Stampin’ in Seattle

Jim went under the tattoo gun again yesterday.  All the shading is done and the color on the dock is done.  Kevin figured he has about 2 hours left so they’ll tackle it again in a month!

After Jim had taken all he could take (about 5 hours worth), it was Tracy’s turn.  She decided she wanted to add to the sunflower tattoo that wraps around her ankle.  After Kevin got started I’m sure she was wondering very quickly why she had wanted to get tattooed on top of her foot!  She said it hurt like (*#$)% !!!

During picture taking Saturday night at my sister-in-law’s house, Jim & I had our picture taken also.  Here we are! 

Then this morning (Father’s Day), Jim & I were on the road before 6:00 a.m. heading to Seattle Center for Lance Armstrong’s LIVESTRONG 100 mile bike ride.  There were thousands of people taking part in several activities:  100, 70, 45 or 10 mile bike rides, as well as a 5K run/walk.

 You can’t tell by this picture, but he was pretty nervous, revved up and ready to ride!

 And they’re off!

 It was cloudy most of the day but it wasn’t actually cold.  A bit of weather did come through the area while the riders were still out.  Jim said it poured, the wind blew hard, it hailed, it thundered and there was lightning.  His clothes were pretty much dry by the time he got back to the Seattle Center but when we got home his socks were still wringing wet.

 I barely got his picture when he got back to cross the finish line.  He rode in with a group of riders and I was trying to only get his picture.  As it turned out, I snapped too quickly and barely got him!

And … he rested!  His time (according to his bike computer) for the 100 miles was 6 hours, 43 minutes and 55 seconds!

Can you imagine sitting on a bicycle for almost 7 hours?   Good job, Jim!  I love you!

I had a couple of  wedding cards to make (Tanner & Kylee and Brandon & Marissa) this summer.  When I was blog surfing recently I saw the pattern for this card and really liked it.  I couldn’t find a color I really liked for their clothes, so I ended up paper piecing them using both cardstock and background & texture paper.  That’s a tedious little job!  Here’s my version!

Supplies: 

Close To My Heart:  (1) Silhouette cardstock/background & texture paper; (2) ribbon

Stickles (for their wings)

Magnolia stamp

Cricut:  (1) hearts; (2) text

Prismacolor (for their hair)

I made my father-in-law’s Father’s Day card today.  We’re having a bar-b-que at my sister-in-law’s house (thanks Dot for having us all over again) Saturday instead of Sunday since Jim will be riding in Lance Armstrong’s LIVESTRONG 100 mile bike ride and this was the only time to get it done.

Supplies:  Close To My Heart:  (1) Sarsaparilla paper, (2) Chipboard Dimensional Elements Fresh Shapes (3 stars), (3) silver brads, and (4) ribbon

Kodak Handmade Dimensional Sticker

So far this week I’ve only gotten three pages done - all of Rome.   And I think I’ve finally figured out how to get good photos of my pages.  I started taping them to the closet door and then I use the photo shop-type program I have to only save the actual picture of the page.  Yeah, I know - it took awhile to figure that one out!!!

These were some cool photos I really liked.  Rome is so picturesque.  Of course I had to add the she-wolf with the infant twins (since Rome was named after one of the twims - Romulus).  I loved this little red car.

Rome, like Florence, has a lot of statues.  Here’s just a few that we saw while touring and walking around.

We took a double decker bus tour around the city.  You can get off and on whenever and wherever you want.  Your ticket is good for 24 hours.  We were given these little headphones, you pick your language and can hear all about each historical place you pass.  It was lots of fun but a little spooky at first sitting up that high driving down those little skinny streets!  We sat right in front on the upper deck! 

We stayed with Kevin & Laura while we were in Florence (Firenze to Italians).  Laura said the building was pretty new - over a 100 years old! To Americans, that’s very, very old!  It seems once a building gets to be 20 - 30 years old, we implode it (i.e., the Kingdome) and build something new!

They live in the shorter middle building.  Giovanni’s offices (Laura’s dad) take up half of the 2nd floor; Kevin & Laura’s 2 bedroom condo and Giovanni’s 1 bedroom condo take up the entire 3rd floor.

 When you’re sightseeing downtown, you can’t miss the Uffizi Museum.  You can see the Palazzo Vecchio at the end of the two wings.  The Arno River runs right through Florence with the Ponte Vecchio crossing over it.  There are lots of little shops to check out and buy stuff!!!  I added a pocket to hold my city map and other little pieces of paper I think I need to keep (i.e., receipts)!

 I don’t really know what this little thing is across the Arno River.  Maybe just a place where the river level drops down?  I don’t know if you can see the two little birds (of some sort) in the second picture.  They were just hanging out in this little grassy area enjoying the day!

