Moving and Shrinking - All Part of the Week's Highlights

It's Friday already.  My, how time does fly.  Once again it is time for the Friday Fave 5 highlights of my week.  This week I'm coming to you from (I thought for a moment there that I should say "mid-town Manhattan" but no, it's still just my little neck of the woods here in Pennsylvania) a different blog host.  You might have noticed that my blog is not on WordPress today.  I have moved.....but more about that in a moment.  Let's get right to my Fave Five, shall we?

1.  I discovered a neat little book at our local bookstore this week.  It's entitled "Eco Books" by Terry Taylor.  I've always been fascinated by the construction of books.  I guess that comes from working some in the book processing department of several libraries.  In the past several years, artists have found a new platform in the design of "art books", creating books as an art form.  We had an ongoing display of some incredible examples at the college library I worked at before retiring.  There has also been a growing group of hobby enthusiasts who are making small books or journals.

This book shows you how to make little books using things that you would normally throw away, such as cereal boxes, old maps, audiocassettes, baggage claim tickets, even egg cartons.  I find it really appealing to make something fun, quirky, and useful out of things that can be recycled.  The instructions are very clear and nicely illustrated.  I think I'll be able to do it and if so, my family just might find some unusual little books in their Christmas stockings this year.


2.  I had the joy of reading a "thank-you" email to my mother from one of her former 3rd-grade students.  It was so nice to see her face light up as I read it to her.  It really showed me just how easily such a simple thing as an appreciative note can make someone's day.

3.  I finished another square for my "Great American Aran Afghan."  This one is the square designed by Kathleen T. Carty.  It was quite interesting to knit up.  You actually knit the outer cabled edge first.  Then you graft that together and then pick up stitches around the inner edges to start knitting the middle of the square.  How in the world these designers ever come up with some of these construction ideas is beyond me.  Guess that's why they are the designers and I'm just a knitter.

4.  I had to go buy some new clothes because I'm down 3 sizes and all of my pants were becoming way too big.  I know these both look big but hey, it's all relative.  The ones on the right were what I WAS wearing and the pants on the left are one of the new pairs of pants I bought.  And what is even neater is that those pants were purchased in the "regular" side of a store, not the women's sizes part of the store.  That hasn't been the case for me in years.  Whee!

5.  I moved my blog back to Blogger from WordPress.  WordPress had a lot of nice features but I was finding myself frustrated because I really wanted to use some of the neat templates that I'd seen available around the Web.  However, most of them were compatible with Blogger blogs, not WordPress.com blogs.  I didn't have the expertise to write my own code so I just decided to migrate back to Blogger and that's why I'm back here.  I still have my old posts from 2009 and early 2010 over at my WordPress blog so if you are looking for posts or links that I had on the other site, you can still access them at the old site.

If you'd like to read other Friday's Fave Five posts or join in the fun by posting some of your own, visit Susanne's blog at Living to Tell the Story.  Lord willing, I'll be blogging the next few days from Raleigh, NC.  My daughter and I are going off on a mother-daughter mini-vacation.  Have a great weekend!