My pictures are DONE! (click on gallery then find our name on list and click enter gallery). The problem is I can't decide which one is my favorite family photo. What do you think? My top favs (the ones that you say WOW and kind of gasp when you first see them) is #17 and #22. Thanks so much to Shannon Montez for the great photography. It's great to have friends with skills!

'Tis the Season! Well, Christmas is officially underway. On Saturday I got together with the Garage Girls and we exchanged our Secret Santa gifts. Look at what I got (plus Suzy gave us a gift certificate that I couldn't spend fast enough)!!

Then I headed over to my SIL with my MIL for our annual Christmas Tea. My SIL attends Twin Lakes church in Aptos and each year they put on a Christmas tea. The decorations are beautiful and the programs puts you right in the Christmas mood. This year they had a great speaker who was full of sass and told it to us like any Southern Lady should. She was from Texas but she reminded me of my grandmother with her Southern ways. What a great reminder that the season is not about all the stuff and stress but about Jesus and loving your family.

Do you think this tree will fit on our house?! Today we cut down our Christmas tree which is a tradition for us. I realized though that we have have other traditions like - getting out of the car and checking out one or two farms deciding we don't like it and get back in the car to go to another one, being indecisive about what tree to cut down so we end up walking up and down hills and end up way to far away from our car, not securing the tree tight enough on the roof of our car so we drive nervously down the freeway and usually we have to pull over and fix it before it flys off, never being able to get the tree perfectly straight in the holder (this usually creates a big debate year after year with my husband on what the definition of "straight" is) and last but not least having half of a strand of lights burn out after I put them on the very pokey tree!

Bag with Bling!

So here is the 2nd version of the knitted evening bag. I added beads at the bottom to give it some bling. This was after I took it to the Los Altos boutique and it got rejected. Which I don't really understand because she had had some knitted bags in there but she said these were more of a jewelry satchel instead of an evening bag. Now with its new look, I still don't think I can bring it back there to try again. I can't bear getting rejected twice. I did get more orders at work though and I may post it on online and see if I can get any more takers. I htink mostly I like knowing that someone other than family is actually like what I have knitted. At least that is how I felt when I was selling scarves several years ago. I loved to think that maybe one day I would run into a stranger on the street that was wearing a Kent original around her neck.

So with the long weekend I got some knitting done. I had this idea to make drawstring purses that would be good for holiday parties. I am hoping to sell some and maybe give some as gifts. The yarn is actually more metallic than the photo shows. I still need to make the drawstrings for the red one. I am hoping I can sell them at the boutique near my work that I have sold scarves at before. How much do you think I could get for them (think shish-shi (how do you even spell that?!) store and I would have to give the owner 1/2 the price). For my knitting friends - if you are interested I can email you the pattern I made up. :-)

In scrapbooking, I am still working on the perpetual calendar (idea from Simple Scrapbooks mag Nove/Dec issue). I also did a layout for one of Suzy's contests at the garage.

Love the time to be creative!!

Okay - I need to blow all the dust off my blog. Gees- sorry it has been so long since I posted. Here is a visual diary of all that has been going on...

This is me with frozen pea packs on my cheeks. This was after I got all 4 of my wisdom teeth out. This is when it was still painful but I could just lay on the couch. This was when Matt thought I looked funny so he took a picture. But it wasn't funny anymore later when none of my pain killers would work and I could not eat or sleep and was about in the worse pain I have ever been in for 4 days. See I found out after the surgery that I have strongbones - yeah no osteoporosis for me but bad if you get teeth pulled because it hurts in a special way. On top of that I got an infection so about a week later I was finally feeling like a normal human being once the antibiotics kicked in. But my teeth and jaws still ache but manageable.



Here are some pics after I became a human being again. Tyler loves doing crafts so we made these out of sculpey and gave one to each family that came to our house for Thanksgiving.



And here we are at Thanksgiving which was at our house. Matt did another awesome job of cooking. I decided this year to take pictures from a different perspective - the filling your plates and eating to your heat's content perspective because really isn't this how it really is at Thanksgiving.

I hope you all have a good Thanksgiving and I sure would like to hear from you all - drop me a comment why don't you?

Oh and I have to just plug my friend's photography business - Shannon Montez photography. It's a long story but we have known each other for a long time and I FINALLY got to have a photo shoot with her. So happy!!! We ended up at the Rosecrucian Museum which may seem like an odd choice (my husband's) but we found some cool spots with some neat architecture. YEAH I am so glad to have that done! Now I will not have to look at old Sear's protraits on my wall for very much longer!

Layout from the corn maze. Look at me - actually posting a layout that is not from a year ago!

Here are some fun pics from Halloween. At my work a bunch of us got dressed up. One of my co-workers "Batgirl" gave me the idea of being "Miss Understood" right when I was leaving work the night before so I rushed to put it together. It was fun. My boss is "Lucy" which was perfect for her because she has many Lucy moments.

Then is was off to watch the boys in their school parade and trick or treat down Lincoln Ave to all the stores after they got out. This year we went with Matt's cousins Josh and Cheryl and their kids Megan and Brett. After dinner, there was more trick or treating around Willow Glen. There are a couple of streets that go all out and our fav is one where there is bunch of teenage boys that dress up in scary masks. They have their whole front yard decorated and they stand really still only moving slightly. They don't jump out or yell which I am not sure why they don't (but glad at the same time). I think it is more the anticipation that they might or the realization that what you thought was a fake statue was real when it turned it's head to look at you that makes it so great. So the kids loaded up on candy and Mom and Dad confiscate pieces every once in a while!