the goodness

the goodness is something that time and again just takes my breath away with this wonderful blog world. thank you all so much for the well wishes, it makes me just as happy to share our news with you as it does with my friends and family here. and its not just sharing the good news, but sharing when we are feeling down, unsure, in need of advice, that make these friendships even more appealing. thank you stephanie and kelly for being honest about not just the joys of parenthood, but the tribulations as well. thank you amanda for sharing your worry and concern for calvin's health and your arrival at peace. it is all of these threads that mean so much in the story we all weave together.
man, is this baby making me mushy or what? its a good thing i have my yellow shoes on today, they never fail to perk my spirits.

yesterday was a crazy day for two reasons. the first being getting eliot off to school! he loved it! he somehow managed to find the firemans hat and get it on his head before i had even left the room. boys. anyway, since i feel like i dont post nearly as many pictures of the little man as i do collette, here are two for your viewing pleasure.



oh man, what a sweetie. so i got him off to school, then came home and spent the morning with collette. and wished david a safe journey on his trip to LA!!! so there are not very many details to share yet, but for those of you who dont know, my husband is a writer, and has been working on a few screenplays for a year or so. he and his business partner left yesterday to meet with some producers. hopefully all is going well, and there will more news to share in the future. good luck david!

oven?

a little game for you my blog friends. wondering why huffmania is in such an uproar? most of it has to do with what is in my tummy. any guesses?

picture pages, picture pages

anyone else grow up watching fat albert, wishing that their parents could afford to buy the follow along book? i still loved the show, even without the book. anyway, as promised i charged up my batteries yesterday and took some pictures. the august theme for the snailmail swap was crafting fun, and sweet jes delivered! look at all these great goodies!

a grab bag full of beautiful paper scraps for cards, two awesome vintage vogue patterns, beautiful vintage fabric, an amazing book full of craft projects to share among friends, some cute picture tiles, and a beautiful decoupaged (?) bottle that i suspect she did herself. there was also some maine goodies, but i have already tucked those away in my kitchen!

i was also very pleasantly surprised to receive a package from myra. a while ago she put out a thrifting challenge with a prize for the winner, and i won! i never win anything, but really myra just goes crazy overboard! im serious, look at this amazing bag she sent me! it is the cutest thing.

not to mention the stickers, vintage lace trims, and cute flips. but seriously, her stitchwork is just amazing, i tried to take a close up picture but it was blurry. the absolute best part about this bag?? its mini! just the perfect size for collette, and she loves it too!

as a matter of fact, i couldnt get her to sit still. she was too busy putting things in it on the go. i posted my other attemps on flickr. thank you so much myra, it is just perfect! eliot was on the go today as well. today was his first day of pre-school! it was just a hour long get to know your teacher and check out your room type of day, but he is definitely ready to go back tuesday. i took the prerequisite first day of school picture.

dont worry, i will get the official picture on tuesday, backpack, lunchbox and all! hee hee, they are so cute. speaking of cute, i posted the pictures from mike and julies shower on sunday on my flickr account. jeff, i think you especially need to check them out, there are some excellent thumbs up pictures to be found (use the link over there on the left). you will be pleased. more pictures and news to follow tomorrow. stay tuned. huffmania in da house....

Let there be light

dearest friends, sorry i have been away for so long. i was unexpectedly called back to the field for a week, and have had quite the time catching back up. i owe both sweetpea jes and myra big thank yous for the packages i found waiting for me at home. pictures to come once my dang batteries charge up. our household is in an uproar right now, for many good reasons, which i will be sharing more on in the near future, i promise amanda! also, so many of my good friends have started blogging, and moving away i might add, but thanks to the wonders of the internet and the blog world we are all still one big happy family. i can now proudly add my closest friend kerry to my links list. as well as sarah and jeff (a very interesting joint blog). other much needed updates to my links list include mike and julie, jmac and chris. so glad to see so many friends with blogs, and so amazed by all the wonderful friends i have made through blogs! love it.

ps. happy birthday dad!

idiosyncrasies and old photos

the captain, i mean kelly, tagged me for the idiosyncrasies meme. here are my five:
1. i always blow on a fork or spoonful of food to cool it off, even if its cold. i catch myself doing this with ice cream the most. i think its the steam.
2. i catch myself unbelting, unbuckling, unbuttoning my whatever as i am heading to the bathroom, i even do it a work every now and then without thinking.
3. i love getting into a freshly made bed with clean sheets. i try to pull down the sheet as little as possible and slip in. so when david comes in and rips the sheets all the way down to the bottom of the bed, i get pretty angry.
4. i have an extra helping of elbow. by that i mean they are really long. im always bumping them into doorways or hitting david with them. they are so bad that i cant really wear anything long-sleeved twice because i bag out the elbows! but they are pretty handy for turning on the lights when my hands are full, or opening the fridge.
5. i pretty much cant stand hair. mine doesnt bother me so much, as long as it is still attached to my head. but stray hairs on anything totally gross me out and sometimes make me gag a little. i especially dont like playing with anyone elses hair. the only exception to this being my kids, and because it is still new and usually clean, im not so sure once they get to be big kids. hair! gross... this carries over to animal fur and ever so slightly to feathers. gross.

so there they are, my idiosyncrasies. i guess by definition they make me, me! i am going to tag the few men i know who are out there blogging, those being; david, chris, mike, and john. also because i know they secretly check out craft blogs from time to time. and my friend kristen, because i am so interested in what she has to say.

