February 24, 2013

Another snowstorm, another opportunity to play around with the zoom lens.

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...middle ground...

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February 23, 2013

I took another card-making class today, and these are a few of the cards I came home with.  These techniques are probably not ones I would do on my own, but it's fun to be creative with other ladies for a couple of hours on a snowy Saturday afternoon.

February 17, 2013

Yet another science experiment...this time to see if salt is the scent you smell at the ocean.  It doesn't smell like much when dry, but when boiling water is added, it does indeed smell like the ocean.  Minus the seaweed and dead sea creatures, of course.  :)

February 15, 2013

Valentine's Day tulips, with a little visitor.  Made me decide to clear out all the winter decorations and bring out the spring colors.

February 14, 2013

Jed's favorite candy is Starburst, and he's not a huge fan of Valentine's Day, so he was pretty happy with this young-man friendly Valentine for his homeschool group friends.  His gift to me?  A poem!

February 13, 2013

Round two of shoveling the front walks, after the avalanche fell.  :)  

One of the back decks, which was still covered in snow from Nemo, plus one avalanche, and another one on the way.  :)

February 12, 2013

The temperatures were above freezing this week, so the snow on the metal roof started sliding down...inches at a time...so we had these overhangs most of the week till they collapsed in an avalanche.

February 10, 2013

So today we started shoveling our way out of the house.  

The windows are in Jed's room on the second floor, but there's a roof that's holding up all that snow in front of them.

February 9, 2013

We got 20" of snow from Captain Nemo.  So awesome!!

January 30, 2013

I took a card making class recently and this was by far my favorite of the bunch...the snowflakes were punched onto the edge of the card, and I used the gold embossed paper on the front and on the inside - if I was going to send this out, I would write on the back of the snowflake side.  The coolest part is the tag...it looks like metal, but it was made by heating several layers of metallic embossing powder and then stamping into the last layer while it's still hot.  When I trimmed it down to size, little flecks popped off all along the edges, which disappointed me at first until I realized that it actually looked like rust...can't beat a rusty tag on a card!  :)

January 29, 2013

Jed made a Lego creation that he wanted to send into to the Lego Club publication, so I spent a lot of time trying to get a decent picture of the two of them.  :) 

This banner was made by an artist friend of ours in New Zealand...each individual cloth tag has a letter sewn onto it, along with lots of little embellishments and bells in between each...so cute!!

January 28, 2013

Another fun science experiment...this time we pickled an egg in a jar of vinegar to see how it's possible for nutrients to pass through the villi in the small intestine to the blood stream.

The vinegar dissolved the hard shell and molecules from the vinegar passed through the soft membrane, swelling the egg to almost twice its size. You can see the egg yolk clearly through the membrane.

Jed is holding the soft membrane with the knife, and you can see the extra liquid absorbed by the egg in the bowl.

January 26, 2013

The moon was so stunning this evening, but it was so cold out my hands were shaking too hard to hold the camera steady, and this was the best I could capture of the beauty.

January 24, 2013

Stick a fork in me, I'm done...with Project 365, anyway.  Maybe there will be a time in my life when I'm able to take on another project, but this obviously isn't the time.  In the meantime, we've been doing lots of shoveling and sledding and science experiments.  The one above involved using iodine to discover which foods had starch in them.  The iodine turns black in the presence of starch - pretty cool!