BLOG AWARD

My blog was recently tagged by a dear friend, Miyako, who has the delightfully entertaining and informative blog, Orchid's Daily Voice with the Liebster blog award. Liebster is German for favorite. This award is given to blogs with less than 200 followers. I'm supposed to list the names of five blogs I follow that have less than 200 followers and it hasn't been easy.  I've finally settled on the five that are listed below.

1.  Dianie Mac Designs 

2.  Colony Mountain Stitcheries

3.  Kay's Kids

4.  Sharon's Fancy

5.  Ye Olde Crone's Gazette

The rules are to list the five blogs and make contact by leaving a message in the comment window letting the blog owner know they've been tagged. 

Do a post telling who the award came from and finally put a copy of the award on the side bar you your blog to be copied by the award recipients.

Thank you for thinking of me, Miyako and hopefully the bloggers whose blogs I have tagged will know I tagged them because their blogs are deserving.

As always, thanks for stopping by.

A DAY IN THE LIFE

Today we're going to show you how we spend those long winter days when Mom is too busy to play with us. We should mention that she's too busy most of the time. If we were insecure little bears that might be a problem but we're not so it isn't.

Not too long ago we read a post about a bear who was bored and didn't know what to do to entertain himself. We thought it would be helpful for us to show you how we combat boredom.

First off we have stacks of books to read and are working our way through the Harry Potter books. We can spend a whole morning or afternoon reading cause the books are so good we don't want to stop. We take turns reading out loud.

We also have games and jig saw puzzles. We got some new puzzles for Christmas and have been putting them together. Some of them are really hard so we can spend days working on the same puzzle.

This can't be all of the purple border pieces. Clarissa, hand me those piece you've got. I think they fit here somewhere.

Mom says to do the borders first so look for the borders.

This isn't all of the pieces for the snowman. Look for more of the snowman.

The piece is the right colors but it doesn't fit. It's gotta fit.

Grab that piece right over there...

When we get tired of puzzling we have crafts supplies to work with. Since Valentine's day is less than two weeks away we're thinking about making decorations. Mom has left some pretty pink fabrics laying out on the cutting table so we're going to make something with it.

Hang on, this pattern making isn't as easy as it looks. Let me try another one.

Ah... Bellamine I think you're supposed to pin the pattern on the material before you cut.

Mom bought us some cookie cutters and promised to help us make some salt dough so we can try our paws at making ornaments for our Valentine's tree.

Hope this was helpful in giving you ideas of things to do to pass the time on those long winter days.

Since Mom hasn't let us have our own blog yet, she said we can do a guest post any time we want so we're thinking up more things for future posts.

Please come back and visit when you have time. We love to show off, we mean we love to visit.

Hugs from the North Pole Bears,

Bellamine & Wendy



USING UP MY PINK FABRIC

First off I want to thank everyone who made suggestions for solving my blogger dilemma. I switched my browser and it seems to have corrected the problem on most of the blogs where I couldn't leave a comment. There are still a couple of them that aren't giving in that easily but I'm persistent and will eventually get to the bottom of this.

Now that I've started making messes in my work area after the "Great Cleanup of 2012" I've decided to keep at it. Since the pink fabric was just laying there on the table I gave some thought to what I could do with it.

At the beginning of last summer I stayed with my sister Maggie for a couple of weeks and while I was there she gave me a few things that were in her discard pile. I have no idea why these things were being tossed aside as they are really cool items. One of the items she gave me is a cloth doll with painted head, breast plate, forearms and boots. When I came home I tossed the doll related items into a box labeled doll supplies. After doing that I pretty much forgot about her. Now that I was trying to come up with an idea for using up some of the pink fabric I decided to give the doll a second look.

I make most of the patterns I use for sewing so I chose some fabric to work with, one solid and one small print and I started cutting and fitting paper and came up with this.

The dress has a dusty pink drop waist top trimmed with white lace hearts and a printed skirt and jacket. The jacket and skirt are fully lined in the pink solid.

There are a couple of you who seem to enjoy seeing pictures of fur kids so Sampson volunteered to join Mildred for the photo session.

I hadn't planned for Mildred to be seated in the bowl of hearts but was told she preferred sitting on pillows rather than the hard, cold marble. I can see how that would be preferable. I think I'll make her a cushion as her sitting in the bowl makes the hearts impossible to see. 

After making the cushion I think I might leave any more sewing for some future date. I'm not sure which direction I'll be heading next but will end up finding something that tickles my interest, no worries there. Perhaps later this morning I'll cook up some paper pulp and make a batch of paper mache clay to work with. I have a couple of pieces that have been around since early November that need to be finished.

My Christmas stuff is still waiting to be put away. I have high hopes that I'll have some help with that this coming weekend. It's a bit difficult trying to decorate for Valentine's Day with Christmas still hanging on. Wish me luck.

As always, thanks for stopping by.