A Day to Honor Our Soldiers

Happy Memorial Day! My family and thank all the soldiers of the past and present that have served our country so that we can live in the comfort our own home. We pray that God will watch over the soldiers that continue to serve our country and for their families.

May OCS

I have been participating in the "One Card Swap (OCS)" for a little more than a year now. It has been lots of fun meeting new people through the swap and of course receiving some very creative cards. If you are interested in sign up please let me know. This month I was paired up with Mama, a very nice and creative lady. This is what I sent to her.

You pull the card out of the flowerpot where I wrote her a special message. She made this double display card for me. I love it!


Thanks again Mama for all the hard work that you put into making me such an amazing card. Thanks for stopping by today. Happy Friday to all of you and have a wonderful 3 day weekend.

An Awsome Sunday

I feel so blest to have Susanna as one of my good friends and that we have such wonderful hubbies to take care of our kids so that we can hang out together. On Sunday after church we spent several hours together shopping on the trendy strip of Melrose. We had the opportunity to visit some very cool stores and found some good deals. Here were at our first stop.

We were very excited to see all the cool Hello Kitty items in the store.





They even had Hello Kitty curtains.

Next we went to a store called Kid Robot where they sale cute trinkets. Both of us purchased two blind boxes of 2 tirnkets. We unfortunately were allowed to take a picture inside the very cute store. Then we went the Harvey store where the purses are made using seatbelts that are woven together. I have purchase several of thier purses online, but have never been in one of their stores. I have always wanted to go check out one of their stores. :)

I have some co-workers that love Havey purses so I had to take a picture in the store.

The lady at the store was nice enough to let me take a picture behind the counter. I think it would be pretty cool to work at a Harvey Store.

The last two stores that we went to were the Paul Frank store


and the Tokidoki store.


We had so much fun that we did not eat lunch until 4:00. We ate a late lunch and an early dinner at a Mexican restaurant called El Coyote.

The food there was very yummy and of course the fellowship was very sweet. Thanks for stopping by today. I am sorry that I do not have any crafty to share today.

Belated Mother's Day RAK

It's a few weeks late, but I finally had a chance to make and put together a couple of Mother's Day gifts this week for some long distance friends from Zach and Kylie. I learned a new way to make some flowers by punching flowers out of cardstock from a class that I went to last weekend. All you need to do is spritz 3 flowers with water using a spray bottle, put a brad in the middle to hold all 3 of them together, and crumple them up to form a flower. It was so much fun making them. It was also a lot faster making them in comparison to the ones that I made a few weeks ago. I attached a flower to a box of chocolate (I also made this friend a card.),

a devotional book,

two bag toppers,

and to a band to put around an assortment of craft items.

I made a few more flowers yesterday as samples for some friends at work that wanted to learn how to make the flowers. After school, I gave them each a pattern and showed them how to make one.

Thanks for stopping by today. I will try to make some time to blog this weekend in between the different activities my family and I will be attending. Until then, take care and have a wonderful weekend.

Two "Thank You" Cards

Two friends sent "thank you" cards my way through snail mail. I am always so excited to receive cards in the mail. :) The first one is made by Cathy

and the second one was made by Jill.I appreciate the both for taking time to make such nice cards to send my way. Thanks for stopping by today. I hope that all of you will have a fabulous week.

Some Great Ideas

I received some very nice cards/crafty items from some friends last month for our swap. This card and RAK is from Susanna. Don't the erasers look yummy. :)

Each time Susanna and I swap a card we give each other a little some thing. Here is the card that I made for her and some cute HK cards that I surprised her with.

This is from Frances.

These are some ATCs from Leslie.

This last card is from Gracie.

All the ladies have such nice ideas and I appreciate them so much for sharing them with me each month. I hope that you feel as inspired as I do to do some stamping. Have a great rest of the weekend.

Some Belated Birthday Presents

I recieved some belated birhtday gifts in the mail recently. I was wonderfully surprised and touched by the kindness that two of my friends sent my way. Michelle sent me these items

and Teri sent me these items.

Ladies, thanks for surprising me with such cool items that I love for my brithday and for the awesome cards that you made for me. I thank the Lord for such thoughtful friends like the both of you.

Mother's Day

My family and I started off the day with praising God and reflecting on His goodness upon our lives by the Mothers that He given to us as well as the many special ladies that He has place in our lives. After worship we went out to lunch in Little Tokyo and had sushi with my parents, sisters, and BIL/soon to be BIL.
After lunch my family and I went to a few Japanese stores before we headed home for a nap. We ended the day with ordering take out from one of our favorite Hawaiian restaurants. We ordered beef stew. For some reason most of the Hawaiian restaurants that we have tried have the most delicious beef stew. After dinner Benson and our kids surprised me with some very thoughtful gifts.
My daughter made me a hand corsage from church and my son made me a ribbon holder,a pot with a message

and a piece of decoration with his handprint in it. (The handprint was made at school and the other two items were made at church.)

