Darcy comes for a visit

My sister Darcy just came for a visit. We had such a great time. Not enough time to do all the fun thing we wanted, but we'll have plenty for the next visit. We both celebrated our STAR birthday's this year, she turned 20 on the 20th and I turned 29 on the 29th. We weren't able to get together until now, so we celebrated our birthdays over the Lava Fudge cake at The Beach House!

We normally get some pretty amazing sunsets. But the fog rolled in every night right before sunset, so it just looked cloudy. But we still had fun at the beach watching the ocean waves.

The Flower Fields in Carlsbad are beautiful! Rows and rows of bright coloured flowers!

The Birch Acquarium was so fun! We saw all kinds of amazing fish. Next time we'll do Sea World.

Seal Cove in La Jolla. All the baby seals were sunning themselves on the beach. It was so cute!

$$ Shopping at the Outlet Mall $$

The outlets here are amazing! Every store you could possibly think of. We even stopped at Godiva to have one of their Gourmet Chocolate Covered Strawberry's. Yum!!


We all took a long walk on the beach.

I had so much fun hanging out with my sister again. James had fun too, and was a great sport about watching chic flic's every night!

Joy of Art Party

We hosted our first Art Party and had such an amazing time. Everyone had a blast and at the end of the night James and I had a beautiful piece of new artwork.

To have your own here's how it works.

Pick a favorite piece of art in the size you want. It's so easy to order anything you want from Art.com This is what we picked, Navaro Rapids by Ando Hiroshige.

Cut it into squares, one for each guest you have. We had 12.

Get all your supplies together. Pastels work so great, we had coloured pencil, oil pastels, pastels, also get a good art paper, and some fixative spray.

Everyone gets one square of the original print and a blank piece of paper cut the same size of square from the original print. Allow the artist inside to express your creativity. All of our guests knew we were having an art party, they were great sports about it considering everyone said what terrible artist's they were. But eveyone ended up having such a great time and were very surprised just how talented they really were!

A work in progress...

It was so fun seeing everyone finish their squares, you can hardly tell which is the original and which one we recreated!

Once everyone is finished put together the finished product.

The art party was a huge success, I am already picking another print for our next party!