Birth Announcement Cross-Stitch

I have recently gotten back into cross-stitching after a very, very long break from it.  When I was growing up I used to do small cross-stitch projects all the time.  My mom even still has a bunch of them hanging in her house.  While I was Christmas shopping I came across a very cute birth announcement cross-stitch project and decided to make one for Portia & Laila to give as a Christmas gift.  I got it done just in time, squeezing the last stitch in on Christmas Eve and framing it in time to gift to them on Christmas Day.  I think it turned out quite nice!  My next cross-stitch project will be the Four Seasons Birds for my bathroom.

Purchase this Balloon Birthday Ride kit.

Painting Elephants

Last week I attended a two hour acrylic painting class at Pinot's Pallete in St. Matthews with my friend Brooke and her sister-in-law.  They do classes almost every night and have a bar where you can buy beer, wine or mixed cocktails to sip on while you paint.

We painted an elephant and it was a lot of fun!  I went in there anticipating a canvas with an outline of the elephant already there, but much to our surprise, we all sat down to a blank, white canvas.  At first we were extremely intimidated, but our instructor was awesome and did a great job of showing us how to do the outline of the elephant ourselves. We started with a grid on the canvas and she instructed us where on the grid to place dots of paint and then which dots to connect until we had our basic outline.

Once we had the basic outline, we filled in the grey for the elephant, which looked like this:

After that we filled in the background before adding detail to the elephant:

After adding details step by step to the background and the elephant, we ended up with a final painting!  They all looked a bit different, but yet very similar.  Here was my end result:

And here is a group shot from the whole class:

It was a lot of fun and I definitely want to do it again soon!

Christmas with Mama Rosie

Tuesday Mom, Portia, Laila, Aunt Cindy and I all headed to Liberty to have a girls Christmas with Mama Rosie.  Usually the whole family goes, but Mama's brother has needed her help while he heals from a bad fall so she just didn't have it in her for a full family get together this year.  But, even so, we had a great time!  Mama, Melvin and Cindy all got to meet Laila for the first time, also.  Taylor couldn't go this time because she had school and it was the only day the rest of us could go.

We enjoyed a lunch of carry out pizza and then opened gifts and chit-chatted for a few hours before heading back home.  Laila was the center of attention, of course, and I'm so glad Mama and Cindy got to finally meet her.  We were also able to get a photo of FIVE generations together!  All photos from the festivities can be seen here.

Tomorrow is the big family Christmas gathering where the other side of the family will get to meet her.  More pictures to come from that one!