More is More

What a week!  Yesterday we hosted a BBQ in our backyard to celebrate 10 years of living in our Dairy House.  We had about 45 people here and I’m not kidding when I say we started preparations back in May.  Nonetheless, Friday and Saturday were full-throttle days doing party prep and set up…and it was HOT!  People began arriving a little after 4:00.  It was just a relaxing and fun evening of good food and friends new and old…at least I hope it was for the guests – I seemed to be running around the whole time (but that’s fine ’cause I love playing hostess!)  Then as soon as it got dark, Curt put on a little show in the driveway with his Tesla Coil (click here if you want to know what that is.).

 Click on photo for a larger view.  Notice that the fluoresent bulbs being lit are not in any way connected to an electrical source – pretty cool.  This photo was taken by our friend Rich.  Can you believe I didn’t take one picture all day?  I love having pictures, but when I’m hosting a party I just can’t seem to get to taking them.  I never even got the camera out yesterday.

The last of the guests left around 10:30.  Despite having lots of clean up help last night, Curt and I still spent about two hours out back this morning putting away furniture, etc. etc.  We’ve both felt like we were run over by a truck all day today – LOL!  We are blessed to have 1/3 of an acre (property that was originally part of a large dairy farm) – a lot size that is almost unheard of in our area of suburbia where the average lots size is around 5000 square feet.  Over the last 3-4 years we hadn’t really been able to keep up with the backyard due to some family illnesses and other issues and it just got overwhelming.  Curt has worked really hard on it the last few months.  It’s so nice to have it pretty and usable again and I hope we’ll host a lot of smaller scale backyard dinners in the near future.

Here’s the invitation to the party.  I stamped and watercolored the original header and border and scanned them into Publisher for the text.  The border was used full size and the Farmyard scene was reduced to fit.  Then I was able to e-mail it out as a pdf.  I felt this was a great compromise since I really wanted to handmake invitations, but there was no way I had time (or patience) to make over 75.  I was actually super happy with the how these turned out.  Curt said people would think we just bought that border paper so I added my little watermark in red in the bottom corner.  *wink*

The chick is Stampendous and available at eclectic Paperie.  The rest of the images are retired Stampin’ Up! (Backyard BBQ and Farmyard Jumbo Wheel).

The week also included a wonderful meeting with my women’s prayer group, getting to have dinner with some of my SCS stampin’ buddies including Karen who was visiting from Kentucky, as well as spending all of Thursday on the couch after waking up in the wee hours very sick (I’ll spare you the gory details).  So you see, when I say “what a week”  I really mean it!  The one thing I didn’t get to do this week was stamp and I think I’m having withdrawals.  I thought I would want to stamp today, but I was too tired.  Hopefully in the next few days I’ll get the mojo flowing again.

Thanks for stopping by.  It’s almost bedtime for me, so I’ll say good night and sleep tight.