What not to wear...I'm obviously wearing it!

The girls and I enjoy all the fashion makeover shows on TV - especially "What Not to Wear." What's that you say? You're not familiar with that show. In the ever so tactful words of my nine year old, "It's when people who dress like Mom win $5000 so they can go shopping and get clothes that look good."

Today we were watching a rerun were three women vie to be the worst dressed teacher in whatever state it was they were filming in. Allie, my afore mentioned tactful 9 year old, says to me, "Does WNTW ever come to Canada?" and I tell her that I've never seen them do a Canadian show but perhaps they might someday. "Good!" says the tactful child, "Cuz then you could apply to be on the worst dressed teachers in Ontario show."



Yeah...I'll do that.



I've never been a real fashionista. Well there was that time that I wore stirrup pants. And Peter Pan Get Away boots (what kind of name is that?) And I did the whole neon craze. Can't forget granny boots. WOW! Now that I've listed all these great fashion statements I made - maybe I was a fashionista after all? Of course, the most recent of these fashion trends became a fashion faux pas by the late 80s so I guess the last 20 years have seen me go from fashionista to fashionless.

I remember the first piece of clothing that I just had to have. It was the summer between grade 6 and grade 7 and the Sears catalogue had recently arrived. There, in the teen girls' section, was my heart's desire - a fake (is polyester fake???? Surely it is real polyester?) sheep skin vest. It was like the hottest thing ever (literally, too!) and Mom and Dad must have also thought so because I was soon sporting this fashion faux pas trend on my way to Junior High.

Lucky for me (and you lucky readers too) this vest is forever memorialized in my grade 7 school photo. Here I am wearing it with a lovely plaid cowboy shirt with pearlized buttons. Fashion perfection at its best. Perhaps next post we will discuss why I have a boy's haircut - can't cover all my beauty and fashion mistakes in one post. Better yet, maybe I'll just do a retrospective of all my school photos - they should cover most of the fashion trends and beauty don'ts of a couple of decades!

The fine art of painting...walls, that is.

I just painted our bedroom. Do you think there is some psychological connection to colour selection cuz I, ummm, just painted my bedroom in shades called milk chocolate and chocolate froth? Or perhaps my colour selections are entirely gastronomically related to my taste buds.


Really, I prefer chips to chocolate most of the time for snacking - although I'm not opposed to dipping my hand into the bag of chocolate chips for a quick pick me up. Funny though, I wasn't drawn to any potato chip coloured paint swatches. Come to think of it, I really didn't see any swatches called "sour cream and onion", "salt and vinegar" or one that I think would look great in the kitchen, "roast chicken."


When I was a kid, choosing paint was so much easier. If you wanted pink you went in and looked at the pink swatch - it had light pink, medium pink and dark pink. Wanted blue? How about light blue? Medium blue? Dark blue. Actually there were a couple of colours that were more definitively named. If you were a child of the 70s you might remember them - avocado green and harvest gold?


I have come up with a tried and true method of selecting paint colours. Choose the shade you really, really like, pay $35 for a gallon and come back the next day for the shade on the swatch that is two shades lighter than the shade you originally chose. Now that I've used this method a half dozen times I've progressed to the point where I skip the step where I buy the first gallon and immediately go for the two shades lighter choice.


Seriously, how can you tell from a 1" x 2" swatch of colour what a paint choice will look like in your room. Really, how was I to know that neon green would look so...well...neon-ish?


Another paint choosing tip. Remember that when you take in a small item to be colour matched (lets say, oh...how about a pillow with a teeny, tiny square of neon green) that the small item might not translate well to 180 square feet of walls.


And what about those lovely booklets with various rooms painted to showcase the current trends in colours? It has been my experience that if you don't have the furnishings, draperies, artwork, and other decorative touches pictured in the photos then your freshly painted room will still look like crap some one with no decorating talent lives there.


I'll leave you with a couple of photos of my current works of art.


The first one is Erin's room in shades of cotton candy. There is now a white chair rail installed (by moi!) at the point where the 2 colours meet. I'm pretty sure we don't have any chairs that will reach that high but we'll be ready if we ever get one!

This next room is Allie's funky new hang out. See the green???...Like it is hardly obvious! This is the 2 shades lighter green! Sometimes you may have to go 4 shades lighter. This photo is a bit dark so in case you can't tell the obvious colour palate is aqua, chocolate brown and lime green...but a light lime green. Haven't gotten curtains up yet so just pretend there are some lovely chocolate brown panels...putting that on my to do list this week along with 1,265, 984 other things.

By the way...anyone in need of 3/4 of a gallon of bright neon green paint (as opposed to the obviously (??) less bright 2 shades lighter neon green paint.)

And because this blog is also supposed to be about sharing some of my scrapbooking works of art here is a layout about Allie's new room. She's giving me the thumbs up so i must have done something right...not always the case around here. And to think she is only 9.

Schools out for summer how freaking long???

So school ended somewhere around the end of June and then we almost immediately had company for a week in which we went to 3 museums, the Musical Ride, and did Canada Day on the Hill with 250,000 of our closet friends. Oh yeah...and a little bit of scrapbook shopping managed to get done too.Then I made 374 trips from the house to the trailer getting ready for our vacation. The first week we spent on quiet (until we got there) Lake Cayamant, Quebec where I positioned a lounge chair next to the lake while everyone else fished, swam and boated and did my own small bit of obligatory fishing, swimming and boating (it was a family vacation you know!) between reading and sipping cool drinks. After an eventful departure (Dan will hate that I'm sharing this but his beloved GM truck got stuck, with trailer attached, trying to get out of the cottage driveway and had to be towed out - by a FORD!) we returned home for a quick turn around where I took 72 loads of dirty clothes into the house and then took 72 loads of clean clothes and 67 loads of food back to the trailer for a trip to a Provincial Park.Today is Monday. Dan went back to work today. Leaving me at home alone with 2 girls who, although they have been sleeping in quite nicely, are still short about 2 hours of sleep each night due to extremely late bedtimes. This does not make for an enjoyable summer vacation.

I have not been relaxing on a lawn chair, magazine in hand and drink (preferably a pina colada) on the side table. Instead I've been doing lots of work around the yard. Why, you ask, would Denise, the Queen of Chillaxin', be doing manual labour? Duh! Of course there is an ulterior motive...don't tell Dan, but the jobs I've been choosing to do all involve really loud machines and, while time consuming, do not require much physical effort. So, in order to keep sane I have taken up a new hobby. It is called pressure washing. So far I’ve done the deck, the patio, the windows and the stone walkways. It has taken me hours and hours to get all that work done. “Quite a hobby!” you say. Well don’t knock it til you try it. Pressure washers are very noisy. Get it? Very noisy? Due to the loud noise generated by the pressure washer I've been required to spend long periods of time without hearing any of the disruptions going on around me. I don’t hear all the fighting, screaming, bickering and crying - I just plug in my MP3 player and spray away

I also kind of wish my grass would grow a little faster. Nothing like a ride on lawnmower for noise. And why is it that every time I start mowing one of the kids comes out and starts hollering at me? I just point to my ears and shrug my shoulders, avoiding the entire explanation of why Sister A hit Sister B after Sister B

a) took Sister A’s favourite Barbie (my kids are deprived, only 1843 Barbies!)
b) sat on the wrong couch cushion (we have assigned seating in our house)
c) ate the last Popsicle (which Sister A dozen’t like anyway, but that is beside the point.

I’m thinking I could probably come up with a couple more noisy hobbies. Unfortunately we don’t have any hedges and we don’t have a wood burning fire place or else hedge trimming or chain sawing might have been good choices.