The three of them got me some very cute HK items and DVDs of two of her favorite TV shows.

I hope that all of you had a memorable Mother's Day on Sunday.
Here some goodies that I received from some of my friends for Mother's Day.

I appreciates all the extra love on this special day. I hope that all of you will have a memorable day celebrating.

OCS and Aloha RAK for April

Happy Friday! Today I am going to share with you a few swaps from last month. The first one is from the "One Card Swap (OCS)." The only requirement is that we make a card with a flower on it. This is the card that I made for my partner, Kelli from Hawaii.

I put ink on my brayer, rolled it on the Fifth Avenue embossing folder from Stampin Up and ran it through my Big Shot. I thought it turned pretty cool. What do you think?
Kelli sent me this beautiful card. She also sent me some very cute stamped images.

For the Aloha RAK this is what I made for my partner, Jovita from Arizona.

The theme of the swap was to send anything but a card along with 5 stamped images. I folded a pocket and made magnets using some of my punches. When I mailed it to her I put the magnets and stamped images into the pocket.

It's funny my OCS partner was also the person that was assigned to send me an Aloha RAK. I was was lucky enough to receive not only a card, but also this nice notepad from Kelli. Thanks Kelli for your wonderful creations.

If any of you are interested in signing up for any of the swaps let me know. They are lots of fun and you get to meet some very cool people with lots of great ideas. :) Thanks for stopping by!

Another Birthday Celebration

Happy Wednesday! I hope that all of you are having a good week. Mine has been pretty good. Like I promised in my last post, I will be sharing about one of the events that my family and I attended on Sunday evening. We celebrated my belated birthday with my extended family, parents, sisters, brother-in-laws, aunts, uncles, and cousins. (My Auntie Fay has treated my sisters and I out for our birthdays to a restaurant of our choice ever since we were little.) There were a total of 16 of us.
We went to a local restaurant called Zen where it serves Thai food, Japanese food, and Chinese food. The menu was full of yummy items that it was very hard to choose what to try. Benson ordered sushi. I tried a few pieces. It was one of the best tasting pieces of sushi I have ever had. No wasbi and soy sauce was necessary.

I ordered a Seared Ahi salad. I love Seared Ahi so I like trying it out at different restaurants. It was pretty good.

After dinner I was served some mochi ice cream with a candle on top. All the waiters, waitresses, and my family sang "Happy Birthday" to me.

We also had some Fried Tempura Ice Cream. We have tried it at several different restaurants before. The one on Sunday tasted the same as all the other ones that we have tried, but the size of it was a lot smaller.

It has been a blast celebrating my birthday for the past few weeks with all the special people in my life. I thank the Lord for each of them and feel very blest to have them in my life. I hope that you have enjoyed reading and seeing pictures of how I have celebrated my birthday.

What A Nice Weekend

Happy Monday! I hope that all of you had a good weekend. My family and I had a very good one from start to end. We started off our weekend with spending some time with our good friend Susanna on Friday evening. Zach and Kylie spent the evening with my parents. On Saturday we had a very restful day and evening to help us prep for a long day on Sunday. We were out from 8:30 am to 9:30 pm. We had a great day, but was exhausted by the end of it.
Here are some pictures of our evening with Susanna. The 3 of us went to Build a Bear to build a sunkist Hello Kitty. Actually Susanna and Colleen built one together (Susanna was going to build one, but deicided not to). She said that she preferred making a white HK instead. Unfortunately they did not have any white ones in the store.) and Benson built a bear for Zach. Here is Benson and I picking out a heart for our new friends.

Susanna and I dressed Miss Kitty together. (Miss Kitty is so lucky to get pampered like this.)

Miss Kitty is all set to go to a luau to do some hula dancing.

Benson decided not to dress the bear for Zach. He picked out a "Tin Man" outfit for Zach to dress his bear in. Ever since Zach was little he has loved the "Tin Man." We are planning to surprise with the bear on the last day of school in June. Hopefully between now and June Zach does not accidentally find what we got for him. He often finds our surprises for him before it's time for him to receive it. :)
Before leaving Benson and I made a birth certicate for our new friends.

While we were in the store, we saw a friend and his daughter from church. His daughter is Zachy's age. Here is a picture of his daughter and I with the cute animals that they we built.

After going to Build a Bear we had dinner together

and went shopping before we went home. Thanks for taking time to look at our post about our weekend. Stay tune for another post soon about what that we did yesterday.