ModPodged Color Wheel Picture Frame

Several weeks ago I had a girl's night with some of the girls in my freshman small group, and if you know me, you know that means there were crafts - more specifically, ModPodge.  I had planned on going to the dollar store to pick up some frames to decorate, but while I was at Target I found some frames on clearance for .94 cents.  Even though they were different, I decided to get some because they were cheaper and would save me a trip to another store. 

 

When we began I still wasn't exactly sure how I wanted to decorate my frame, so I just started tearing out pages that had lots of color in them, and eventually I came up with idea to do a color wheel type look.  Once I had enough paper, I cut out wedge shapes and put the colors in an order I liked.  Then I started ModPodging, which ended up taking forrrrever.  The rounded edges, and the little lip that the glass fit down on made it quite time consuming.  I also ended up with ModPodge all over myself because I used my fingers to smooth things out a lot.  But once it was all done, I thought it looked pretty neat.  And since it was so colorful and fun, it only seemed fitting to put a picture from the Color Me Rad race in it!

Tabletop View

I wanted to add a little Christmas spirit to my spot in the office, so I hung colorful lights around my window!  To put them up, I had to climb up on my desk, which has a glass top on it.  As I was staring down at myself I thought, "This would make a fun blog picture," and so I took it!

Thanksgiving

Obviously this is a little late for a Thanksgiving recap, but I still wanted to do it.  My family went to Maine for Thanksgiving this year! That's where my dad's whole family lives, and my cousin and her family drove over from Michigan.  I hadn't been to Maine in about six years I think, and it's been that long since we've all been together too.  While literally half of my time off was spent in the car, and our two days in Maine were very busy and full, I'm so glad we went!  

After our Thanksgiving lunch I introduced my cousins to the Mac photo booth.

Then we we drove into Portland and visited the Portland Head Light.

The coast in Maine is rocky, not sandy.

I love sun glare :)

Just doing my thing.

I love that you can see the moon in this one!

Jonathan, Amanda, Mom, and I.

After that we went to Freeport and went to the L.L. Bean store.  We tried on hats and I got up close and personal with some fish!

On Friday we drove to Kennybunk where we climbed around on the rocks for a while and ate seafood of course!  Later in the day we also got pizza and ice-cream twice!  All from local places.

That's George Bush's summer home in the back.

Seaweed in a tide pool.

It was kind of bizarre to be so close to the waves and hear them crashing, and smell the salt water, yet be wearing boots, a scarf, hat, and gloves.

Family picture.

Operation Christmas Child

I'm sure you're familiar with Operation Christmas Child, the Christmas time "shoebox gifts" for children around the world.  Thousands of these boxes are collected all across the country and then they are taken to one of seven processing centers to be prepared to ship overseas.  And one of those processing centers happens to be in Boone, North Carolina, which is less than an hour and a half away from Johnson City!  Each year we have the incredible opportunity to take a group of students there to prepare the shoeboxes, and that's what we did last Thursday!  The OCC facility is a huge warehouse that has assembly lines set up, and everyone has a job to do to prepare the boxes.  This year my job was to go through each box and make sure there were no items in it that weren't ok to ship, things like liquids and food.  I went through hundreds of boxes over the course of three hours.  It was so neat to realize that the gifts I was looking at would soon be in the hands of children in Africa!  I loved picturing little girls dressed up in beads and toy tiaras, and boys playing with Hotwheels and throwing footballs.  My favorite boxes were the ones where the families and children that packed them included letters and pictures; hand drawn cards scribbled with crayon are the best.  I'm so thankful to have this opportunity to be a small part of blessing hundreds of thousands of children at Christmas!