Bad family photos and barking in the rain.

Okay so I missed a greater number of weeks than I would normally between posts. It's been a busy couple of weeks though, with Christmas, New Years, family outings, winter illnesses, basement renos and what not. All of these are poor reasons for not blogging though, I must confess that. They're not even really reasons...more just excuses.  so here's a bit of an update on most of what I have been busy with.

1. Creating another awful Christmas card. Last year we decided to start a tradition of sending out horribly distasteful Christmas cards. This year's is pretty bad: 

2. The Christmas tree went up. The Christmas tree came back down.

3. Working on our basement. I'm not going to post any pictures of that in this post though. I will blog about that when it's complete, but so far we have a great storage room, and the new laundry/bathroom facility down there. 

4. I found this great drawer unit for $8. I plan on covering each drawer with either printed book pages, or vintage floral paper. Then I will use it in my near future crafting corner which will be in our new basement. I will post the finished results probably not too long from now. 

5. I redid the front entrance way to our house by building in a built-in coat/boot/seat area: 

6. I made Olive a raincoat. I made it out of part of a shower curtain. Our new shower stall in our new bathroom, is only half as wide as the curtain, so I cut the curtain and reused the other half to make this new coat for Olive. I tried to find some patterns online but I didn't really like any of them, so I started measuring my dog and ended up creating my own pattern. 

Olive hated having to be measured every 5 minutes. As soon as she saw me with the partially completed coat, she'd make a dash to the basement or under a chair. But eventually it was completed.. Here is the final result: