Merry Christmas & Happy New Year from me and my family!

Sorry, I forgot to put Anthony's name on the picture...he's the handsome guy in the white turtleneck, handsome and silly!

UPDATE: Nominees! Winners! I'm sharing my award! My FIRST blog award! Merci beaucoup, Carole!

My first blog award: The Marie Antoinette Award, courtesy of Carole at Madness and Mess !
And now the fine, FINE print:
Rules of acceptance:
1. Put the logo on your blog
2.Place a link to the person who nominated you
3.Nominate 7 blogs to receive this award
4.Place a link to those blogs
5.Leave a message on their blogs to let them know they have been given this award

And who to nominate? I'll be back soon to do that part.
p.s. You know the best part? It is Carole thanking me for being her blog buddy!

And the nominees are:
Grrl + Dog She is fun and inspiring. And she has a dog.
Dream with the fishes There is SO much to see on this blog & I like her comments.
Kate's Quilting & other fibre arts Not just because she's from Maryland, but beacuse she is incredible with fiber and very generous.
Emily Falconbridge From her Mini-art Journal Challenge to her photos to her camera straps to her smile, I like it all.
Well, I did 4 5 out of 7, not bad for an old broad! Merry Christmas!

But wait, there's more: mimiloveforever Because she combines embroidery, shiny stuff, and super watercolors on a canvas, and I wish I had thought of that myself (well, I can always imitate the original, but never as well), and because she has a great sense of humor, loves music~which seems to inspire and/or complete her art. And because she'a a Virgo, and because I like her & her blog.

a little explanation about the posting below, designed by Brian

I have 4 grandchildren who I love with all my heart. Brynee' is 16, and she has a boyfriend, is a cheerleader, and is an honor roll student. Anthony is 15 , and is a natural at any sport (as well as being incredibly funny and kind): football, wrestling, baseball, basketball. He does it all ,and he's good. They have lives that don't include being home a lot, and that's the way is should be for now. Lindsey is 11, Brian is 6, and these guys are home more often and most of the time are still content to cuddle with Nanny (me!) or play and/or make art. One of Brian's favorite things to do when I'm with them is to give me a toy gun so we can go outside to evade Germans, Russians, and/or zombies. It doesn't seem out of the ordinary that his 59 year old grandmother is playing with him. I know I still haven't explained Brian's posting, but I love the chance to write about the kids.
Yesterday while Lindsey was playing a video game and her Dad (my son, Erich) was with her, Brian and myself went to the computer to look at Wookiepedia . Then we took a look a my blog because Brian likes to do that. He decided to play with one one the blog gadget pages, and spent a good amount time designing a posting for my blog, changing symbols, test, colors. then he was done and ready to post his design. At first the snooty, grown-up side of me was semi-horrified ("what would people think?"), but the Nanny side of me just said "sure, let's post it!".
"What does this mean, "call church"? I asked. Brian said it just means people can call a church if they want to do that. (Note: none of my family currently attends any church). "So it doesn't mean anyone has to call a church", I asked. "Nope", said Brian. So now you know as much as I do about this posting.

designed by brian

Cyber Fyber ATC trade info

On Saturday, January 17, 2009 CYBER FYBER will be celebrating ATC day! The highlight of the afternoon will be the INTERNATIONAL RANDOM ATC Swap!

ANYONE can participate....there's no restriction on age, location, or artistic medium! Here's how to add your ATC(s) to the mix:

Mail up to three ATCs to:
CYBER FYBER
2123 Park Street
Columbia, SC 29201

Include a self-address, sufficiently stamped envelope for each ATC you send. If you are located outside the USA....send the envelope with stamps from your own country! We will be bundling those headed to each country and mailing them to a volunteer who will drop them into the postal service!

DEADLINE: EVERYTHING MUST ARRIVE BEFORE JANUARY 17!

Stand by Me

William to Judy then Toni Brown to Rice seen by me and put here for you!

A book from my Grandson!

Last week, my grandson, Brian, went to the Book Fair at his elementary school. He bought a book for me and then gave it to me last Friday. He thought of me, his Nanny, at the Book Fair! and he picked out a book he knew I would love. And I do love it. This book will be put in my Art room and not in the living room on the "regular" bookshelves. Who knews what Art this book will inspire. Thank you, Brian Thomas!

A general posting

Usually, I don't write a lot. I post a picture or two, or list a giveaway, etc.
Today I want to write and I think it's all due to Chrysti's posting today. One of my favorite books is POEMCRAZY and that's Chrysti's giveaway for today. I have the book, but if I win my copy is going to my friend, Janet, in Seattle. If you don't have the book, go buy yourself a copy for Christmas. I feel like writing words, words, words, but I'm at work, work, work, so this will be a shorter posting than I want it to be.
Some of my new favorite words are the verification words shown when posting comments on some blogs. Like "monogyper" and "croophs". Just think what a collage or two with those names would look like.
See what a great book this is?
Happy days!

Woo Hoo!

Yes, I actually wrote "woo hoo!", something I have not written before. But there is a good reason, because there is another giveaway to announce: at Daisy Quilts just click on the badge to the right!

