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Stay at Home Saturday | 100DayProject Day 49 | Card 31 | Card 32 (started)

100DayProject Day 49

Card 31 (Pop Art)

I started and finished my card for lesson 5 of the Altenew For the Guys course in which we were to make a Pop Art inspired card. I searched for some images and used one as inspiration for the card. I used Gina K masking strips to create the grid then ink blended the red grid.

Card 32 (Glitter) (started)

The first lesson of the Altenew Let It Shine course is entitled, Glitter. The lesson demonstrated making your own glitter cardstock. It was the first time I tried to do that. And will likely be the last. I actually had to have two attempts because I decided to try to burnish the glitter by running it through my diecutting machine rather than just using a bone folder/spatula. The adhesive of the 2-sided adhesive paper beneath the glitter ended up sticking to the printer paper I had put over the glittered cardstock before running it through. The next attempt I put a piece of acetate over the glitter before burnishing it in the die cutting machine then ran it through again with my hello die. Clearly I shouldn’t have put a piece of printer paper over it even after I had it burnished.

I am only partway through putting the card together. There were a few other techniques in the class including stamping the floral image on vellum and colouring the image on the wrong side with alcohol markers. All of my alcohol markers are at the cottage so I thought I’d try to colour ink by mixing some ink with some Simple Solution Acrylic Medium. I’m not sure if that’s going to work. I’m letting it dry overnight.

Stay at Home Saturday

We stayed home last night and today since Heidi is having some friends up to the cottage. We definitely had a slow start to the day and eventually got out to walk Luna then we went to the Cottage Show at the EY Centre. We bought a few new decor items for the cottage which are still in the car so I’ll photograph them tomorrow. We also bought some date humus as well as some soup mixes. It’s always fun to try out some of the interesting food and to support local small businesses at events like that. We were a month too late to buy end of season cross country skis at Fresh Air Experience. We’ll head back there in early December. We also went to Bushtukha to look for some hiking boots for Roland and some light hikers for me. But it was quite busy there so we’ll go back another time. Roland has had a very frustrating time trying to put in a replacement part into the leaking washing machine. He went to Princess Auto to buy a wrench but still had no luck getting it apart. So he went to Metro and got some nice steaks on sale for his dinner to bolster his mood. I did some cardmaking while Roland watched some curling.

Picture This Year

I’m going to try to start following along with Tracey Clark’s Picture This Year 2025 prompts now that I have discovered them.

Picture This Year prompt 101 (bag). This was Friday’s prompt and I took the photo on Friday. I love this bag that Heidi gave me for Christmas. The other side is the outline of the lake that our cottage (which we bought in 2001), is on. Heidi did a great job with our cottage logo, which like the lake image is also on the matching sweatshirts that she gave us all for Christmas.
Picture This Year prompt 100 (stack) | This was actually Thursday’s prompt. I had the idea on Friday and took the photo today. I had Heiid’s Bananagrams game out because I had borrowed it to play at our girls getaway near Montebello. Even though you don’t actually play with the letters stacked I thought the game would be a helpful prompt for this photo prompt.
Picture This Year Prompt 103 (out). This is actually the prompt for tomorrow and the photo was taken today. While I was taking the photo for Prompt 100 (stack) I realized that the Bananagrams game would be helpful for this prompt as well. In fact, I like it better than my stack idea.
Picture This Year prompt 97 (vibrant). This was Monday’s prompt and I took the photo Monday night just as I was heading to bed. That was the evening that I had discovered the challenge. These bright pink (can we say vibrant?) laces were calling out to me to be photographed when I caught a glimpse of them out of the corner of my eye as I was reading through the April prompts which I had printed out to review in bed. I’m not sure whether I’ll go back and do some of the past prompts, but I do hope to continue doing many of the daily prompts for at least April and May.
Picture This Year prompt 98 (bird). This was Tuesday’s prompt and I took the photo on Tuesday. The birds in the conservation area were quite elusive on my walks so I decided to use this photo of the bird card that I’m making to cover off this prompt.
Picture This Year prompt 99 (line). This was Wednesday’s prompt this photo was taken on Wednesday. Everyone was very good about lining up on the woods while I got my phone camera set up in the ‘Y’ of a branch with a timer setting. It was such a fun afternoon with all these friends in the woods near Montebello between Ottawa and Montreal where we met to celebrate a recent 65th birthday as well as a recent retirement.

