A Goodies Weekend: From My Lovely Mother

Ok, ok, yes, it was my birthday on Saturday. I'm 47. I really don't want to dwell on that. Let me dwell instead on having spent a day of utter perfection with My Lovely Mother, lunch, moseying through all our favorite stores, yakking endlessly, laughing, just one of those wonderful, easy, deeply shared days. Below is evidence of her enormous generosity to me, the way she mentors my art, encourages it, plays benefactor financially whenever I allow it ... she gave me gift cards to Joann's which, combined with my stash, allowed me to make the purchases below today.

The amazing birthday card from My Lovely Mother. Frame for the incredible card My Lovely Mother gave me. That is going up on my wall ASAP! Pink flamingo-topped swizzle sticks for my morning coffee mixing! And red gingham ribbon, so fresh! These are from the $1 aisle, decorative post-it sheets in pads, so easy to use as journal tags! I was pretty happy to find these.



If you've followed my blog at all, and seen my journal backgrounds, then you know how much I use these kinds of stickers on the pages. Trying to budget to buy the kind of stickers I like at $2.99 and up for one sheet is just ridiculous. But these tablets are $6.99 and come with 20 sheets of a variety of journaling stickers. Well well worth it, I thought. Clear stamp sets. This is my first ever alphabet set -- I just get so impatient spelling out words one letter at a time, but I'm not using these for that. These are to use as monograms, or just one letter to start off a sentence in my journal, or set off a particular word. I hope I actually get some use out of these; if not, they'll be going to live with Veronica. Interruption to show you my journaling pens buckets. The one on the left is filled with pens almost running out of ink, so I use those to write in dates on pages, or short/one-word comments ... the one on the right is THE pen bucket, which travels out with me every day to my patio roost where I write in my journal. Restocking my favorite gel pens, which are all almost out of ink, and look at these!!! FLOCKED STICKERS!!! (It's too easy to get me excited, I think.) Some really nice travel-themed rub-on quotes. The scissors actually came from the 99-cent store I went to before I went to Joann's. I already have a respectable supply of papers for card-making. Now I'm beginning to search out papers personal to me, papers I can use for my journal backgrounds, and I want lighter patterns and colors, so I can journal ON the papers without difficulty reading the journal entries later. Lovely papers. Because in my house there live 3 Hoop-Stars, I have a 12x12 vinyl pocket with nothin' but basketball-themed papers, stickers, hoorah and doorah, and try to keep it stocked. Hadn't seen this basketball paper before, so snagged a couple sheets.
Papers.