More Craft Rooms

I've decided two things while searching for inspirational ideas for my craft room:

1. I love Pottery Barn style
2. I love craft organization by Making Memories

If I can combine those 2 elements like I want I'd be very happy. Here are some examples I've found that incorporate BOTH!

(All images came from Scrapbook.com)

Give-Away by Papaya & TomKat

I'm an avid blogger these days (as if you didn't know) and I visit some really cute sites. One of my FAVORITEs is TomKat studio. She makes the cutest paper items for parties and all sorts of other things. She posted about this give-away from Papaya Art and I'm sharing it with everyone here. (hint: part of the give-away contest is to post about it on your own blog). Even if I don't win anything I think I'm gonna buy some stuff from Papaya, it's TOTALLY my style and I LOVE it. Be sure to check out their cute little address books, all of the pages so detailed! My favorite items are the Clover design office products. So whimsical!!

Here's how to get to TomKat's blog: Click HERE

Here's how to get to Papaya Art's site: Click HERE

And these are a few of my favorite things! I'm so glad they aren't terribly expensive cause I want to buy A LOT!

Organization & Planning

For part of this weekend I spent some time organizing my little "craft area" downstairs. This is technically supposed to be part of the portrait studio we set up in the empty area we have in the basement, but since the studio isn't getting much use I decided I actually needed to utilize the space better. I also decided that because I was sick of my dining room table always being messy with my scrapbook and crafty stuff! Anyway, here is the progression:

Started out as a mess of course

And here is the table after organization ;)

Ribbon and ink bins

Flowers and color swatches boxes

I absolutely LOVE my new paper organizer. I found this thing for $5 at Big Lots!

I started creating my idea books for my papery projects. Slowly but surely I'll build up my ideas and portfolio. For now, I have my favorite book (below) to drool over and flip through.

My handy storage cases.

And how would a craft room organization update be complete with some inspirational and wishful thinking?!?! These rooms are just AWESOME and I hope someday I'll be able to create a space like these. Having so much color in a place can really inspire you to be creative! These rooms are my ultimate dream!

Hawk Landing

Had one of these land on our porch this morning. I was sitting at the dining room table working on my laptop and I happened to see this HUGE bird land on top of my hanging flower basket. It landed on the arm that holds the basket. It was facing me through the window and all I could do was stare back! It was so amazing cause the bird was so HUGE! I am just in love with birds, especially all of the hawks we have around here. Ramin will tell you, anytime I see a hawk flying around I say "There's the hawk!" and I always say THE hawk as if there's only one :P I love them. So anyway, at first I didn't think it really was a hawk that landed because I thought his beak was too small. But after doing some research looking at birds trying to figure out which bird it was, I realized that it really was hawk! I wish I had the camera with me, but I didn't want to move from my seat for fear I would scare the bird.

It was a cool memory. Maybe I'll catch him again someday ;)

Wanna help?

I finally created a blog button for the Atmina blog :P It's over there to the right. Yeah yeah I know I'm slow. If anyone is willing to share our business on their blog, please let me know and I'll send you the html code for the button :)

Thanks!

A few of my favorite things

I am so anxious to really spend the time and effort on getting the photography and invitation businesses up and running. I know it will take time and I need to have patience. So I keep myself satiated by visiting other sites and blogs to get inspiration and keep my excited!! Maybe you'll find some of these places fun to explore around:

Lolliblog
Snippet & Ink
Cake Wrecks
Amy Atlas - candy buffets!
TomKat Studio
Zenadia Design

WOW FINALLY!

So I have some good news to announce (no it's not that kind of news yet :P) - But it is good news for the business :) Ramin and Chris spent all day Saturday with me creating the website for Atmina. Please check it out HERE. Isn't it so great?!?! I am so excited about it, especially because I LOVE the home page with the rotating images. I also like our portrait galleries. We went with a simple back theme with white font so it's simple and easy to read. We also have hints of mint in there as well. I just love it! They did such a great job for us.

The other piece of news is that I bought us a new camera!!! Jill is currently in Chicago right now on a trip so she has no idea. We've been wanting a new camera for a while right now but couldn't really afford it right now. But as I read some of the ads in the paper yesterday I realized that we could do 0% interest financing at some places. Ramin LOVES Best Buy and suggested we go there since they have 18 months no interest! This way we'll have a while to pay off the camera as we make more money.

So that's the news - I can't WAIT to surprise Jill when she comes home! She will be so excited and happy - I'll make sure I take photos of her using her new camera :P I'll give her a strict rule though of learning to use it properly AND taking extra special care of it :P

Flowers

So as you all know...I just LOVE posting pictures of my flowers. It's probably silly considering my flowers are not NEARLY as glorious as most of the other flower gardens out there. I always admire lovely flower gardens throughout the neighborhood or as I'm driving by someplace. But you know why I'm so proud of MY flowers? Because *I* grew them! I grow a lot of flowers from seeds and while this year I mostly used petunias, I've been able to watch them grow tremendously!! That is why I'm proud of my flowers!! So here's the story of this summer's flower garden!

This is one of the MAIN plants I grew from seeds this year. And for the life of me I cannot remember what the name of these flowers is. I can tell you this...I've been watching very closely for a good opportunity to photograph them because they only bloom for like a day or two and disappear! I was really lucky to get this many blooms sprouting at one time! This flower plant was growing all summer and only recently started sprouting it's flowers!

6 at once!! Amazing!

This is the delphenium. You might remember the picture of it from earlier in the summer. It sprouted very nicely in early Spring. I had it out on the front porch and I thought it started getting too hot for it out there so I moved it to the back porch in the shade. It almost died right there. I've found it needs just the right amount of sunlight, so I moved it to the garden table which gets mainly just evening sun. And now it's growing amazing again after I pruned it down! I only took this picture a few days ago and it's already grown much more - new blooms will be sprouting on it again and I'll be sure to take more pictures!

My 3 petunia pots out front. I'm proud of these because they weren't doing so good in early Summer. The big pot was so sparse most of the summer. I tried just moving it back a few feet and guess what? It started growing like crazy! Just a few extra minutes a day of shade or something has really made a difference for the flowers in that pot. Isn't that so weird how flowers work! They really do have a life of their own and you have to figure out what they like and don't like in order for them to thrive :)

My favorite petunia pot. It's probably obvious why it's my favorite :P

The 3 main pots on the back porch. I added in some of those little blue/purple flowers in with the petunias and they are cute. I think they're not great for pots though. I've seen many flowers with them and they do much better in the actual ground. I have a feeling they are spreaders and like to spread their roots around.

The garden table. More petunias, blue flowers and the delphenium.

So here's a story for you! I water the plants every other day or so, depending on the heat outside. One day over this past weekend I went to water my favorite petunia pot out front! As I poured the water I saw a quick scampering from something. I've seen this before, lots of creatures like to live in my flowers :P This time though, it was a very green praying mantis! You can see from the two pictures below that I got it pretty good with the water - you can see droplets on it's back.

So I hurried and got the camera to snap some shots. In this one below I was pretty close to it. I think that combined with the fact that I had just tried to drown it really pissed the thing off :P After a few seconds of photo taking the thing actually FLEW at me!! Like right into my face! I honestly didn't even realize praying mantis' could fly!!! It was so weird and funny.

And after it flew/lunged at me, it landed on the driveway. It just stayed there for a few minutes and I gave up watching it and went back into the house :P

I'm always pruning the petunias. Every time a flower on them starts to wilt and shrivel, I'll pull it off. I've had to watch myself a few times because I've come close to grabbing some weird insect hiding out in the flowers. Ahhh the joys of gardening!! I love it!