Flower bun with woven ribbon tutorial

To everyone coming over from Blogelina,  Grab a comfy chair and have a look around.  I would love it if you would sign up for my rss feed, … {Read More}

flower bun with ribbon weave

Easy Bun

  This is one of my favorite go to hair styles.  I do this easy bun to finish a bunch of hair styles.  And believe me it is easy to do!!  … {Read More}

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Afters with no Befores

Do you ever get so excited to start a project that you jump in and forget to take pictures?  I do that all the time.  I know bad!!  So I have some … {Read More}

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Most popular posts of 2011

Last year, before I started my blog I was an avid blog reader.  Still am.  One of my favorite posts was where bloggers listed their most popular … {Read More}

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How to get large prints for CHEAP!!

I have seen this around the blogosphere quite a bit so you might have already seen this tip.  But in case you haven't, it is too good not to … {Read More}

large cheap prints

Cheesecake

I LOVE me some cheesecake!!  Yummy, Yummy, Yummy!!  So over the years I have tried A LOT of recipes for cheesecake and here it is, the very best one … {Read More}

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Thrifted Desk Redo

As promised here is the tutorial for my red desk.  I love how it came out.  Here is what I started with: I got this desk at the thrift store for … {Read More}

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Yummy Corn chowder

  I made this recipe the other day and it was super yummy!!  I put it in the crock pot and just let it go.  I know soups aren’t always … {Read More}

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How to color the tips of your hair

My girls recently had crazy hair day at school.  We decided we wanted to try out a temporary color on their hair.  By temporary I mean it washed out … {Read More}

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It’s a crafty Christmas…lifesaver necklaces

We are making these cute little necklaces for my nieces and the girls friends.  It seems every time someone comes over to play and they see them … {Read More}

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My spring Mantle and pinwheel tutorial

I have a pretty dark mantle.  And that's ok because it is full of things I love.  But it wasn't very cheery.  It's perfect for fall but I wanted to … {Read More}

pinwheel spring mantle

Free Printable…Valentines

It seems like forever since I have done a free printable. {really it's only been since before Christmas but that seems like forever ago} And since … {Read More}

valentines day printable

Not your ordinary dye job

I know what you are thinking but you would be wrong.  No I’m not talking about hair but these: So now that we have that settled lets see if we … {Read More}

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It’s a crafty Christmas…

Every year, we have 32 people to buy presents for NOT including us and our children.  That’s A LOT!!  We end up with 8 family parties scattered … {Read More}

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Book Club

I’m super excited to announce our book club selection for Nov. and Dec.

The Hunger Games

by Suzanne Collins

I chose this book specifically for this holiday season.  I am hoping it will help remind us of all the blessings we have in our lives.  We live with incredible freedoms and opportunities in this day and age.  This book helps us to remember and be great full for them.

So what is The Hunger games about anyway?

Katniss is a 16-year-old girl living with her mother and younger sister in the poorest district of Panem, the remains of what used be the United States. Long ago the districts waged war on the Capitol and were defeated. As part of the surrender terms, each district agreed to send one boy and one girl to appear in an annual televised event called, “The Hunger Games.” The terrain, rules, and level of audience participation may change but one thing is constant: kill or be killed. When Kat’s sister is chosen by lottery, Kat steps up to go in her place.

With this stormy cold weather, it’s a perfect time to curl up with a good book.  And this one is great!!

I’m also SUPER DUPER excited to introduce our sponsor for this book club session:

I was incredibly impressed with this shop.  I love anything that instills values in my children and gives them a sense of who they are.  Plus I am all about frugality and her prices are AMAZING!!  Interested?  Click on the banner image above to go to her shop and look for the sponsor introduction post {next week} to learn more about Fairy’s and Flutterbys.    You will definitely want to read the Hunger Games so you can enter the giveaway from this AWESOME shop!!

Happy Reading!!


September and October Book Club Selection

Here is  our selection for Book Club for the months of September and October.  Hopefully with kids back in school and colder temperatures we will be able to cuddle up and get our read on!!

