Living in Long Beach

So, the cat’s out of the bag. For those of you who didn’t already know, I am moving. To where? Well, that is TBD!! But I am moving out of my condo in January. Our book for the month was picked by Lora, The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid. The thing that we all seemed to like best about it was that it was a quick read! But overall, I did like this book and would recommend it, especially if you are in a book club as it gave us a lot to talk about. But then again, we are all talkers. Since it was to be my last book club and some of my neighbors did not know about my move, I decided to make them a little “Celine” gift. If you remember this post here , I had created a design for us to label my door and all my “French” food. I decided to revisit that design and make a Stoneybrook Book Club book mark! First I cut the design in half, then printed them on business cards. (This took two tries due to borders.) Then I glued the cards together…punched a hole in them…and tied a piece ...

My Mother has posted some nice fall pictures on her blog and my cousin, Ken, posted some gorgeous fall photos on Facebook. Click on pictures to bigify! Inspired, I walked around my condo and took these photos. This is as “fall” as it gets here in Long Beach. Some evenings I have to wear pants instead of shorts and use a blanket on the bed but then during the afternoons, shorts are still a must. But I do feel like it is slowly getting  cooler. Speaking of fall or autumn, I found a guest towel on sale at Michael’s and was inspired to whip up a cute fall towel. I have loads of thread that I have bought at Estate sales. The problem with these is that many colors don’t have any identification on them or are from defunct companies. Therefore, they can’t really be used with specific patterns. There are several French blogs that I follow for their nice, free cross stitch designs. My favorite is Gazette 94 ; I decided to use one of her designs. It has everyth...

This is a tile hinging in my spare room that my parents gave me for my birthday a few years ago.   Día de los Muertos is a Mexican holiday that takes place on November 1st and 2nd to coincide with All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day. I don’t remember seeing much about this holiday when I lived in Georgia but here in Southern CA, it seems to be celebrated for a few weeks.  Today is technically Dia de los Muertos or Day of the Dead and yesterday, November 1st is Día de los Inocentes or Day of the Innocents (children). I went to MOLAA on their free Target day to see their Día de los Muertos celebration.  Of course, there were lots of booths to buy things. Then they were several altars, one (not pictured) which was for someone’s cat. Unfortunately, I had so much fun that I pretty much forgot to take pictures.  This was an interesting one about Charles Bukowski. He must of really liked his alcohol and cigarettes as they were featured throughout his altar. Th...

We have a Social Committee for the condos where I live. This month they put on a Day of the Dead/Pumpkin Carving Party. These parties are always a LOT of fun because even though there are more than 500 units, it seems that mostly my neighbors show up. So it's like a block party or something. There are always plenty of drinks for the adults! Some of the spooky food included cemetary brownies that my friend Maria made, popcorn in baggies that looked like skeletal hands and mice eating cheese. Of course, I used my candy corn tray again and there was a cool punch with finders and hands in it. Crafts for the kids (and adults!) included skeleton making with wine corks, pumpkin carving and paper flowers. Although I helped with other pumpkins, here is my Owl Jack O'Lantern. It was quite tedious but a margarita helped me power on! I also made two paper flowers. (You can click on any of the pictures to bigify.)

As I was doing laundry today, I thought I'd share this cute little apron that I made a while ago. My friend Arlene got me two cute dish towels for Christmas last year. I took some organza ribbon that I had on hand, pulled out my Hello Kitty sewing machine , and tada!! A cute little apron that I use all the time!! (click on picture above to "bigify") Wanna closer look at the cute Hello Kitty spoons? They are from a past Yogurtland promotion.

My good friend Arlene started a blog Lemon & Wildwood and has inspired me to start blogging again. So over the next few weeks, I'll try to catch up on a few of the crazy "projects" that I've been doing while I am also looking for work. In case you hadn't already heard, I am currently into all things late 60's and early to mid 70's. I saw this cute idea to make a pom pom wreath over here . However, I decided I was going to make it as cheaply as possible. I bought a straw wreath from the dollar store and vowed not to spend more than a dollar for each yarn. Ugh...I went so many places and it was much harder than I thought it would be to find dollar yarn. So I didn't really get the colors that I wanted and some of the yarn was not the greatest quality. Plus, the yarns were different textures resulting in different looking pom poms. I made over 70 pom poms. Since I thought I would only be making 40 or so, I used my little st...