Valentine's Swap

Fresh off the press! Pictures of the swap spread. My swap buddy was S.L. Here is the whole kit and caboodle that she sent.

A close up of the adorable card.

Here are the dish towels and the pretty plates.

The card-making or scrapbooking supplies, plus the candies, the heart-shaped bathtub grippies, and the little mailbox.

Here's a close up of the little mailbox, soon to be filled.

Thanks to S.L. for the best Valentine's Swap!!!

Creativity Under Construction

This is the first time I've participated in the gift swap. My giftee might have opened the package and gone, "What the?" I feel like I could have done better. Because after I opened the package from my gifter, my eyes started to well up.

What adorable heart-patterned plates! And the red-heart-on-red towels! And valentines making supplies complete with the cutest little mailbox I've seen. My swap buddy really outdid herself. Thank you, S.L.

So to N.W., my swapee (is that really a word?), the thought process was that everything relates to bubbles. Enjoy the bubbly in a bubble bath while blowing bubbles. And if you just need to let out some steam with the way the economy is treating you, stomp on those bubble wrappers.

Bring on the next swap, Becca. Wifey is going to roll up her sleeves, put on her thinking cap, and scour the pages of Etsy. Watch out world!

Toilet Roll Christmas

My aunt visited the Holy Land and brought my mother back a beautiful olive-wood creche. It had all the main characters as well as the supporting cast of sheep, cows, shepherds holding lambs, shepherds leaning on their staffs, and others I don't remember. Heaven only knows what happened to that creche.

Over the past month, I've been longingly looking online at olive-wood creches. Lusting after them in my heart. But then I look up at the mantle and see our current creche.

It's an old shoebox turned on it's long side with the short sides cut so that it resembles a stable. The empty manger is a matchbox with X's glued to its sides to make it stand on the raffia "hay". Baby Jesus, who's stowed behind the "stable" until Christmas Eve, is a wine-bottle cork wrapped in a scrap of white cloth. Mary and Joseph are on the bookcase on the west side of the room, while the Three Wise Men are on the piano on the east side of the room. All five, plus the shepherd on another bookcase and the angel at the stable, are made from toilet paper rolls with different squares of cloths glued to the top as their scarves and their faces painted with water colors to differing degrees of human likeness by my then-preschool-aged children.

How do you trade in such a masterpiece as a handmade toilet-paper-roll-and-shoebox creche for a hand-carved olive-wood straight-from-the-Holy-Land creche? Two simple words.

You don't.