So I honestly don’t go out to the movies that often and I didn’t know that our last selection {The Help} was being made into a movie.  And it came out while we were reading.  So in looking up this book apparently it is also coming out as a movie.  But reading the book is almost always better than the movie anyway. 
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Sarah’s Key
by
Tatiana DeRosnay
You know I don’t like to give away a lot about books before we start reading them, but I feel I must say a few things about this book.  It is a haunting yet beautiful tale.  It deals with a period of time during WWII when Jews were rounded up in France.  It goes into some bad conditions they endured including concentration camps.  This is a story that will stay with you.  However I think it is well worth the read.  If you would like to know more, please read the synopsis.  And if you have any questions about his book, please feel free to contact me.
Synopsis
Rosnay’s U.S. debut fictionalizes the 1942 Paris roundups and deportations, in which thousands of Jewish families were arrested, held at the Vélodrome d’Hiver outside the city, then transported to Auschwitz. Forty-five-year-old Julia Jarmond, American by birth, moved to Paris when she was 20 and is married to the arrogant, unfaithful Bertrand Tézac, with whom she has an 11-year-old daughter. Julia writes for an American magazine and her editor assigns her to cover the 60th anniversary of the Vél’ d’Hiv’ roundups. Julia soon learns that the apartment she and Bertrand plan to move into was acquired by Bertrand’s family when its Jewish occupants were dispossessed and deported 60 years before. She resolves to find out what happened to the former occupants: Wladyslaw and Rywka Starzynski, parents of 10-year-old Sarah and four-year-old Michel. The more Julia discovers—especially about Sarah, the only member of the Starzynski family to survive—the more she uncovers about Bertrand’s family, about France and, finally, herself.
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July/August Book Club Selection

Wait, July/August what?  No I am not loosing my marbles.  I am making a change.  There have been a lot of changes around here recently.  But hopefully this works better.  I’ve had a lot of feedback that it is hard to find time to read even though you love it.  Or that you have tried to read the book but things got busy and the month got away from you and by the meeting you only got half way through.  Believe me I get being busy.  So I decided to make book club a 2 month process instead of just monthly.  I hope that will help a little. 


So the Selection for July and August is:
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The Help
by Kathryn Stockett
And here’s a synopsis for you:
Be prepared to meet three unforgettable women:

Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.
Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.
Minny, Aibileen’s best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody’s business, but she can’t mind her tongue, so she’s lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.
Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.
 

Hopefully giving 2 months will help with our busy lives and still let us indulge in some great novels.  I will post here and there about the book so we don’t forget. Happy reading!!

June’s Book Club Selection

Summer is here and I LOVE it!!  There is something so great about long lazy day.  Kids running around in the backyard, freshly mowed grass, I love it all.  So In honor of summer, I picked a great easy read:

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Princess Academy
by Shannon Hale
Princess Academy is a Newbery Honor Book.  Here is the synopsis {so if you don’t wanna know skip the next paragraph}
High on the side of rocky Mount Eskel, far from the valleys where gardens are green and lush, where lowlanders make laws, Miri’s family has lived forever, pounding a living from the stone of the mountain itself. For as long as she can remember, Miri has dreamed of working alongside the other villagers in the quarries of her beloved mountainside. But Miri has never been allowed to work there, perhaps, she thinks, because she is so small.Then word comes from the valley that the king’s priests have divined Mount Eskel to be the home of the prince’s bride-to-be—the next princess. The prince himself will travel to the village to choose her, but first all eligible girls must attend a makeshift mountain academy to prepare themselves for royal lowlander life. At the school, Miri soon finds herself confronted by bitter competition among the girls and her own conflicting desires to be chosen by the prince. Yet when danger comes to the academy and threatens all their lives, it is Miri, named for a tiny mountain flower, who must find a way to save her classmates—and the one chance to leave the mountain each of them is determined to secure as her own.
Our Book Club Sponsor for June is:
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Since we had such a good response to recycled jewelry, I’m happy to introduce JMP Designs.  Go check out her shop and you can see the great stuff up for the Giveaway at the Book Club meeting. 
So there you have it, a nice easy read for summer.  I’m always looking for recommendations for Book Club selections.   Contact me to recommend a book.
 
