Old books, new life

I just sent this batch of altered books off to Earth Angel's. I buy so many books to get the poems out of them and then have all these books with half the pages gone ,so this is a great way to use the rest of the book up. I hate to waste anything!

Fun-filled Friday

The stars aligned and fate stepped in and gave me a Friday free of babysitting. So my son, hubby and I went to the Columbus Zoo. My son wants to be a zookeeper, so we try to visit as many different zoos as we can. I love to photograph animals so it was a fun time for the both of us!

Here are some of my favorite photos..........

Otters are my absolute favorites, I ended up taking over 30 photos just of them, the guys had to pull me by the arm to get me away from them!

Afterwards we went to one of my favorite restaurants, Logan's Roadhouse. It was the perfect ending to a perfect day!

Antiquing finds

While on vacation in KY, i found a brochure for an antique district near where we were staying. It advertised 6 antique malls with hundreds of dealers between them. I was so exited and ready to find lots of goodies to create with. So forty minutes later I arrived in the quaint little downtown square. There were 3 shops on the right hand side and 3 on the left. I started on the left and all 3 shops were closed for the day, on a Tuesday of all days! So I headed across the street and the first shop was closed for good. So that left me with only 2 open shops to spend my afternoon. Luckily I managed to find a few things to perk up my disappointing afternoon.



I found this sweet little stained linen dress.......


An assortment of rusty, grungy tins....just like I like them!

A couple of books, photos, a wood box, cigar box, wooden ruler and an empty glass paperweight.....

And then finally the piece that made it all worthwhile, this sweet, flower covered hat!! So much for my plans to hit the antique mother-lode, but I was content to find these few great pieces and already have ideas of what I can create with them.

We also stopped at the Louisville Zoo on the way home, where I took a ton of pics. I just love photographing animals. I thought I would share my very fav of this sweet little meerkat.

I just know this is a meerkat mama that was up all night with her little babies and then spent the morning chasing after her older children and finally found one minute in the day where she could sit for a minute and catch her breath!! (or it was a male meerkat that found a good spot to observe his female partner do all the things I just described.....LOL.....)

Back to reality

The worst part of a vacation is the ride home when you realize it is time to get back to the hustle and bustle of real life! We had a wonderful time during our stay in Bee Spring, KY. The guys fished every morning and night and I got to catch up on some reading since we had no phone or computer access. Here is the view of the backyard of our cabin on Nolin Lake. The dock was right below the trees. The lake was such a pretty blue and I just loved sitting on the dock and listening to the waves hit the shoreline. Our main quest on this trip was to see all the caves in the Mammoth Cave area. This is the fun way to enter a cave, if you don't mind a tight squeeze!

This is the easy way into a cave, not near as much fun

especially when you have to climb all those steps to get back out, I took the pic standing at the half-way point of the stairway, so there alot of steps!

My favorite was the Lost River Cave where you get to take a boat ride on the river in the cave. To enter you have to bend over at the waist, in the boat, because the rock ceiling is so low. A great way to get to know the person sitting across from you...lol..I wish I could share those photos but it was so dark in there not many came out well. Here are some shots in different caves that I thought were pretty.

Here is my favorite pic of my son, Wyatt, at Dinosaur World,

and my favorite pic of my hubby, love the contrast of the blue against his shadow.

We hope to go back one day and do some more caving but I think our next adventure will be visiting the caves in Indiana! I will share pics of my antiquing finds in a couple of day.

Off on an adventure

This weekend my family and I are heading to Kentucky for a week, to do some caving and exploring. We will be heading to Mammoth Cave National Park and renting a cabin on Nolin Lake for some rest and relaxation ( that means fishing for the boys and antiquing for me!) I will tell all about it when I get back, unless I can't find my way out of one of the caves....LOL...

(This was one of the caves on last year's adventure in Tennessee)

New creations

I have not been very productive due to another bad case of the stomache flu that had me down for the count for a few days. Thank goodness it finally passed and I was able to get back to creating....yeah! I brought out the pink again, I know twice in one year that I used pink....lol..., but I thought it was the perfect compliment to the pretty blue wood plinth.

I wanted to create a piece using some of the wonderful vintage lace I recently acquired. I wish the detail of the bottom piece of lace showed up better, it is so pretty and delicate. This piece was created on the back of a vintage photo album cover.

I just fell in love with these photos of the little girl and little boy and was so excited to be able to use them.

To see more pics just click on my available work link on the left top of the page to view close-ups.