on to the old photos. went to my parents house last night for dinner. afterwards we were talking and my mom mentioned that her uncle sent her two cds full of pictures of our family in colombia. my mom is from bogota (forgive the lack of an accent mark mom, i dont know how to put it there), colombia. all of her family (and it is big believe me, waaaay extended) is still there except for one brother and one sister who live close by in kc. i borrowed them so i could burn copies for myself. looking through them today made me very nostalgic. i really hope to take my own family to visit one day. for now it is too expensive and not the best place to be. i miss my other aunt and all my cousins. i have so many fond memories from summers spent there. i have been four times, the last time was in 92. we used to spend three months at my grandparents house, leave as soon as school got out for the summer and come back a few weeks before classes started again. when i was four my mom and my brother, he was just one at the time, went for six or seven months. from one fall to the next summer. i distinctly remember lighting sparklers outside on christmas night. my dad and american grandmother came to stay with us the last month or so before we came back home. the story goes that when my dad arrived to the house from the airport he came over to me and began speaking english. i gave him a funny look and asked my mom what he was saying because i had forgotten english! fast forward twelve years to my first kiss which was from a street kid, my mom got a kick out of that one. anyway, all of this rambling to say that there were a few old black and white photos of my great grandmother, my grandparents and my mom and aunts and uncles. so great. i love looking at these old photographs.

this is my favorite. this is a picture of my grandfather enrique with my great grandmother ester. i think he is around 12 years old. i was fortunate to spend quite a bit of time with my great grandmother, and could that lady sew! she used to make all of my mothers clothes. my mom said that she and her sisters would go to the store with her, look at all the clothes they wanted, and then my great grandmother would come home and make them. just like that. so amazing. i also was fortunate enough to get a box of knitted baby clothes that she had made for her children and passed along down the line to me!

i love this one too. from left to right is: my moms cousin claudia, my mom, my grandmother, my uncle daniel, my aunt marta, and some girl i dont know. look at that grin on my moms face. from what im told, she was pretty ornery. i think i inherited quite a bit of that. and daniels slicked back hair, so cool.

i cant hardly get over how awesome this picture is. this is my papa enrique (thats what we call him) and his cousin, my moms godmother teresita. i love this picture, cant you just hear the music playing in the background? so dapper. really how many men today are flat out dapper? not too many.

this might be hard to believe but this is a picture from my parents wedding. they got married in bogota. lets see if i can pick out some of these people. well the guy in the bell-bottomed suit on the left is my dad, he is talking to my great grandmother. my mom is the one with flowers in her hair. you cant tell from this picture but her wedding outfit was a one piece, bell-bottomed white jump suit. it has little pearl buttons that go all the way down the front. so cool. the little girl to the left is my moms youngest sister, my aunt adriana, and thats my uncle daniel again in another rockin bell-bottomed suit. tons of other extended family in this picture. i love these old pictures so much! i am going to try to get my hands on as many of them as i can! and i promise david to start speaking spanish again. i know i say this all the time, but we are doing it this time!

i heart gocco

my friend kerry came over saturday and helped me print 45+ baby shower invitations for our friends mike and julie. i think kerry is hooked. you can picture me rubbing my hands devilishly if you would like. anyway i think they turned out great. here is a picture. im not too happy with it, i scanned the actual invitation at work, but i think it made it look fuzzy. anyway, i uploaded a few more shots on my flickr account and the gocco pool started by the lovely katey. now that i am back into the swing of things over at flickr i am going to try to take some pics of my meager vintage fabric collection. hopefully i will get those up soon. after looking at all the pictures posted in the gocco pool, i feel a little frustrated. i feel like my images are so flat, and im not really sure how to get some more dimension. i know overlapping and multiple screen prints is a good way, but i seem to be stumped. please if you have any pictures of work you have done with the gocco and you havent posted them to the pool, do it now!

thinking, thinking

even though i havent been doing much crafting lately, i sure have been thinking about it quite a bit. my friend john is opening up a cool shoe store downtown in the art district. take a look at his cool space. i am so excited for he and kristen, it is going to be such a great endeavor for them, plus who doesnt need another place to shop for shoes??? i am even more excited because john, being an avid reader of my blog (yeah right) asked me if i might be interested in trying to sell some bags in his store at some point. what did i say? heck yah! so for the last few weeks i have been combing the internet, looking at what kinds of DIY things that are out there, and selling. trying to get a feel for pricing and things like that. there is so much great inspiration out there, amys shop, giaos shop, leslies shop, one good bumblebee, the small object, i could go on and on. i think the key is that they all look so well put together and have wonderful packaging, which helps any product sell better. so all you crafters that sell their goods, please email me with any advice or tips. such as, where do you order your labels for the inside of your sewn goods? how about tags? plastic packaging? while i pull my hair out trying to think of a name and a look for my creations. the only positive step i have made in this whole endeavor is to place an order for some fabric from reprodepot. here is a peek. at some point i hope to transform these into something wonderful that people will like and want to buy.

ps. my husband has started blogging again, and with a vengence. he is working on his list of 100 must-see movies. take a look.

target

not much crafting being done at my house lately, i have been in some kind of stupor. i did however manage to find some tiny elastics at target (seriously they look like the rubber bands i used to have to put on my braces). i like they way they turned out, you?