A while back, Jennifer at  The Literate Housewife Review had a drawing,  to send handcrafted bookmarks (made by none other than herself!) to 25 lucky recipients out of all those who entered the draw.  One person never responded by sending an address, so Jennifer had to do a call for a drawing for Recipient #25.  I entered that chance, and won!  I felt like the wild card who gets in the Super Bowl .

Yesterday, I received two bookmarks in the mail from Jennifer.  How exciting! 

Here are how they look (wish I had a professional-quality camera, but I don’t, so just know they look better in real life):

In case you can’t read the words next to the hand-drawn bicycle, it says:  “Delight in Life”. 

I don’t currently have any books to read (with the kids finishing school this Friday, the last few days have been so busy) except for a bed-time book on how to interpret dreams (which, ironically or not, makes me very sleepy after reading  just a few pages).  But I have two I need to start and finish soon–”Anthem”  for the Martel-Harper Challenge and “Shanghai Girls” by Lisa See which is an advance reading copy.  Can you guess which bookmark is going to be used for which book?

Don’t you think the ribbon and flowers goes very well with “Shanghai Girls”?  And isn’t it funny that this ancient paperback of “Anthem” is almost as small as the “Delight in Life” bookmark?

Thanks again, Jennifer for being so generous, and making these bookmarks for all of us lucky winners.  I look forward to using them again and again.

I’m going to start “Anthem” tonight–since it’s a small book, it won’t be long before I blog about it.

The meeting for our monthly ATC group was actually last week, but I finally have a little time to post about it.  There was no specific theme this month.  I recently acquired a new “crop-a-dile”, so I played with that in the creation of my new cards.  Scrapbookers (I am not one) know that a crop-a-dile is useful for adding eylets or snaps or grommets to paper or other similiar materials.

  I had learned a crop-a-dile works well for fabrics, even thick layers of fabric.  The design for this month’s cards was inspired by the (occassional) spring weather we’ve been having this month.  Here is a picture of all the cards, and a close-up of one.  These pictures were taken at night, so not quite as bright looking as they really were.

This month’s meeting was a small but nice one, so not very many cards.  Still a nice collection.  One is made by an author of the upcoming book “Fabric Embellishing”, and  is a miniature replica of the book cover!  I thought that was neat.

Below are the cards from this month’s meeting.  Once again, they look better in real life !

The deaf women’s group (which I helped start up through my work) had lessons given by a friend, Donna, on how to make a basic tile mosaic. At the first meeting which was a month ago, we glued broken tile on a wood backing–everyone’s looked different and had their own disnictive style. Here is how mine looked after gluing the tiles:

Those are mirror pieces in the center. I would have liked to use an whole mirror, but that was all that was available. Some of us brought our own pieces to use, but I took tiles from Donna’s extensive collection and had fun breaking them. By the way, the project is approximately 9 inches square.

The adhesive had to dry before grouting, so a second meeting was scheduled a couple weeks later. But I missed it because we were in Colorado. So, last night Donna met with me and another lady who needed to finish hers also.
I decided to use a light blue grout. There are tubes of coloring that you can add to the grout mixture and we did that until the shade of blue was “just right”.

We had to wait a while for the grout to set up before wiping the tiles clean, and as it was getting late (my kids were with me too), I brought it home and finished it up late last night. Here is the finished product.

And a detail (below).

One of the tiles I broke up had a fish on it. Can you spot parts of the fish?

I was pleased with the end-product–it makes me feel like being at the beach (and not because of the fish tile)–I think because of the colors.

I enjoyed making it–it sort of reminded me of making a quilt, especially a crazy quilt. I had to figure out where the pieces would fit and what would be the best layout of the various tile pieces.

However, today I noticed that there is some cracking in the grout. I think I may need to seal the grout with something. I will do this again and can learn more at websites like this guide or this one. You can, too!