Fun and Games Friday | 100DayProject Day41

Fun and Games Friday

I did a short walk with Luna checking out how the neighbourhood spring perennials were progressing. A few new tips were popping up. I really need to get back on track with getting to bed early. Enough of staying up late to work on blog posts. I was quite tired when my alarm went off at seven so I didn’t leap out of bed and I managed to (very easily) talk myself out of heading to the pool for a swim. I even briefly crawled back into bed after getting dressed with a vague notion of getting some more sleep. I expect I will end up having a nap on our way to Heidi’s team’s 10:30 ringette game.

Rather than starting to make a card, I decided that I need to focus some of my 100DayProject efforts on getting my craft room disaster back into order. I have a reasonably good system for organizing my supplies, I just have a very poor record with putting things back where they should go and establishing a ‘home’ for my new things. So, I spend way too much time when I am working on a project trying to find things, moving stashes around to find a good spot to work, etc. So I set my timer for 5 minutes to put some things away. Then I started to work on cataloguing and filing a few new products for 5 more minutes. It took me a few minutes to figure out what the weird light pattering sound was. It turns out that water was dripping from my overhead light fixture in my craft room onto my very crowded work surface. I am really glad I was down there working at my table when the water started to come in. I was able to grab a plastic painting drop cloth to cover it up and we added a few plastic containers to catch the drips. It seems to be coming from the washing machine which is above it since the water is soapy. And, so Roland is trying to figure out what’s wrong with the washing machine during the spin cycles. We’ll wait for it to finish before pulling off the light fixture. Fun and Games! So much for my new found resolve to get and keep things in better order in my craft room.

In addition to watching Heidi’s ringette game we’ll also be playing a game of curling. I wrote a few cards before heading out to her game. It was a very good and exciting game with her team tying the score with 6 seconds left but unfortunately losing after 2 -1/2 minutes into the first overtime period. Heidi spent the afternoon and evening with her teammates, having lunch then watching the two semi-final games together. Roland and I dashed from her game to a brief practice ice session we had at our curling club since we hadn’t been on the ice at all yet this week. I baked some oatmeal chocolate chip cookies then it was time to pick up Karen and Peter to head to the Navy curling club. We won our first game and really enjoyed our après game drinks, snacks and conversation with our opponents. Then we went to Pub Italia in Little Italy for dinner.

100DayProject Day 41

I didn’t do any cardmaking today but I did watch the next few lessons in my Altenew For the Guys course. I look forward to getting on with making an Interactive card for Lesson 4, a Pop Art style card for Lesson 5 and a Gaming card for Lesson 6. I did do some google image searching for a few inspirational pop art images to help me with the design of my card for Lesson 5.

https://creativetreats.club/2025/04/04/oatmeal-chocolate-chip-cookies/

I did take off the plastic that’s covering the worksurface in my craft room just now before heading to bed so that if I have a bit of time between our 2 curling games tomorrow I will have a spot to work on those cards. I think that the reason my overhead light stopped working a few days ago is likely because water had been gradually accumulating in the light fixture for a while until it overflowed today. There were some wet spots on the table which has a wood surface so it is a good thing I took the plastic sheet off the check things out tonight rather than later in the day tomorrow.

Try It Tuesday

As I walked with our dog, Luna, in the forest this morning, I pondered the theme I wanted to carry through the day. I came up with Try it Tuesday. As I would have mentioned yesterday (had I written it down), with the Celebration of Life for my mom behind me, I should have more time to try to establish some of my long-neglected but very helpful habits. I should have more time to try to establish some new habits. I should have some time to try out some new things.