 The Parco Delle Cascine is just a handful of blocks from Kevin & Laura’s house.  One day while they were at work Jim & I found our way over there.  It was a really nice park.  And now for an interesting story about this park:  In the recent Giro d’Italia bike race the stage that ended in Florence actually ended in this park.  We were watching that stage when Kevin & Laura were visting us for the weekend.  It was fun to watch them watch the race and see all the things that were familiar and Laura got to see “home” again!

 And being an American in a foreign country, one of my favorite sites was the U.S. Embassy!  Imagine how good I felt when I saw that flag flying!  The funny thing, and something I couldn’t get a picture of, was the Italians guarding the U.S. Embassy!  Pretty cool, huh?!

 Of course, you don’t go to Florence without seeing the Duomo and Bell Tower.  They are massive in size and the architecture is awesome.  There were some very talented people all those years ago to engineer and craft something thise cool!

 But when you walk around it all you can see is scaffolding.  Jim was very interested since he’s built so many tall buildings in his career which involved lots and lots of scaffolding!

 Then he insisted a get close up pictures of the scaffolding to make sure they had done it right!  He decided they’d done an okay job of building the scaffolding!  DUH!  I would guess scaffolding is the same no matter where you are in the world!

 No matter where you go in Florence there are statues everywhere.  And they all seem to be naked men!  What’s up with that, I wonder?!  So, I googled it and this is what I found:  When he was asked why he sculpted (and painted) the naked human body, Michelangelo replied “I want to sculpt people as God sees them”.  The reply was that he wasn’t God!

 I thought these were two of the most unique sites to see downtown.  Although after I thought about it, the upstairs of all the buildings were apartments so there might as well be a little market down there.  And that little garden area in front of somebody’s front door is pretty neat.  Plus I would think it would be cooler in the shade than just having concrete and asphalt right outside your door.

 I love these Smart Cars.  The first time I saw one was in 2000 in Barcelona and loved it then, too.  Now I’m seeing them all over the Seattle area.  It only took 8 years to get them to the U.S.

There’s a funny story about this restaurant, Il Chiasso Ristorante.  When we were in the Mediterranean on a cruise in 2000, we toured Florence.  We ate at this restaurant (I still can’t believe I found it again).  When we were done and our tour guide was settling the bill, she had instructed us to just wait outside.  While we were waiting, three kids (maybe early teenage years) were hanging out watching us.  They were watching us through the reflection of those big plate glass windows.  When our guide came out, we called her over and pointed out the kids and asked if they were pick-pockets (she had warned us several times about pick-pockets so we were really on the lookout for them).  Instead of answering them, she held up her tour sign (that we looked for if we got separated from our group), and in a very loud voice proceeded to tell our group that the three kids standing by the windows were pick-pockets and to beware!  She said it loud enough that the kids heard her and took off running.  We had quite the laugh over that!

Finally, to end our time in Florence, Kevin & Laura and Giovanni (Laura’s dad) took us to the train station to catch our train back to Rome where we would stay one more night and then fly back to the U.S. 

I’ve finished three more pages of our time in Rome and hopefully will get them posted in the next few days.  I figure I have about 10 more pages and then my 2006 Italy vacation scrapbook will be done.  I won’t be able to pick it up … but at least it’ll be done!!! 

 One of our stops while driving around Tuscany was the beach at San Vincenzo.  The water was kind of cool but maybe it just felt cool since it was so hot and humid outside!  We had a dip and cooled off nicely!  After we had our swim, we stopped at this little picnic table.  Again, I was amazed to see something that I would see at home - the pine cones!  I really have to get the thought out of my head that the U.S. is the only place that has pine trees with pine cones!  And check out the lizard!

 The memory flap shows Laura trying to make a lasso so she can lasso the lizard!  She was so close to getting that little guy, too!

 We also stopped at this little seaside town on the Tyrrhenian Sea.  I was absolutely stunned when I saw everyone sunbathing on the rocks!  We walked quite a way down the rocks (beach ??), and there were just skads of people doing it.  I added memory flaps on all three pictures.

Kevin & Laura look like they’re the king & queen of the rocks, I guess!

Yep, we found more rocks with more sunbathers!  They were all over those rocks and acted like they were having a great time, too! Hm, we were in the Tuscany valley - maybe the chianti was flowing!!!  After a few of those the rocks wouldn’t seem that bad, I guess!

We found one area by a resort that offered concrete instead of rocks.  Plus there was an area by the marina that had sand!

