has been in my craft room, again!
I'm very pleased that Miss Phoebe has an interest in music and has started violin lessons at school. I decided to encourage her interest by decoupaging some Easter Eggs with sheet music. I printed some music to use, so Easter Parade became the star! This is the first time I've decoupaged eggs ... hmmm. 
Will it be my last?


I printed an extra sheet to frame so we can create a vignette in our Easter decorating. I placed a cutout vintage card on top of the music. I found the card online. Each of the eggs is embellished with a gemstone ... all eggs need bling ... and a little vintage ribbon.


I did the eggs two ways. I cut the full piece to wrap around using this technique.
I covered a couple eggs with small pieces of music in a crazy quilt technique. I have to say both worked pretty well and I'm content with my first effort's results!



Make sure you take a look at my home page and my other embellished eggs! You might like these, too! I'll be sharing this post with a few of the parties listed on my sidebar. Make sure you take a look and enjoy all the other great ideas.

Vintage Lace & Ribbons


I recently found a big box of vintage lace and ribbons at my favorite collectible shop. It came from a florist that had closed down years ago in a neighboring town, so I decided it was at least 25 years old! Just from the style, it seemed that way. Miss Phoebe and I do lots of crafting, so I knew we would use it. My first project was to embellish some glitter Easter Eggs. I'll let the pictures do the talking!






Here's a couple collages ... showing the ribbon and the flowers.



I'll be sharing with a few of the parties listed on my sidebar! Make sure you stick around and visit my other posts. You might like my eggs covered with sheet music ... they are right here! Be sure you click through to the parties to see all the other creative entries.











Mini Scrapbook for Grandma Sister!


My sister and I love our jobs as Grandmother!  She lives in Arizona and I live in Southern Illinois, but we stay in almost daily contact with lots of grand daughter stories! When I started making mini scrapbooks, she said she wanted one ... so it was a natural to make one for her about being a grandma! I just visited her son's Facebook page and grabbed several pictures of Kelly ...


The cover of the book and several inside pages are made with the Karen Foster "Grandparents" design kit. I used lots of ribbon and faux rhinestones to dress up the patterns!

I used some other themed pages because it was so easy to do with the pictures I had! Kelly's purple dress was trimmed in flowers and butterflies ... and the teacup Disney ride picture was a perfect match! I shop the dollar store regularly for packages of stickers and embellishments for scrapbooking. I just keep them until I find a use for them! Miss Phoebe loves our dollar store ... and now we are getting a second one in our town!

The scrapbook pages are cut with the Cricut Elegant Edges die. I love those patterns because there are plenty of edges, corners and other elements to add to the pages. In the picture on the right page, Kelly has made a life size picture of herself holding a cluster of balloons, so I created a layered cluster of balloons on the page!


The following pages represent holidays! I enjoy putting pockets on my pages and inserting stamped tags ... 




Rhinestones make the butterfly much more beautiful!


My nephew plays in an Irish band! Kelly loves to tag along. 



Here's the back cover!  I'll be sharing with a few of the parties listed in my sidebar. Make sure you click through to have a little fun!

Daddy's Birthday

Happy Birthday, Daddy!

Today is my daddy's birthday. He is celebrating his 96th birthday in Heaven ... probably having coconut cream pie, pineapple upside down cake and lemon meringue pie ... with my mother. I'm sure all the other family members are there with him ... because he is loved.

Here he is just a couple weeks before he left us ... We were decorating graves for Mother's Day ... and I met him at the cemetery with this new puppy ... for him. He immediately named him "Coalie" ... because he had a black dog as a child that he had called Coalie ... black as coal! Daddy didn't get to keep the puppy and my husband insisted that it come to our house. In keeping with family tradition, he immediately changed his name ... naming him after my father, Jim. This is Jimmy Mutt, aka MeMutt!

My dad was one of those guys who knew everything his children did ... He would often greet us with a question about why we had done something ... and we just couldn't figure out how he knew our secrets!

My dad taught me many things ... things I should NOT DO ... and things that I should do ... I've created a list!


Daddy taught me that ...

God carved everything in stone at the beginning of time
God answers prayers when he is ready
Everything happens for a reason
Family is important
Nature nurtures
Charity isn’t noisy
Good husbands want their wives nearby
 Every day is a holiday
Good cooking is important
Meals around the table solve all kinds of problems

Happy Birthday, Daddy!




St. Patrick's Day Dinner!

We love St. Patrick's Day in our family, and we have friends who love it as much as we do ... so our Sunday night dinner table was opened to the extended family!

You can see from our menu that we don't like all our vegetables cooked to smush with the corned beef, so I roasted my carrots and boiled my tiny red potatoes, then smashed them and loaded each one with chopped leaks, Irish cheddar cheese, plenty of salt and pepper and a sprinkle of onion powder.

I added beets to the menu this year. We celebrate Scottish style ... and beets are a staple vegetable crop in Scotland and have been since about 1900. A German crop grower began farming in Scotland and eventually the government took over the sugar beet crops ... and decades later, the consortium was returned to the growers. That is a topic for a different post! I baked Scottish style soda bread. It includes multiple grains ... corn meal, oatmeal, whole wheat and white flour. Pretty ugly, but good! I hadn't baked the popular Guinness chocolate cake in awhile, so I made it and served it with coffee ice cream. I skipped the frosting! A good pot of coffee, strawberry Irish Cream ... actually a few of those ... and the meal was a great success! My friend told me she'd never eaten anything at my house that she didn't like!

