Mural pictures!

I finished up the Cupboard Under the Stairs on April 12th. Doug went out with me and helped me take pictures and get everything packed up.



Sylvia's husband is going to put a little bookshelf back in the bottom corner, where the ceiling slopes down to the floor. They'll have a small TV in there and all the Harry Potter books and movies. Sylvia's also got some quilts that she made with Harry Potter fabric, and bean bags.

Signing the mural and taking all the tape off is always an exciting moment. It looks so different without the blue tape outlines.



Sylvia's daughter Wendy found some glow-in-the-dark paint, and we thought about putting it on the moon and all the windows, but I tested out a little area and thought it wouldn't look very good. I did put little dabs on all the lamp posts, which is kind of a neat effect.






Kate was just six weeks old when I started painting. If I had known this was going to take so long, I would have taken regular pictures of Kate in front of the mural, so we could see them grow up together.


This last picture is stitched together from a few photos. If I get a wide-angle lens for my camera I'll have to go back and take more.

Happy Easter!

Here's Kate in her pretty dress that her Aunt Barbie made. She liked carrying the basket around, but lost interest in the plastic eggs. (In fact some of them are still sitting on the ground outside--I should go pick them up).


When we got to church this morning, we went in and sat down and I discovered that Kate only had one shoe on. I found the other one out in the parking lot, under a truck that had parked next to us after we went in. We're lucky the shoe didn't get run over!

You may have noticed that I haven't posted any pictures of the mural. It is finished (hooray!) and we took lots of pictures, but I just haven't gotten them up yet. I heard from Lisa at Griff's Shortcuts again, and we definitely are going to offer some digital versions of my frame designs. So I've been working hard on that for a few days. I was hoping to have some things ready for Easter but I'm not sure that's going to happen. I might try to put some stuff up if I can get it ready tomorrow or the next day (I'm not going to work on this on Sundays), or I might just wait till we've got more ready to go.

Almost done!

Work on the Cupboard Under the Stairs has been progressing very slowly. I've only been out to Port Orchard to work on it a few times since Christmas. I was working on rocks for a while, then got sick of that and spent a day putting bars on windows. This picture was taken back in February. Those little floating white things are lamp posts. Or rather, they're lamps with no posts. I've since put in the posts so they are no longer floating. (The perspective on that building looks really weird--I think it's just the angle of the wall. I hope!)

Last Wednesday Kate and I went painting again. I've been saying for quite a while now that I only had "just a little bit more" to do, but this time I finally felt like I was really almost done. There's a bit of water along the bottom that needs to be put in--that won't take long--and the part where the water meets the rocks. Other than that, well, I could spend weeks fiddling with rock shading, but I'm not going to. (Just say no!) So, Doug is going to go out with me tomorrow, and I'm going to finish up and sign it, and get eveything packed up. It's been a long, long project.

Here's Kate out at Sylvia's house last week. Awww!

Kate at 15 months

I'm a bit behind here. I've been working on this layout since, oh, March 27th, actually. The trouble with scrapping digitally is that there are so many possibilities, and I just have this compulsion to keep playing around with it and trying out different things. But then, the nice thing is that I can always go back and change it later, if I want to.

The blue and reddish papers are from Ronnie McCray's "Maritime" kit. I made the large curve and stitching--I was rather pleased with the way it turned out.

Since hitting 15 months Kate has been changing even more. She learned how to turn around in a circle and make herself dizzy, and she's developed a penchant for pushing things. We went up to Ikea last week and she was pushing around one of their little kid-sized shopping carts and just having a great time. Now she keeps wanting to push other things--the stroller when we go to the park, the big shopping carts at Fred Meyer, and even the rocking chair, which doesn't push very well.

Kate also has a new word, and that word is "meema." It means snowman. Over the Christmas season she had this thing about snowmen--everywhere we went, if there was a snowman decoration somewhere, she would spot it. Maybe it's their bright carrot noses (she does like carrots), or their cheerful expressions. You don't see snowmen around so much in April, but Kate does have a couple of books that have have snowmen in them, and she just started saying "meema" a few days ago. There's also somebody on Two Peas who has a snowman blinkie in her signature, so when Kate's sitting on my lap when I'm reading the message board, she'll point suddenly at the screen and say "meema!" and I'll scroll back up and see that I just went past the snowman.

I have a little Gingerbread Man book by Richard Scarry. It was given to me by one of my roommates at BYU. In the front she wrote, "This is to help you remember the gingerbread groundhogs." As it happens, I don't remember the gingerbread groundhogs, but Kate has been enjoying the book. Doug reads it to her (with humorous ad-libbing), and he has a little song that he does for the "Run run, fast as you can" part. Now when Kate sees a picture of a gingerbread man, she points at it and starts singing the little song. ("La, la, la.") It's just the cutest thing.

We do have one book, a little book of colors (which I can't find right now, but I'm sure it's around here somewhere), that has a snowman on the white page and a gingerbread man on the brown page. What fun.

Wahooooo!

I figured out how to type in Korean! With a lot of help from various sources, we finally put the final pieces together today and got it working. I got a bunch of yummy fonts from this site, and I can use them in Word and in Photoshop. Wheee!

A girl and her stuffed animals (and a flower!)

I took this yesterday:



This is Kate sitting in the laundry basket (yet again), surrounded by all her furry friends. We've been pulling her around in the basket quite a lot. Doug made some modifications--a piece of cardboard taped onto the bottom, so it slides smoothly over the carpet, and a belt on the handle so we can pull it without bending over. Loads of fun.



And here's one from today. She's becoming more little girl and less baby.

April Fool!

This is my avatar on Two Peas.





This is my avatar on Two Peas for April Fool's Day.


I'm easily amused.