Belgium iPhoto Book

One of my last projects of the summer was finishing up the digital scrapbooking pages about Belgium and getting an iPhoto book printed with the pages. Ah, you may ask, wasn't your trip to Belgium 2 years ago??????? Blush, yes it was. I've decided that digital scrapbooking takes too much time for a busy teacher. I think from now on I will just do photo books for trips and maybe scrapbook just a few pages.



I am very happy with how the book turned out. IPhoto is not a cheap option, especially when you make lots of pages, but the end result is beautiful!


FYI - I scrapbooked the pages in Print Shop, saved them as jpegs, and the imported the jpegs into iPhoto to create the book.

Quartz and Turquoise Necklace - Remixed

Here's another necklace that I recently designed. This is a long necklace with quartz and turquoise beads that I made a couple years ago. I changed the piece that dangled down at the end. I added a circle from a toggle bracelet and then attached a long pendant with more turquoise and quartz. The orginal dangle was too small - this works much better!

Crust Pizza - Bloomfield Hills

Spinach Pizza with Pine Nuts

If you are a fan of crispy, wood fired pizza, you will love Crust. Located in the strip mall on Telegraph and Maple, Crust is a small restaurant decorated with lots of visible pipe giving it an urban feel.

Bianca Pizza

The menu includes soups, salads, and sandwiches, but the star is the pizzas. I've eaten here several times, and enjoyed each one that I tried. I especially have liked the Bianca Pizza and the Pancetta Pizza. You can also build you own from a selection of toppings. Each pizza serves one, and if you don't pig out you might have a slice or two left to take to lunch the next day.


They also have these neat little desserts served in shot glasses. During my last trip we passed on the dessert, but it is definitely worth saving room for a few sweet bites.

Maverick Star Quilt (for the cat)

When I bought my Poang Chair, I wanted to make some mini quilts to cover it to help control the cat hair. I did finish a small one that fits on the footstool. The "rules" were that I could not buy any new fabric - it all had to come from my stash!


I used this Maverick Star tutorial. I like this block because it is scrappy and I didn't have to have all the points matching - I am not that precise a quilter so don't look too closely to see if the corners match!


It took a few weeks, but now it certainly is the cat's favorite resting place. If you look closely, I'm sure you will see a nice overlay of cat hair!

Olive Straws

Over the summer I saw these Olive Straws being made on Martha Stewart. I thought they were so unusual. And I love green olives! (I made the recipe pretty straight from Martha's website, so you can get it there if interested.)


Not that complicated to make, just fussy. Basically you encase the olives in purchased puff pastry and cut it into strips.


It was hard to roll the puff pastry thin and tricky to figure out how best to cut the squares and fussy to cut the strips. They looked messy before I baked them but they actually looked ok once baked and tasted pretty good!

Fluorite Bead Necklace Remix

One of the first beading projects was made of these fluorite beads. I loved the purple colors mixed with some green and white - they are beautiful stones. But I never liked the necklace and seldom wore it. Over the summer I took it apart and restrung it, added small purple seed beads to separate each bead. I like this combo much better and have been enjoying wearing it.

Book Publishing using Lulu

A few years ago my father wrote down his memories of his experiences in Italy during World War II. I had typed it, scanned in some of his pictures and documents, inserted them into the narration, printed it, and put it into a notebook. I've always wanted to test out one of the publishing sites that will take your document and turn it into a book. So for my Dad's birthday I uploaded the document to Lulu to be published. It was fairly easy to do - it took maybe a couple hours to figure out some of the settings. I turned the Word file in to a pdf (it saved all of my formatting) and made a high resolution jpg in Print Shop that could be used as a cover. It took less than a week to receive the books. Here is the end result:


The cover is shiny and very professional looking. The pages were exactly as they looked in my Word Document (only in black and white - didn't want to pay the extra for color pages as only a few of the images were color). I ordered 2 books - the cost was under $20 total, including shipping, which I thought was very reasonable. It was printed in paperback form, but there are options for hard covers and various sizes.


The page below shows the telegram that was sent to my dad's parents to let them know he had been wounded in combat:


Click HERE to see how the ordering page is set up at Lulu. I love that if my Dad wants additional copies of his book, it will be a piece of cake for me or anyone to order them!

Sweet Lorraine's - Berkley

A few weeks ago I met some friends at Sweet Lorraine's at lunch to celebrate a birthday. Sweet Lorraine's has been in Southfield (near Berkley) for years and has always been one of my favorite places to go to to go to for brunch on weekends. They also have a great lunch and dinner menu with fresh ingredients combined in interesting ways.


The decor is modern, a bit funky, with rich jewel tone colors. In all the years that I have eaten at Sweet Lorraines, this was the first time I have eaten in this side room.


Several of us ordered the flavored ice tea. Loved the curly straw! The tea was flavored with syrup, way too sweet for my taste.


Excuse this bad picture (still learning how to take pictures on my iPhone), but I had to include it because the bread is so amazing. I love the dipping sauce!


Someone ordered the chicken kebobs - what a spectacular presentation!


I had a fish special dish and I have totally forgotten what kind of fish it was - it might have been whitefish, but don't quote me on that! It had an excellent Asian sauce, rice, and snow peas. The snow peas were cooked just the way I liked them. The umbrella was a cute touch.


Our server, Jennifer, was one of the nicest waitresses (can you still use that word?) that I have had in a long time! We were a large group of very chatty ladies and she laughed with us, told us about all the good things on the menu, was patient as we figured out what to order. She had genuine enthusiasm for the dishes on the menu and really seemed to have fun as she served us! She deserves four stars!