I don't use my Johnson Brother's Friendly Village china enough, so I decided to 
use it to remind us of a small village in Ireland ... or Scotland! Since I had decorated the fireplace mantel and a couple other spots in the dining room, I didn't create a centerpiece for the table. I decided to just use my soup tureen to hold the cabbage ... so it became the central focus! We needed room on the table for platters of food, so we could serve family style! I added a couple Celtic crosses to the tablescape and used plaid fabric ... and my 
Douglas Tartan sash as a runner! 























You never know what impact simple things might have on your dinner guests. My friend lost her only sister years ago, in a car accident. Seems that her sister's favorite china was Friendly Village, so my tablescape had special meaning and gave us an opportunity to share some beloved memories.


Our cabbage wasn't the only green on our table! Green plaid napkins with napkin rings that I think resemble Celtic knots ... on top of a green place mat. I used green napkins rings ... and blue napkin rings to honor our blue Douglas Tartan colors! I used my faux antler flatware to add a little woodland to the village theme! All the men in our circle of family and friends are deer hunters, so that is a masculine touch that they appreciate! The butter knives are Cambridge Oak Leaf pattern, which works perfectly with the china pattern ... and many other china patterns!

A couple of the recipes I used were new to my traditional Irish menu! We love sour cream horseradish sauce with prime rib, but I'd never served it with corned beef. It is a simple recipe ... you start with two cups of sour cream ... add a teaspoon of Dijon mustard and as much horseradish or horseradish cream as you like. I added 1/2 cup of horseradish cream and it was pretty snappy, so adjust the recipe to your own taste buds! 

The hot cheese dip is one that I adjust with different cheeses, depending upon the rest of my menu! This time I used 8 ounces of Kerrygold Gouda, 16 ounces of cream cheese, 6 strips of fried bacon and the remaining grease ... and 1/2 cup chopped leeks. After you fry the bacon, toss the leeks into the grease to soften. Put all these ingredients in a food processor and cream the mixture. Bake it at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes until bubbly and a little brown on top. This time I served the dip with biscuit chunks. I used a tube of the big size butter biscuits and cut each biscuit into 6 chunks. I piled them in a ring on one of my Temptations trays, so I could bake them and serve them on the same tray! I love my Temptations! 

Happy St. Patrick's Day!  I'll be sharing my post with some of the parties listed on my side bar.  Make sure you click through to see the other posts!

Blue with the Green!

It's just about time to celebrate St. Patrick's Day and I have all kinds of blue going on! Why? Well, I'm only partly Irish and a bigger part of me comes from Scotland. So, we incorporate our Douglas Blue Tartan into our St. Patrick's Day decor. You'll see the real tartan in an upcoming dinner party post, but for now, enjoy my plaids! 
You do know that St. Patrick was actually from Scotland, don't you?


I'm having a little family dinner party, so I've decorated the fireplace mantel in the dining room. I just puffed the three plaids on the mantel to create the theme.
Cricut helped me with the "LUCK" and the rosettes. I love using tiny clothes pins!


My favorite part of the cuties on the mantel are the old man and woman salt and pepper shakers in the following picture. I bought them recently and they still have a gold sticker on them that says "Official Souvenir of Long Beach, CA"! My sister and her family lived in Long Beach for years ... far from Southern Illinois where I live ... and found these in an antique store! If any of you have a clue what they have to do with Long Beach, please leave me a note!


I've had my Cricut out working hard ... since the first week of January! I've been making adorable mini scrapbooks and elements for spoolies! I thought the rosettes would be cute pinned to my fabric on the mantel! Who doesn't want all the Irish LUCK they can get?!


Here are the other elements of the composed mantelscape! Isn't the little bean pot cute? It's hand-thrown pottery. I love using my cornhusk dolls whenever I can fit them into the theme! I painted the wire cloche to match the theme. I bought several of those a few years ago at HL when they were 90% off and have painted them a dozen different colors!



The Irish are known for their rhyming prayers, but I like my message much better! Here's hoping you find it easy to live in grace! I'll be sharing my post with some of the blog parties I've listed at the bottom of my sidebar. Click through to see the other creative posts!  Happy St. Patrick's Day!









St. Patrick's Day Spoolies


I'm having a family St. Patrick's Day meal ... corned beef with all the appropriate vegetables and a rich chocolate cake made with stout! I'll include a couple friends who are like family for this meal. I like to give party favors ... and the men will enjoy a good cigar ... and the girls will get spoolies!




This one is for my daughter ... the genealogist who has traced our roots back to Mary, Queen of Scots! I made miniature pages of sheet music ... one for Mary my Heather Queen and another for Highland Mary ... for this theme. The tiny spool tucked into the display is covered with a tiny piece of sheet music ... "The Irish built the pyramids"!  Cricut got busy and made the rosettes for the backgrounds of my spoolies.



This spoolie is for Miss Phoebe and I incorporated a rainbow theme in it!
I'll let the pictures speak for themselves!





This spoolie is themed "My Wild Irish Rose" for my friend ... who loves musicals and all things Irish! I used some of the parts of one of my card making kits as the paper rose elements in this one!


This one has a little blue in it ... and it is for me! I hope! I'll share, if somebody else wants it! I'm really enjoying the television show "Reign" about Mary, Queen of Scots ... even though it certainly lacks historic accuracy! So, my spoolie has a little of Mary in it. You'll get a better glimpse of the tiny spool on this one!



Hope you've enjoyed this post! I'll share it with a few of the parties listed at the bottom of my sidebar. Make sure you click through to see the other posts!


February's Family Sunday Dinner

Christmas 2020

Mary Queen of Scots Dinner Menu Booklet

Grandma Debbie's Christmas 2018

Grandma's Blue & Green Pupkins!

Autumn at Grandma Debbie's