Our Spot: Celebrate!

Sunday, September 21, 2008

Celebrate!

Yesterday I competed in the 16th annual Women's Fitness Celebration; the nations largest Women's 5K event. It poured rain like no other ALL day long, but it was a great experience and one I hope to compete in again and again.
I am reminded of a 5k I did with my friend Elizabeth. We'd been religiously fitness walking and were in really good shape to compete in a little March of Dimes 5k. When we started the race we saw two ladies take off RUNNING (who runs in a fitness walk?) So we decided to go after them. When we realized we would never catch them walking we asked an official if you were really allowed to run in a walking race (of course not that would be cheating right?). She said we could...so of course we ran and we won!!! How ridiculous is that. But we enjoyed our glory, all two of us with a couple of volunteers who handed us potted flowers for finishing, while rolling their eyes in disbelief. Anyway, those were good days.
I'm happy to announce that I WALKED my whole race yesterday (Mind you I could have run) and I came in 38th over all and 4th in my division out of 728 fitness "walking/many times running" competitors and surpassed 119 official runner's. So I think I'll start getting a little more serious about preping for these races and see what I can really do. There was an 85 year old gal who finished 10th over all for the walking category. WOW!!! I want to be like her.

http://www.athleteslounge.com/results/event/2377/results.php?p=8

3 comments:

Wendy said...: That's awesome! The pictures from the news looked like everyone was sopping wet but excited to be there. Congrats!; September 21, 2008 at 9:33 PM
Anonymous said...: Way to go. That is amazing about that 85 year old lady. I only could dream to do that. That would mean I would have to get in a routine before I am old.; September 21, 2008 at 11:18 PM
Elizabeth said...: That gave me a good laugh remembering that race. Good job for keeping it up!; September 22, 2008 at 2:23 PM

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Spotlights

Fall Felt Flower Wreath
Try this tutorial site for how to make the felt flower.
http://junepfaffdaley.blogspot.com/2009/09/sweet-sweater-rosettes.html (I changed part of this method, see below)

Items Needed:
12" Styrofoam wreath
20 - 24 felt sheets from the craft store
fabric scissors
glue gun (with plenty of sticks)
berry sprigs, garland, whatever you can find for cheep

Note on flowers: After cutting the spiral I rolled my flower up with out glueing. I added a dab of hot-melt at the end. I did not put a felt circle bottom on the flower either. I just went with gusto on the glue and stuck it to the wreath ;) That's crafting my way.

Method: First I cut two and a half of my felt sheets into one inch strips. Spiraling the strips around my wreath I glued them to the styrofoam surface. Next I went to work on the flowers.

For the Three largest flowers I simply cut the spiral and then loosily "swirled" it and added hot-melt wherever needed. I cut three sizes of flowers (5 in, 4in, and 2 in) That made something like 8 large, 12 medium, and a gazillion small flowers (don't worry you'll need them). After making all my flowers I went about arranging them. That's the hardest part for me. AND the nice part for you since you can put them anywhere you want. In the end I decided I wanted My focal spot to be the bottom right "corner" of the wreath.

I started with gluing the three large flowers first. I then snipped off a few berry's and glued them in the centers. Then I just worked out from there, using the 5in flowers to get me going out away from the focal flowers. Because I used five colors in my wreath (sage green, berry, tan, chocolate, and mustard) I tried to not only work with the right size where I needed it but also tried not to have the same color ever touching. With five colors it was easier to accomplish this than I thought. One thing I learned was to periodically lift my project up to make sure I was covering enough surface area that I didn't see the skin of on the inside or the outside of the wreath.

Voila! Ready to hang.