I’m linking here.
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May’s Book Club Selection!!
Wow…you guys are amazing!! I had such GREAT comments on April’s Book club Meeting. You have opened my eyes to some insights that I never thought about. It’s such fun introducing good books to people that love to read!!
Congratulations to our giveaway winner. Who will win a copy of Mays Book!!
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And the Winner is #7
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Kiana who said:
I have not finished the book quite yet but I have to say I had no idea those times were like that in THIS country! My eyes were definitely opened! I am just past the part where Henry’s Dad falls sick. Just have been so busy! I hope to finish it either tonight or tomorrow! Can’t wait to hear what May’s selection is!
Do you think that both Henry and Keiko felt like they had no control over anything and that is why they just let each other go so easily?
Congratulations Kiana. I loved your comments. You can still comment on the book even though the giveaway is now closed. I’d love to hear what you thought.
Without further ado, Here is May’s Book Club Selection:
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Uglies
by Scott Westerfeld
And here’s the synopsis {so if you don’t want to know what the book is about skip the next paragraph}
Tally Youngblood lives in a futuristic society that makes its citizens believe that they are ugly until age 16 when they’ll undergo an operation that will change them into pleasure-seeking “pretties.” Anticipating this happy transformation, Tally meets Shay, another female ugly, who shares her enjoyment of hover boarding and risky pranks. But Shay also disdains the false values and programmed conformity of the society and urges Tally to defect with her to the Smoke, a distant settlement of simple-living conscientious objectors. Tally declines, yet when Shay is found missing by the authorities, Tally is coerced by the cruel Dr. Cable to find her and her compatriots–or remain forever “ugly.” Tally’s adventuresome spirit helps her locate Shay and the Smoke. It also attracts the eye of David, the aptly named youthful rebel leader to whose attentions Tally warms. However, she knows she is living a lie, for she is a spy who wears an eye-activated locator pendant that threatens to blow the rebels’ cover.
This book does start out a little slow {at least for me it did} But once you get past the first chapter you will absolutely LOVE it!! This book is one of my true favorites. It’s one I always go to first when I’m asked for recommendations. I’m sure you will enjoy reading it and I cannot wait to hear your thoughts at our meeting!!
Our fabulous sponsor for May is:
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Ginger Snaps does vinyl labels, décor and more. She has an amazing blog and an even more amazing Etsy shop. We will be seeing more of her throughout the month and of course she will be providing the giveaway for our meeting {so excited she has some GREAT stuff} Of course you guys know I wouldn’t offer up anything that I didn’t think was truly awesome , so go check her out. You won’t be disappointed.
And now it’s time to start reading. On your mark, get set, GO!!
I’m linking to these great blogs
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April’s Book Club Selection!!

I love to read.  So much so that it bears saying again.  I love, love, love to read!!  I’ve looked for a book club to join for a while now and I haven’t found anything so I thought what better than an online book club. 

I’ve been wanting to do this forever.  In fact it’s one of the major reasons I started my blog.  So here’s to our first inaugural meeting!!
Here’s the rules: {although I am so laid back that I hate to have rules at all}
I will announce the Book Club selection around the first of the month and give us until the end of the month to read it. 
We will hold discussions in the comments about the book.  I will provide some questions but feel free to go off script. 
If you have a suggestion for a book selection for us please email me by clicking here or using the contact me button up top.
This book club will be very informal.  I want it to be about the joy of reading and discovering literary treasures. 
So without further ado, our First Book Club Selection is:
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Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
by Jamie Ford
**warning plot synopsis coming.  If you are like me and don’t like to go into a book knowing anything about it then please skip the next 3 paragraphs**

In the opening pages of Jamie Ford’s stunning debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, Henry Lee comes upon a crowd gathered outside the Panama Hotel, once the gateway to Seattle’s Japantown. It has been boarded up for decades, but now the new owner has made an incredible discovery: the belongings of Japanese families, left when they were rounded up and sent to internment camps during World War II. As Henry looks on, the owner opens a Japanese parasol.
This simple act takes old Henry Lee back to the 1940s, at the height of the war, when young Henry’s world is a jumble of confusion and excitement, and to his father, who is obsessed with the war in China and having Henry grow up American. While “scholarshipping” at the exclusive Rainier Elementary, where the white kids ignore him, Henry meets Keiko Okabe, a young Japanese American student. Amid the chaos of blackouts, curfews, and FBI raids, Henry and Keiko forge a bond of friendship–and innocent love–that transcends the long-standing prejudices of their Old World ancestors. And after Keiko and her family are swept up in the evacuations to the internment camps, she and Henry are left only with the hope that the war will end, and that their promise to each other will be kept.
Forty years later, Henry Lee is certain that the parasol belonged to Keiko. In the hotel’s dark dusty basement he begins looking for signs of the Okabe family’s belongings and for a long-lost object whose value he cannot begin to measure. Now a widower, Henry is still trying to find his voice–words that might explain the actions of his nationalistic father; words that might bridge the gap between him and his modern, Chinese American son; words that might help him confront the choices he made many years ago.

I absolutely fell in love with this book.  And it remains one of my very favorites.  I am so very excited to have it as our first Book Club Selection.  Be sure to check back here for the Meeting at the end of April.  Happy Reading!!
Please click here to see all the awesome blogs I am linking to!!
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