Three Things I Worked On Today

1. Graduation announcements for two daughters.
This is a big year for Streicher graduations and I am motivated to get some announcements put together and dropped into the mail before they become yesterday's news. Over the weekend, I made good progress - the graduates-to-be and I finally settled on the designs for the fronts of the cards and got them made. We also decided on photos to send along and had them printed. The last big decision will be figuring a quick and easy way to get the important facts on the backs of the cards. Then it will be a simple matter to slip them into the already-addressed envelopes and send them off in the mail. I've given myself a deadline of Friday at 5 p.m.; wish me luck.

I drew these sweet little wreaths of leaves using this inspiration photo which is sourced to this blog.
Thanks, Emily Ley..sorry I can't find the exact post where you showed this!

P.S. The card is posing at a jaunty angle in this photo. Don't worry - in real life, it is straight.

2. Mother's Day gifts for two mommies.
This past Christmas, I made a photo album for both my mother and my mother-in-law. Each member of my family chose 15 favorite pics that they took over the course of 2011, and we had two sets of prints made. I bought two albums and slipped the pics into the sleeves, then each member of the family wrote little captions for their own photos. The end result was lovely, but there are still a lot of empty pages at the back of the books. So for Mother's Day, we each chose another five pics from our new 2012 files, and made copies of those as well. Complication: since both mommies and their photo albums live far, far away from me, I can't put the new pics into the album, nor can we write our captions directly onto the pages. So I devised a system of numbering the photos and generating a list of captions that link to the numbers, so the grammies will know exactly what we have been up to. Finally, I got all the details in place, and mailed off their packages this afternoon. Hallelujah.

Expected delivery date: Friday. Yay, my gifts should be on time this year!

3. A sweet vase of flowers. 

Last night, I challenged myself to pick a bouquet of flowers. Yes, I know that is a ridiculously simple thing for most people to do, but as I explained here, I have issues. However, I'm very pleased to report that had you been lurking around my yard this evening, you would have seen me traipsing here and there with my kitchen scissors, boldly trimming off a bit of this and a little of that. I took my collection into the house, shook off the bugs, evened up the stems and thrust the whole caboodle into a cute little glass milk bottle. So proud. I took plenty of photos but it was a bit late in the day for the sunshiny effect I was hoping to capture. See what I mean?

Oh fiddle-dee-dee, this is not quite what I had in mind. I'll try again tomorrow.