pretty paper. true stories. {and scrapbooking classes with cupcakes.}

With the show finished, we are now officially on holiday. I am loving the chance to see some of what I define as ‘real autumn’. I still love autumn in England, but it is visually quite short, as the leaves turn and fall in a matter of days most years. And it actually took me a while to accept autumn this year, since summer lasted approximately one weekend. But now I am fully embracing layers, knee socks, cabled tights, wool and thick cardigans. I am carrying a pair of gloves, but I’ve only put them on once so far. I’m not quite ready to embrace winter just yet.

So far, we’ve had a day of city and a day of countryside on our little holiday in the north. The first was spent eating noodles and looking at japanese craft books and taking a gazillion photos with the Madisons. After seeing the few snaps on our camera, I am both excited and a little nervous to see what Jon captured on his collection of approximately six million cameras. We did that sort of photography day where the driver pulls over to the side of the road, makes you stand in front of a wall that matches your dress while he runs out in the road to snap while also dodging traffic. But we did retreat to Gasworks Park eventually. Where there are more geese but significantly fewer cars invading the photography space.

Then we headed to Bellingham to stay at the Anderson Creek Lodge for a night, and oh my goodness, it’s like our ultimate ski lodge. A lovely, beautiful house in a lovely, beautiful setting. With fabulous hosts who cook amazing organic breakfasts and…llamas! And lots of fireplaces to sit by with a cup of tea and a book (him) or an in-progress cardigan (me). This place is just idyllic.

Then through border patrol and into Canada for a lazy Sunday in Vancouver. The master plan for today involves hiring bicycles, so we are crossing our fingers that the sun stays out!

xlovesx

PS: For those who are interested, we are photoblogging this trip here.

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Greetings and thank yous all round to everybody who came along to class at the Seattle Scrapbook Convention! With paper, coffee and cupcakes plus so many lovely girls, how could one not have a good time?

And an extra special shout out to my lovely assistant Joy, who saved my life just a few hundred times over the course of the weekend, as well as letting me borrow her kitchen and her kitchenaid!

xlovesx

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We are not in costumes (though I have worn an orange skull & crossbones shirt all day) and we are not out pressing our luck for sweets, but it is indeed Hallowe’en. The Boy has never experienced an American Hallowe’en, so his reactions have been hilarious. Especially to the amount of candy collected by children we have seen. The same day in our neighbourhood usually consists of between four and six children adding a black plastic rubbish bag to their school uniform (white shirt, black trousers and blazer) and claiming to be Dracula along with a little sister in a Disney princess nightgown. Here, on the other hand, we got to see dozens of kids in brilliantly creative costumes trick or treating at the shops in Fremont. Our special prize for the best costume absolutely ever went to the most adorable nine year old Edward Scissorhands. To the point that he couldn’t pick up sweets from the bowl by himself! (Sadly, the prize itself is probably disappointing to a kid, unless nine year olds appreciate it when I clap and tell their parents that their costume is the greatest.)

Of course this shortly resulted in stories of trick or treating past (along with an explanation of how there’s not really a ‘trick’ element for most kids). The last year I went trick or treating as a kid, I was pushing it for being way too old, but several of us went together and dressed up as the different Heathers from Heathers. The neighbours probably didn’t have a clue and just gave us candy because it was a small neighbourhood. But the worst bit I only fully appreciate now.

Our neighbourhood was about 40 houses, 39 of which were built in the late 1970s or early 80s, I’m guessing. The remaining one was an old farm house that hadn’t been painted in decades and was hidden from the road by skeletal trees. An older lady lived there and no one referred to her by her first name, including the adults. She was widowed and lived alone and that was enough to make the children of the neighbourhood absolutely terrified of her. I have no explanation for this other than that innocent kind of ignorance that exists only when you are seven years old. Anyway, if we were scared of her on a normal day, we were petrified on the 31st of October. Every year, we could see there was a light on. Some kids were brave enough to make it to her front porch (probably a result of a dare) and reported that there was a table outside the front door filled with freshly baked cakes and cookies. Well, this was already the era of checking your candy before you were allowed to eat it, so this was just another sign that she was to be feared. Those cakes were probably laced with ten million poisons, you know! To my knowledge, none of us actually ate the cakes from the supposedly haunted house.

When I was in high school, there was a huge article in our little six page weekly local newspaper. The lady we were convinced was the wicked witch of 183rd street? She’d won a national bake-off championship for the Junior Service League, or something similar. They interviewed her and printed one of her recipes and she said how much she enjoyed baking for friends and neighbours and children and…

Yes. For years, I had the opportunity to eat some of the best cookies and cupcakes in all of America. And I was too busy squealing in fright at the front gate. Gutted.

Happy evening of candy and costumes.

xlovesx

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I knew autumn was going to be the craziest time of my recent memory. (Jen knows well that 2007 is our joint Year of the Surreal, and that is ongoing.) So with changing leaves and space needles, I am definitely sticking with both of those labels.

As of last night, we are now in Seattle. (_We_ meaning The Boy and I rather than Jen and I. I realise vague pronoun references are almost as annoying as knowing that I am yet again in the same country as Jen and yet no.where.near.) A few days of touristy goodness. Then a few days of work for me. Then a good week of a proper holiday for both of us, in which he navigates while I drive us to Vancouver and we take the ferry to Victoria and assorted other things that are lovely in this part of the world.

