two birds, one stone

because we hadn't seen g-wan (the hub's paternal grandma) since before christmas, we decided to take advantage of a rare day off for the hub and drove up to see her.  she lives up in big bear, so we were in for a scenic ride and a nice visit.

since i knew it would be a fairly lengthy drive, i decided to capitalize on the time sitting on my ass and get a little pinteractive.  i'd bought the materials to make a new wreath (since, of course, the valentine's one was so two weeks ago and put away), and figured i could probably get through the assembly as i sat there in the passenger seat.

yeah, my camera focused on everything in the shot except the foam base i was actually going for.  oh, well.

i'd bought 1/4 yard of four different st. patrick's day-themed fabrics, and as we filled up at the gas station (not a cheap stop by any means - good gracious, over $4 a gallon!), i cut it all up into strips of various widths.

following the instructions - which were ridiculously simple, by the way - i got to work on tying strips around the base.  and way before we'd arrived at our destination, i'd made my way around the entire thing.

so i settled back and watched the pretty scenery out the window.

when we got to g-wan's house, the bean was stoked to find that there was fresh snow to play in.  the hub and i had thought that there wasn't much of the fluffy stuff around and didn't bring stuff like her boots or another pair of pants to change into, but there's no stopping a 4-year-old when there's something as fun as snow to jump in.

she totally throws like a girl.

luckily, it was nice and warm inside the house.

and she was thrilled to play with pebbles, g-wan's rather spoiled and somewhat temperamental yorkie.  it'd been a while since we'd seen her, and i was rather startled to see how much weight this dog's put on.

anyway, we had a lovely visit and treated g-wan to a nice lunch at one of her favorite joints in town.  it was nice to see her, and she seemed pleased at our visit.  we really need to get up there more often.

back at home, i put my wreath up on the mantel.  it looks a little...sparse, though.  i think i need to add more strips, or perhaps some sort of sparkly shamrock embellishment.  in any case, i have a shitton of strips left over.  i could probably make another wreath with it all - hell, maybe even two.