Send a Little Love

Wow, it has been a long time since I have posted anything. In all fairness, I have a ton of half written posts in draft. Maybe I can actually get this one done and posted in a single day......ahh, dreams.

If we are Facebook friends, you probably know that last June my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. Then, in December her mom was also diagnosed. THANKFULLY they are both now done with treatments and are cancer free.

Not being there while my mom was having treatments was a very hard thing. I am sure she was ok, since she is one of the toughest people I know but it was still hard being far away. I wanted to do something for her, but I wasn't sure what would be most helpful. Finally I decided on this:

I can't remember where I got this little plastic box, but I think it might have once been full of rubber bands from Staples. 

I lined the inside with the pretty green paper in order to be able to make the words on the cover. I wanted them protected inside the box when it was closed.

I wanted the insert to be able to stand up all on it's own, so that she could set it next to her chair during chemo, on her desk at work, where ever. The plastic box made it possible for her to fold it and take it in her tote bag or purse. 

Yes, she is really that short.

Two of my favorite photo panels were my wedding day and our photo from our 60 mile Komen 

3-Day event a few years ago. We did that event because this was actually Gram's second go-round with breast cancer. There were photos on both sides of the accordion and I made sure I got all her kids & grand-kids on there, as well as both of her parents. 

Employee Gifts

Every year I make a little something to give to my husband's employees as a "Thank You" at Christmas time for all their hard work. I try to change it up and make something different each year.

Spices

This year I decided to do little spice jars. Here is a collection of the spices I collected. I worked from a recipe that my mom gave me a couple of years ago. We refer to it as "Bam Bam" as it is an all purpose spice recipe from Emeril Lagasse that she found online somewhere. My copy of the recipe is on a little scrap of paper in faded pencil from my mom. It took me three batches of the recipe to fill 18 jars.

Here they are all lined up on the counter. They are actually from the wedding favor department at Michael's and were on sale. They worked out to be $0.70 per jar before filling. 

Not sure why this rotated?

Here are all the jars with their tags on them. I cut out the tags on my Cricut machine and then embossed them with red embossing powder and my heat gun to make them nice and sparkly. On the back of the tags I added a printed note saying that it was Bam-Bam and an all purpose seasoning. Everyone loved them. I didn't think to calculate the total cost once the spices were mixed, but I do have quite a bit of left over spices.