It’s not the time of year that one would normally book a holiday to the pacific northwest, and we are enjoying that very much. Of all the times I have been to this city, today is the first time I have been up the Space Needle, and there were approximately six other people up there. Including a British couple, of course. It is chilly but not freezing. Clear and crisp. Nothing a lot of coffee won’t solve. The Boy is not tiring of his highly original game of saying ‘Oh! There’s a Starbucks!’ in a way that reminds me a bit of ‘Look kids—Big Ben and Houses of Parliament!’ In general, it’s just not as busy right now as in the summer. Which is fine, because if you haven’t heard, we queue enough in England already. To put certain minds at ease, I am still on the decaf though I am jealous that someone else has had like three double tall lattes today and isn’t wired in the slightest. I’ll get over it.

And the obligatory twee-but-true observation: long-haul travel is far more fun when someone else comes along. Though it’s a tough choice when only one of you gets offered a free upgrade to first class.

xlovesx

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During the summer, I told you all about how I was sick of estate agents and not finding the right place to live and all assorted grumpiness, including some very sore feet.

I take it all back.

Pending approval of our references, we have a new place to move into in less than a month. In a neighbourhood we love. With grass we don’t have to cut (our place is a flat but we will be mere feet away from two giant parks), birds who will be ecstatic about our stale bread (seriously, can two people ever finish a loaf of bread before it goes funny, or is it just us with this problem?) and deer who make me calm when I am anything but. But also? In London.

Goodbye suburbia.

We were so excited that we had to try out the cupcakes in what will be our closest coffee shop. Obviously.

xlovesx

PS: UK crafty girls—have you seen this on the newsstand yet? So pretty and so much fun. They let me play with lots of Christmas ribbons and a sewing machine, and you should too!

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(photo from the BBC)

You know, there are certain things you can’t blog about because you just can’t get it right in words. Surely everyone has one of these topics? Right? Right? Well, mine is Sigur Rós. I mention them all the time in strange little stories and yet I can’t explain to you why they are so important. They just are, and that’s that.

Originally I was devastated that my debit card was cloned, not because of the scare of losing my bank balance as much as the fact that it wasn’t working on the day tickets went on sale for this little screening of their not-so-little film. But why pay the original price for something when you can keep stupid ticket touts in business, right? (I kid. We will not speak of how much my morals were twisted on this one. C’est la vie.)

Anyway, it did not matter that I had been awake for far too long or that my brain thought I was in a very different time zone. Because those things don’t matter when you get to listen to an acoustic installment of wonderment and watch a film about tour you actually saw, all from the second row. (Though I hadn’t realised it was going to be on TV and the internet, and if it had…I probably would have tried to look like I was in this time zone. But anyway, the boy is in stripes. I am in the alice band. Whoo-hoo for night vision!) So really, the only reason I blog about this is for your own wellbeing. Because you can watch the set online here until 4th November. And after that, you can buy the film and realise that your life will not be complete until you wander around Iceland with your ipod and a camera.

Or if you read enough scrapbooking blogs, I can put it in perspective: Cathy has Neil. I have these guys. And we call it appreciation rather than obsession, and that makes it absolutely okay.

xlovesx

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And just in case visiting one’s home town wasn’t weird enough: there’s teaching one’s home crowd.

Thank you to everybody who joined in my classes at the CK Scrapbook Convention in Kansas City. Extra thanks to my fabulous assistants who helped me keep an eye on everyone, and to Tami who came along to take pictures. So if you came to class and always wanted photos of you scrapping, you might just find one here. (The photos are from the Thursday night classes + birthday party.)

I’m so glad we could bond over our love of pretty paper. And some other stuff too.

xlovesx

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So this is it: the obligatory trip home. I try to make it back about every two years. Give or take. If you don’t live in the place where you used to, you’ll share that feeling that comes whenever you go back. It just looks and feels all different.

In the case of my suburban Kansas City hometown, the difference is in the sheer amount of urban sprawl. Where I grew up was in the middle of nowhere. Outside the city limits. In between four farms. I had to get a car as soon as I was old enough (and fourteen was old enough!) because there wasn’t any other way to get to high school (about 8 miles away) or work (the dairy queen, about 5 miles in the other direction). My senior year, our high school moved into a new building that seemed huge for a little place (our graduating class had 96 students. memorable because it was 1996.) but now it is too small for the town. A town that I remember having one pizza place (Gambinos, which had a juke box with ice, ice baby and can’t touch this as well as an Elvira pinball machine) and one bbq restaurant that was actually in a converted house. There was one place to get groceries and one place to get your hair cut, but you had a choice of two places to fill up your car. One of which was referred to by the initials of the owners, something that seems to be completely normal in small town america. As in, I’ve got to stop at C&H or I’m not going to make it to Jefferson. It was not uncommon for me to (partially) fill my little red Ford Escort with two or three dollars of gas, cobbled together from change found between the couch cushions. And that would drive me back and forth to school for about two weeks. It goes without saying that I drove on very, very few paved roads as a teenager.

Of course this place is totally different now. The roads are paved. There are plenty of shops, including more grocery stores and chain restaurants like Subway and Pizza Hut, even. I don’t think there is a Starbucks in the high school cafeteria just yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it is there some time next year.

But somethings never change. Good people, good places. Going back always reminds me of how much I love where I live now, but it was good to have some time to see this place again. Thanks for people who helped make that happen. More trip pictures here

xlovesx

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