I recently had 3 friends over to help me make the gardenia notecards that everyone signed at mom’s Celebration of Life to put on the wreath (I do need to come up with a suitable way to reference that wreath, but that’ll be a task and a story for another day). Two of those friends had just retired and the third, ‘F’, was in semi-retirement, currently not working but looking for a job. She’s often bored which I found very interesting since, like me, she seems to have an overabundance of activities that she likes to do. So, as we passed the crafternoon together around the table finishing the beautiful gardenia cards, I kept nagging F for her input in the list that I was creating for her which I entitled, ‘Boredom Busters’ with a subtitle of ‘thing that I’m going to help F try out.’ I categorized her input into 3 columns: for sure, maybe, unlikely. These were columns for whether I’ll be willing (or able) to help her out. I know that F is willing and able and will bust through all the things on her ‘Boredom Busters’ list. Some are big things. Some are little things. Some things we can try right away, others will definitely have to sit on the back burner to accumlate the money, the fitness level and the courage to try.

I am so excited to be helping her out. Because, in reality, it is actually F that will be helping me out. It’s not surprising that I sometimes manouvered the converation to make sure that some of the things that I want to try were on her list.

So today is a Try it Tuesday. As of 4:00 (as I started writing this) I haven’t tried many new things out. But I am committed to keep trying.

Some of my trusty ‘on hold’ habits that I’m determined to try to get back onto ‘current habits’ list include: meditation, lots movement, learning Spanish, veggies with every meal, at least 100g protein daily, strength training.

Some of the new-to-me things that I want to try include learning some hip hop, learning to sing Happy Birthday and O Canada properly. I don’t think it’s on F’s list (yet?) but I’d like to try Tai Chi.

Some of the things that have long been on my personal wish list to try include: cycling Ptit Train du Nord trail, complete an Olympic-distance triathlon (1.5 km swim, 40 km bike and 10 km run).

Some of F’s Boredom Busters that are ‘maybes’ for me to try to help her with include climbing Kilimanjaro, cross-country skiing on Baffin Island, visiting Anapurna; and doing the Lake Louise Loppet. Of course if/when she tackles the ‘start a business’ item, that will move to my ‘for sure’ I’ll try help her list.

The one item on her list that’s under the ‘unlikely’ column for me is to try is to take a mountaineering course to learn how to traverse areas with crevasses using crampons, ice-axes and, hopefully, ropes. I have the good luck to still be here after a few days in my early twenties when I, very unwisely, explored a glacier near Chamonix without taking a mountaineering course. I did have crampons and an ice-axe. But no rope. I still marvel that the accident that was waiting to happen didn’t.

On my early morning walks (which I’m now 2 days back into reestablishing as a habit) I walk about 1 km in the forest to the bridge over a stream with a small waterfall. It is a nice spot to stop briefly to appreciate all the nature that is so nearby. I’m trying to make sure I don’t just take it for granted. On the way there I try to walk in silence and let my mind wander. On the way back home I try to listen to a short podcast, usually Radio Headspace. Today is the 2nd of a 10 episode series featuring Mel Robbins as the host. Today’s episode was entitled ‘Recognizing your Passion‘. I always love it when the podcast episode that I listen to lines up so well with the word/theme that I’ve picked for the day. She encouraged her listeners to think back to a time when we felt great and to try to list out what our lives looked like at that time.

Which brings me back to personal ‘things to re-try‘ list:

Writing 750 words each day this is a great website for that,

Regularly creating blog posts. I so love looking back on the pre-Instagram (2009 through 2014) regular blog posts that I created in which I posted a photo a day along with a few words about it. Maybe I’ll repost a few on as ‘Throwback Thursday’ posts on this blog.

Swimming at least once a week. I don’t love getting into the pool but I sure love how I feel when I get out.

Creating cards just for the fun of it. And to regularly send them to my friends.

I’m committing to trying at least some (but not, all) of these things. How about you? What are you committed to trying?

And by the way, the improved working (and maybe final) title for my mom’s wreath is “Alice’s Circle of Love”.

And, as of 4:30 I’ve written 750 words today.

And, I am about to publish a blog post. It will take me a wee bit longer since I have to add a photo and a few links.

And, yesterday I coordinated a regular swimming date (Thursday mornings at 8:00) with F and, hopefully, have roped in a few other friends.

Friends make life (and tackling our “to try’s”) so much easier. So go out and help your friends do hard things.