One evening after Kevin & Laura got home from work, we headed up to the moutains to escape the heat for awhile and eat dinner at a little sandwich place that the kids had gone to several times.  Unfortunately, the sandwich place was closed but the temperature must have dropped 20 degrees from the city.   I loved this little town.  It was very pretty and picturesque.  Plus the coolness of the mountains felt so good after the sweltering heat of Florence.

That’s all for now.  I’ll post the rest of my Florence pages this weekend.

My Italy scrapbook might have to be broken down into two albums I’m getting so many pages.  And believe me, I am only  using a fraction of my pictures - a very small fraction!  The architecture is just beautiful and it’s hard not to take pictures of everything I saw.  There are stairs inside the wall of the Duomo that didn’t get finished and we could have climbed up them but it was way too hot that day to go inside a closed in wall and climb a bazillion stairs.

 It was interesting to learn about each ward (or neighborhood) in Siena and how each ward has their own mascot.  Wouldn’t it have been interesting to live in medieval times?  NO!

 And speaking of medieval times, can you imagine 17 horses racing around this town square?  I’ve seen the race on TV and it’s downright dangerous.  But to standing in that square, I just couldn’t imagine it.

 What really caught my eye with the architecture was all the arches.  Every building has at least one arch and usually a lot of arches.

And then I turned the corner and see this nice stuffed boar head on the wall of a store - letting the shoppers know that the store had roast pig that day!

 I added memory flaps to courtyard picture above because when you walked through the arch to get into the courtyard and looked up, this is what you saw.  It was just beautiful - photos just don’t do it justice.

 The two weeks we spent in Italy were very hot and humid.  Our hotels in Rome were airconditioned; however, the building Kevin & Laura lived in Florence (which was a fairly new building of 100+ years old) wasn’t.  And neither was their car.  So, one day we rented a car (yes, with airconditioning) and drove around the Tuscany valley sightseeing (Kevin drove and by this time he’d been in Italy 6 months and drove just like the Italians - crazy).  We had planned to go to Pisa and see the leaning tower but the traffic was so bad we bailed and went to the sea instead.  On the way, we stopped and visited this castle (or fortress).  Awesome, huh?!  I mean, this is what you would think a castle should look like.

There really wasn’t any shopping inside the castle - mostly little eating places.  But it was fun to walk around inside.  Can you believe they have gernaiums?!  Why is it that when I am in another country and see flowers from home I’m surprised?  Yeah, I know - I’m a dork!

 Again, I took too many pictures and had to add memory flaps!  And I wonder why my album is getting so big!!!  I enjoyed wandering around the little streets, plus it was nice and cool!

And what about the views from the top of the castle walls (yep, I climbed up to the watch walk) to take these pictures.  I had a bird’s eye view of the Etruscan archeological dig as well as the Baratti Gulf.  And what about the sun trying to shine through the clouds right onto the water?

 There was one lone sailboat out in the gulf.  And the faraway landscape across the water was kind of misty and reminded me of “purple mountains majesty”.  It was pretty cool!

That’s all for today!  Stay tuned for the rest of our driving trip through the Tuscany valley to the sea shore!

This is Jim and the picture is self-explanatory! 

All the line work is done and Kevin got a little start on the shading.  They’re going to try and finish it (the rest of the shading and the color) the end of the month after Jim’s 100 mile Lance Armstrong’s LIVESTRONG bicycle challenge is over and he’ll be done training every weekend!

Yes, I know, I’ve not been to San Gimignano since June 2006! But I am determined to get this scrapbook done before I start my Australia/South Pacific Cruise scrapbook! 

 This first page finishes up our adventures in San Gimignano.  I have so many pictures it was hard to pick just a few.  My solution was Close to My Heart’s Flip Flap Memory Protectors.  I absolutely love them!  You can add just one or three!  I also added a little pocket down in the bottom left corner to hold little things I want to keep (receipts, parking stub).

 This is the first set of flaps.

I also added a second flap to the bottom picture.

 We rode the train to Siena.  It was a nice ride through the Tuscan valley.  But all I can say is the people who lived thousands of years ago must have been really small!  I mean, look at this tiny, skinny spiral staircase.  It’s really only big enough for a kid!  I added a pocket to this page for receipts and train stubs.

 Kevin, standing at 6 feet, had to really duck to get up those stairs.  We all had to scrunch down and turn sideways to get up and down them!

 It was nice and sunny up top and we saw some beautiful  sites!  There were so many cool pictures, I added three flaps to to the bottom picture!

 First flap.

Second flap.

Third flap.

And here’s what under that last flap.

Stay tuned for more pages!  I scrapped 21 pages over the last few weeks so I have lots more to share!