Snow, Shawls and the Clay Ball

 We woke up to an inch of snow this morning. There is such hype about snow in this area as we just don't get it that often. The local media goes crazy building the snow story, and the snow seems to always come up short. No matter, it is always pretty.

In the meantime, I am still getting ready for the Clay Ball. I have been experimenting with shawls. I will wear one and my friend might.

 Jan, one of my blogger buddies, came to visit her father and was kind enough to model for me. We agreed that I would just show the shawl. I enjoyed her visit so much, knew that I would. Jan's blog:

http://laughingdogarts.blogspot.com/

I love the way that these turned out, but not for the Clay Ball, so I went back to experimenting. and came up with more. These are red wools and plum wools over metallic netting with silk laid in. So much fun. More to do.

Fun With Photos

If you haven't yet taken Kim Klassen's classes on Photoshop Elements, Layering, Textures, etc, I highly recommend them. I read about them from another blogger friend and found them to be very inexpensive and highly informative. http://kimklassencafe.com  Today I played around with a few of my pictures of my great niece and some old childhood pictures of my mother. I still have many things to review about layering, but I have learned so much from Kim. Before her classes I just couldn't get it.

 In this picture I overlaid a picture of my mother on top of a current one of my great niece. The old one already had sepia tones so I didn't add any more texturing. I need to go back and relearn how to remove the bright dress from the babies face. That will come.

In the second picture you can see my mother's doll also, and again the sepia tones. Thanks to Kim, I am now using a photo program that I have had for several years. Thanks Kim.

One Generation To the Next

Last weekend we celebrated my mother's 89 birthday. My two sisters came from LA, and we did our traditional shopping and lunch trip. We love getting Mom a nice present, though she fights us the whole time. This time we got her a nice down jacket and she looks great in it. As she is often chilly, this should keep her nice and warm when she goes out. Mom says that she loves it when she sees her girls together enjoying each other so much. These are moments that we treasure as Mom gets older.

Mom is now 89 and Dad is 88, just 7 months apart in age. They have been boyfriend and girlfriend since the fourth grade, and now married for 67 years. This kind of commitment doesn't seem to happen anymore. Their life raising 7 children hasn't been easy, but whose is?

We had a big party for Mom and fixed lasagna with all the trimmings. My sister's daughter came from Seattle with the youngest member of the family. She will be a year old in March. She is so beautiful, and is now crawling everywhere.

With my mother turning 89 and my great niece almost 1 year old, I am witnessing two ends of a wonderful generational spectrum in our family. How did I get so old?