Another Christmas Giveaway!

If you've been nice or maybe only a little naughty, click on the picture to the right of Old Saint Nick or go here and check out The Great Christmas Giveaway!
Merry Christmas

Lindsey is 11!

Happy Birthday, Lindsey!

A little saga through song~Part I

LK Ludwig has initiated "A Day of Sharing Song".
I decided to tell a little more about me on this day & share some songs too.
When I was much, much younger I played my parents 78s and some 45s and found a passion for music and voice. Eartha Kitt was one of my favorite singers. and here she is...

A little saga through song, con't, Part II

The Beatles, need I say more?

A little saga through song, con't. Part III

I'm young, thin, not butt ugly, and I fall in love with my own "magic man": a bad boy who is gorgeous and has a sense of humor. He is 6'2" with long dark auburn hair and incredible blue eyes with dark auburn lashes. He has freckles. He steals cars. He really likes me. It didn't last long, but it was memorable.
This song also belongs to a heavy set guy named Joe with a Harley who was more sensitive than I thought (or cared) at the time.

A little saga through song, con't., Part IV

I am divorced with a high school aged son. I ask Mary & St. Jude to send me someone I can love and someone who will love me. I get him. Be careful what you ask for, friends, you just may get it. We danced to this song. He was a "narcissistic predator" (my psych's words) who nearly destroyed my heart & soul, sadly, with my assistance.
Fade Into You by Mazzy Star

A little saga through song, con't. Part V

Ghost Dance by Robbie Robertson
I found this song when I was in a Red Dog Scott deck swap called "Dreams, Visions, & Intuitions". It was incredibly inspiring to me and helped save my art life.

Yeay for Chrysti Hydeck!

Chrysti is giving for the joy of giving.
You can read about it here .
Thank you, Chrysti!

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Catatonic Charlie from Pioneer Woman on Vimeo.
Here is a video of what I hope to do a lot of over the next 4 days!

More sharing with LK Ludwig

Share a song! read more here .

A Day of Sharing Words~~LK Ludwig's blog

You can read all about it here . The event will take place on Wednesday, November 19th, 2008. All you have to do is post on your blog a poem or song with the author and source, then maybe add an image. Words that you love or that touch you. Happy days!

Down Abbie's Road...
GIVEAWAY! Sweet Abigail and Sweet Sophia...
Just go here !

My first Zentangles.....

My friend, Janet (as shown in a prior posting), got me into an invitation only Zentangle book.
I had never done a Zentangle on purpose, except for a practice one in a journal swap. So I did what I truly love to do: research! Lots and lots of Internet searching and I found lots and lots of inspiration from various sites (thanks to you all out there), and tutorials here .
And here are my Zentangles and the front & back covers.

"What we need are critical lovers of America-patriots who express their faith in their country by working to improve it." ~ Hubert Humphrey

the sweetest boy dog.....

Chopper Chan

My friend Janet

My friend, Janet, at a workshop given by
Deryn Mentock (who let me use these pictures to share with you what Janet made).








This is a picture of Janet's Joujou necklace.

I voted!

Embrace the Face Challenge

This is my entry in the Embrace the Face Challenge. The theme this month is "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?"

I didn't want the snake to be scary, but more like Cecil (from Beany & Cecil).

Have you read.......?

update 12-17: I give up, Middlemarch is not for me.
update 12-1: I started Middlemarch, so far, it's tough going.
update to the update: I finally finished A Tale of Two Cities!
update: Wednesday evening I started reading A Tale of Two Cities.


Deb Richardson at Red Shoe Ramblings has a list of 100 books and indicates which ones she has read (or some that she feels like she's read, and I feel like I have read some too, but I know I haven't). Anyway, here's the list, and the ones I have really read are in bold. What about you? How many have you read?
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor

this song kept me company on the ride to work...

Final wishes~whew, this is a tough one.

10-27-2008:UPDATE! Well, I wrote up my Final Wishes. The really hard part was the first time I wrote the "D" word. Once I had written "at the time of my death", I found it was much easier to write die, dead, death (though it gives me a tiny shiver now). One good thing about this, other than making things easier for whoever has to deal with the dead me, is that I am in the process of getting together important papers, the savings bonds I buy for my granddaughter, things along those lines, and to put all of this in one place that my son & my sister know about. I have to embellish the letter & envelope, and then I can seal it and put it away.

Michelle Ward's Crusade No.24 at GPP Street Team is a tough one. This Crusade asks that each person write her Final Wishes and leave it in an envelope for someone to find after she's gone. Can I do this? Well, of course I can, and I can see how it would help in a very emotional time. The decisions will probably have to be made by my son, and finding my letter describing my wishes (Final wishes) may help. This is one of my tasks for this weekend.

I am THIS Tarot card, which Tarot card are YOU?

You are The Lovers

Motive, power, and action, arising from Inspiration and Impulse.

The Lovers represents intuition and inspiration. Very often a choice needs to be made.

