Greetings to all readers who come this way. . .I offer you a warm welcome to an old lady's new adventure! Now in my mid-60s, I was born before ballpoint pens were invented. It's so fun to think how far communication has come since then. Instead of clicking a pen to write on paper, I'll click on post and launch my words world-wide!

My blog will include alot of cardmaking and scrapbooking conversation. My big big big hobby is creating papercrafts. Many of you share that interest and I have enjoyed your blogs, your ideas, and your clever talents. I hope you will like some of my projects as well.

My daughter Stephanie has a blog as well, and hers is rather new too. For a long time the two of us talked about starting a rubber stamp business, producing our unique line of stamp designs.

Stephanie has all the biz sense, plus she is an extremely gifted product designer. I have been a professional artist for the past 40 years, so I am able to design stamps.

We started our line, october pumpkin, several months ago. It has been very successful so far. Stephanie operates an etsy shop and our stamps have also been picked up by a major online retailer, Addicted to Rubber Stamps. But we still wanted to have blogs, in order to

share some of our paper arts projects and to interact with other papercrafting folks whose work we had already seen and admired on blogspot.

Stephanie loves fall, especially "pumpkin time". She came up with the name october pumpkin for our biz. We both live in the midwest where fall is a major, major event every year.

We both love the seacoast too! Stephanie is too busy with home life and kids to get away as often as she'd like, but one of the great pleasures of being old is the freedom to go where you want, when you want, so my husband and I go to the NW coast of Florida each winter.

We like the quiet winter beaches along a stretch of road that doesn't get alot of traffic and where the coast is not overdeveloped.

Outside our condo building (one of only 2 hi-rise buildings in that area) there is an expanse of immaculate white sand edging the famous emerald sea of the Gulf of Mexico. While temps back home in Ohio range from 0 to something-awful-below-0, and snows pile up two of three feet high, my husband and I can breakfast on our 8th floor balcony, watching brown pelicans fly past at eye level. They are funny old birds (I'm sure they think the same of us!) with a kind of wild pterydactyl look to them. They cruise past in slow motion, unconcerned about anything beyond their next fish. As many as eight or nine may travel together in a precise formation.

Although we only rent our space, I think of the beach as mine when I'm there. I gave it a name the permanent residents don't even know, and why should they? It's just a way that I make that special place my own. In the header above this post you will see a photo of Pelikan Beach

from eye level, and when I finish writing I will add a shot of PB from our balcony. I'm sorry there are no pelicans in the pix, but they keep failing to notify us of when they will be coming by!

I'm sure that you have a special place of your own that you love. Maybe you will share some thoughts about that place with the rest of us by and by!

I hope you'll come back to visit often. Tomorrow I hope to put up some pix of cards I've made, hoping they will be interesting to you.