Easter at Our Place – 2016

I hope those of you who celebrate Easter, had a nice weekend. Well, actually I hope all of you did!

We had a very good time with our pal Andrea and her friend Heather, who was visiting from Montreal. They came over for dinner on Saturday.

We don't celebrate the religious aspect of Easter (Aside: growing up in a Catholic home, I have a vivid memory of being a kid and trying to explain to my neighbourhood friend Sandy, what Easter was really about. I recall much doubt on her part about a man rising from the dead. I felt so frustrated that she didn't believe that it had really happened. Yeah, right ... preach Little Lou.)

Rather we view this holiday as a celebration of the arrival of spring.

Here's a little look around our place. Note, I'm not one to miss out on a chance to decorate! ...

In the kitchen I hung the garland I made last year (shown in this post).

A Handmade Easter Card : Stitching on Paper

c="http://www.loulou.to/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/handmade-greeting-card-easter-cross-stitch-chick.jpg" alt="handmade-greeting-card-easter-cross-stitch-chick" width="640" height="480" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-31922 blk-brdr">A few months ago (here) I showed you a couple of small cross-stitched pieces, done on paper. I thought I'd use the same technique to make an Easter card.The cute chick was created using a pattern designed by the writer of the Buzy Bobbins Blog, found here.Stitching on paper is pretty fun to do. The main thing about it is to choose a small simple design, saving the more complicated patterns for fabric, which will uphold much better than paper, therefore making better use of your time spent.If you'd like to give it a shot yourself, the how-to instructions are here.To turn the piece into a greeting card, I glued it to another piece of paper, cut to leave a 1/3 inch border around, to give it a framed look. Then I glued that to the front of a card base that I made by cutting, scoring where the fold goes, and then folding along the scored line.

Thrift Store Finds

Care to see some things I've found at the thrift store lately? (For those of you in Toronto, these things were found at the Value Village at Bloor and Lansdowne.)

As usual, I gravitated to the housewares and linens sections, so I'll start there ...

A Great Toy Store and Some Easter Gift Ideas

At the Art Gallery – Outsiders : American Photography and Film 1950s to 1980s

There’s a terrific new major exhibition on at the AGO called Outsiders : American Photography and Film 1950s to 1980s. It runs from March 3 to May 29 and has over 300 photographs and four films, making the show is the largest of its kind ever hosted by the gallery.It features the work of several American photographers and film-makers, including photographers Garry Winogrand, Gordon Parks, Diane Arbus, Casa Susanna guests, Nan Goldin and Danny Lyon, and film-makers Robert Frank, Alfred Leslie, Marie Menken, Shirley Clarke and Kenneth Anger, observed that mainstream media was not presenting the full picture of what life was like in America at the time. In their art they sought to delve below the surface and portray the grittier, less perfect aspects, and to therefore provide a more accurate representation of what was happening in the country during those years.