Originally, this card was called just LOVE. And that's actually more apt than "Lovers." Love follows in this sequence of growth and maturity. And, coming after the Emperor, who is about control, it is a radical change in perspective. LOVE is a force that makes you choose and decide for reasons you often can't understand; it makes you surrender control to a higher power. And that is what this card is all about. Finding something or someone who is so much a part of yourself, so perfectly attuned to you and you to them, that you cannot, dare not resist. This card indicates that the you have or will come across a person, career, challenge or thing that you will fall in love with. You will know instinctively that you must have this, even if it means diverging from your chosen path. No matter the difficulties, without it you will never be complete.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

"Candy" giveaway!

You should visit Kristin Hubick's Retro Cafe Art Gallery for 2 reasons:
1) to visit & browse, and 2) to enter her very exciting giveaway!
Just tell her: "Joanie sent me" (it won't make any difference, but it will be cool for me to see it!
Happy weekend!

My WATER Traveling Journal with the Paper Traders group

The Paper Traders Yahoo group has a Traveling Journal exchange starting this month. The theme of my journal is simply: WATER. This morning I mailed it to Diana in Kentucky. I used fabric on the front cover with machine stitching, beads, and embroidery. The back cover is a photo I took at Chicoteague, Virginia, of a sunrise, changed to black & white, and printed on fabric. More description later, maybe. Happy days!

Haunted Object Deck

THE TRUTH IS: AGNES INDIGO IS HAUNTED. WHEN MY GREAT-GRANDMOTHER, NONNY, PICKED UP THE SHELL FROM THE BEACH, SHE WENT WHITE AS A SHEET, MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER, POPPY, SAID. BUT AFTER NONNY HELD AGNES TO HER EAR, EXPECTING TO HEAR THE USUAL OCEAN SOUNDS, POPPY SAID NONNY’S EXPRESSION BRIGHTENED, SHE SMILED, AND TOLD POPPY SHE WAS FINE. AND THEIR HONEYMOON CONTINUED. AT HOME, NONNY PUT AGNES INDIGO ON A ROUND TABLE BY A LACE CURTAINED WINDOW AND SEVERAL GENERATIONS OF MY FAMILY HAVE LISTENED TO AGNES. SOME HAVE HEARD HER SOFT, WINDY VOICE CHANTING MERMAID SONGS OF SIGHS, LONGING, AND TOO MUCH FREEDOM. SOME HAVE HEARD SONGS OF THE DOLPHINS AND THE WHALES. I’VE HEAR AGNES TELL STORIES OF THE MEN WHO SPENT THEIR LIVES ON THE SEAS, SOME WERE HONEST AND WEARY, AND SOME CRIMINAL AND ADVENTUROUS. BUT ALL LIVED DANGEROUS LIVES. MY FAMILY LOVES AGNES INDIGO, AND SHE, IN HER OWN WAY, MAY LOVE US. NOW, HOLD AGNES TO YOUR EAR, AND LISTEN VERY CAREFULLY. JOANIE HOFFMAN, 2008.
(family image provided wonderfully by The Vintage Moth), card by me.

Christmas Deco # 3 (Tammy)

I've done another page in another deco, this time it's Tammy's.

She made her deco from brown paper bags. Very cool!

Cookie Sunshine-a very nice blog!

Cookie Sunshine is having a give away in support of Breast Cancer Awareness. Give aways are always fun, but visit the blog and stay awhile, you'll be glad you did! She just received her samples from Spoonflower, I can't wait to read more about this. The samples look terrific.

Christmas Deco, pages for Rhonda

These are the 2 pages I made for Rhonda's Christmas Deco with the Treasure Art Trends group.

Purple QTC for PC Pizzazz

Pink QTC also for PC Pizzazz

It's been a while...Shades of Sunshine

I made these to fill in a spot on one of Lenna Andrews' swaps. The 1st one is for me to keep, the 2nd one I'm mailing to Lenna to forward to Fiona.

"Do one thing every day that scares you." ~Eleanor Roosevelt

Something new for me. Doing 1 thing a day that's scary (or it can be 1 thing a week, a month, I decide). Take a look at Diary of a Self-Portrait for details. I haven't yet set my goal, but I'll update when I do. Be brave!

Tip In Page for Sweet Pea!

front, and back of page

Birds...

The front of a Chunky Book page for the Treasure Art Trends group.

Christmas Deco Swap

This is the page I made for Gwynn's Christmas Deco. I drew the angel, then used Inktense pencils, Sharpies, & a gold pen for the color, and added a little fabric square.

Blue QTC

Blue QTC for the Postcardpizzazz group swap.

A few more One Image PCs...

for Shelley. for Lunaea.

for Abby.

Christmas Deco (Treasure Art Trends Group)

The cover is fabric and is very well padded. The inside of the front cover is my page for the Deco. Each artist will have their own page, front & back if they want. Then there is the back cover. Inside the back cover are tags for each artist to sign in. The blank book itself was a gift from a Nozey Beetle.

Birdie, Birdie Swap (Paper Traders group)

What flower are you?

I am a Snapdragon What Flower Are You?

Not so good pet pictures, but, what the heck...

This is ChopperChan, Savvy the cat, & Fuzz-Marie. I heart them much.