i am home!! home home home!

obviously, i'm home. i've actually been home for a week now, slowly trying to get caught up on things.

it's lovely to be back with my mom, my sofie-bean, my own bed, friends and high speed internet, but it was good to be on the prairies as well. the trip was a bit ridiculous with family, and went by really fast, but i managed to spend a bit of time with a few friends, and find some time to myself as well.

i spent a few gorgeous days up at our cabin, with no extended family present, which is super rare! i picked 3/4s of a gallon of wild saskatoons and froze them, and spent an evening sitting around a campfire talking union gossip, and took lots of pictures, though not nearly as many as i'd wanted, and went o way too many thrift stores. i spent lots of time driving, breathing in the landscape.

i don't have the words to explain how i feel about the prairies. everything i try to say sounds incredibly cheesy, but oh, how i love it. i look at the sky and feel like i'm breathing it in, it sustains me. the sky is so incredible out there. and the colours are so gorgeous, the light on canola fields at dusk...

i took a bunch of TTV (through the viewfinder) photos, which i hadn't played around with much since last year. i finally got around to building a better way of connecting the two cameras and cutting out light (using scotch tape and a toilet paper tube!), and the pictures i took after that turned out much better. there are a lot of them, so i'm posting them pretty small, but if you click on them, you'll be able to see them better on flickr.


i love grain elevators! i wish i'd taken this one later in the trip, so that it would have turned out better!



this church is a heritage building now, though apparently my great grandparents were married there.




these ones were taken at the Old Church Pottery and Gift Shop up near our cabin. i stopped in there and couldn't resist buying a few pieces of pottery!









the fountain in minnedosa, mb


barn near the road to our cabin.

a small ukrainian catholic graveyard kinda out in the middle of nowhere






this graveyard had a lot of stones with crosses attached, which i've never run across before.







hopefully i can catch up on more posts soon!

mods, portland and ttv!

the last few weeks have been really crazy with family stuff, everyone's been away, and then back and then away again and back, now they're leaving today for another longer trip, and i've ended up running tons of errands for everyone else who's super busy! in addition to that, i've had several friends come to town that i rarely get to see, so i managed to squeeze in two really lovely meals, dinner with my childhood friend ariel and her boyfriend of several years (who i'd never met!), and her family, who i also adore, and a lunch/dinner thing with my friend liz, who travels the world and inspires me with her combination of creativity and action! they were both so fabulous to see, and it was definitely worth the lack of crafting this week! (the constant errands - not so much worth it!!) there's so much to catch up on, alphabet atcs and non paper atcs, a fabulous gift that came in the mail ages ago, the most amazing wedding invitation and my rsvp, books i've been reading, the ttv pics with the polka dot dress, techniques i've been trying....

but the most urgent thing to update on is my trip to portland and silverton last weekend (most urgent because i never got around to posting pics from my LAST trip to portland in march!)

i went down to attend angie and her hubbie's "BabyQ", aka a baby shower and BBQ all in one (such a cheesy name!!), and also got to spend some time with the amazing kittypam and her mark. it was a super quick trip - leaving very early saturday morning, and arriving back home late monday night, but i'm so glad i went.

the baby shower/BBQ was so much fun, and angie's place is BEAUTIFUL! she's out in the country, surrounded by fields, and the property has chickens, geese, ducks, turkeys and peacocks roaming around everywhere, and goats on an island in the middle of the lake. (did i mention there's a LAKE?) it's so gorgeous, and so peaceful, but still close to lots of stuff. i'm completely jealous.

about to pop!!





on sunday we went for breakfast in silverton, and then wandered around a bit. for a small town, there's a lot of craftiness! there's a bead store, with quite a lot of selection, a yarn store with some really amazing wools, and my favourite, a sewing lounge! it's called snippets, and just opened recently, but how fun! it's actually in the same building as the yarn store, they're open to each other, and there's a coffee shop upstairs. it's a gorgeous old building. i did a bit of shopping, despite my telling myself that this wasn't going to be a "shopping" trip! but really, how could i resist a yard of the most perfect woodgrain cotton at snippets?



angie took a few pictures of me doing the ttv photos, i'm going to post them on the thread on craftster so that people are less confused about what i'm doing!


there were american flags EVERYWHERE though!










after a bit of a lazy afternoon, and looking over angie's inherited serger for her, i headed into portland to see mark and pam. we had a mellow evening, and on monday morning we went for a brunch before pam went to work. angie was able to come at the last minute, and it was fabulous. i so wish i'd had more time to see everyone!

i adore these two. so much.

and angie's so incredible.


after everyone else went off to work and stuff, i started to leave town, but detoured to collage instead.... how could i resist, really? i knew i'd end up there!

i restrained myself, really! not much in the way of ephemera or paper, just supplies and some stamps. i totally scored on the fabric paints - they were all regular $10 and were marked down to $2! i bought a few things that i'd been actively looking for, a stylus for embossing and the tool for batiking, and stocked up on a few things (stazOn remover for $4 instead of the $8 i pay here), and then the stamps. a few were from the clearance, and then i bought three different heidi swapp stamps - i love her stamps, they're totally funky designs, and they're CHEAP! i got the chandelier, the heart and the clocks (because i can't resist clocks!). and i picked up the bam pop number set, to go with the alphabet set i caved and bought from story kits a few months ago.




though short, it was such a good visit! (and i didn't spend too much money!)

more ttv photos!

i was so excited about the photos i took tuesday that on wednesday i went gallivanting after my massage appointment and took a bunch more!










i really love the square image it creates, and i'm totally going to experiment more. it's a little tricky, because you can't use a flash, so you need a sunny day, but if it's too sunny, or the object is too light, the picture doesn't turn out (hence why you're not seeing any of the pictures i took of sun-bleached headstones in the graveyard!). and i need to figure out a way to hold my digital and polaroid together more easily, so that i can concentrate on focusing and the lighting instead!

but i'm still pretty happy. it was a lot of fun.