I hope this holiday season is finding you happy and well and that you are enjoying your time getting ready for the upcoming holidays.
Sorry I haven’t been around very much lately. I have been busy with things at work and getting ready for Christmas so I haven’t had very much time for blogging.
I finally had a chance to take a few more vacation days before the end of the year which has allowed me to catch up on things and finally getting around to some blogging.
As usual, part of my vacation time was spent visiting some of my local antique and specialty shops. Earlier today I visited a wonder shop called “The Vintage Pixie” which is a shop that only holds what they refer to as “occasional sales”. They are only open about 6 times a year over a long 5 day weekend. I was lucky in that my vacation time this week fell on one of the weekends that the shop was open. After this weekend, they won’t re-open for their next sale until April or May.
One part of the shop was full of Shabby Chic/Vintage style items. They had everything displayed so beautifully and I wanted to either move in or buy everything to take home with me. However, being a good girl and staying within my set budget, I couldn't’ buy everything that I would have like to, but I did end up finding a few special items that I ended up buying. I found a very pretty flower vase and a set of 4 small glasses made of pink milk glass that I think I will use as flower vases. I am only showing 2 of them here. They are a wonderful addition to my pink milk glass collection.

Once the holidays are over and things start to slow down again, I hope to get back to blogging on a more regular basis. Until then, may all of you have a wonderful and blessed holiday season.
Thanks for stopping by for a visit.













Then it was off to the Archivers scrapbook store, where I purchased a variety of pretty 14x14 inch scrapbook papers to decorate my new “scrapbooks” with. I also purchased a pack of 8 x 11 mixed color cardstock paper for another idea I had. I chose the pack that had my favorite pastel colors of pink, soft green, cream and yellow.
Once I returned home, it was time to get to work. I chose matching scrapbook papers for each binder and cut them down to size so that the paper would slide into the outside front and back covers. This meant cutting the paper size down to approximately 10 ¾ inches wide and 11 1/8 inches in height. A standard scrapbook paper cutter works great for this, especially if you are like me and can’t cut in a strait line. After decorating each notebook binder with the pretty scrapbook papers, I added the sheet protectors to each of the binders and inserted one sheet of the cream colored printer/card stock paper into each sheet protector. Adding the card stock paper made the scrapbook pages sturdier and gave the sheet protectors a front and back side.

Once I had all of the full size pages placed in the sheet protectors, I started on the second phase of putting together the new scrapbook pages. This involved sorting all of the smaller photos, cut-outs, words and phrases into the color categories that they best fit in (pinks, reds, greens, blues, purple, etc.). This would make it easier to create scrapbook theme pages by keeping the photos of a similar color scheme on each individual page or blending different colors together in an eye pleasing way. I recently found some great thin plastic storage cases at Target in the office supply/scrapbook aisles that work great for keeping my color categories separated.






I still continue to work on my decorating scrapbooks to this day and I have approximately 15 of them filled already. I store them in the bottom cupboards of my entertaiment center in my living room.







A shot to the left of the bridge shows the dock where the river boaters can dock their boats. Many pleasure boaters will travel the river from Stillwater to the city of Hudson, WI which is south of Stillwater. This is a great place to picnic on a warm sunny day. It’s fun to sit and watch the boats cruise up and down the river and it’s even better if you are lucky enough to be there during the times the bridge is lifting to allow larger boats to pass under the bridge. If you ever make a trip to Minnesota, I would highly recommend a visit to Stillwater for anyone who enjoys antiquing. I would definitely be worth your time.
And one final shot of the river against the pretty blue sky and the tree lined bluffs along the Wisconsin side of the river....
That’s it for today. I hope to have more news to share in the next few days about my car and camera troubles. Say a prayer or two for me that my troubles will be small and nothing too serious.






