Tiny mountain flowers Stream under bridge in Gatlinburg
Birthday Girl
Bright yellow moss on rocks
Shadows and light
A mountain stream
Pretty zinnias with butterfly in Gatlinburg
Yellow flower growing in rocks
Craggy roots
Gatlinburg
Pancake Pig at the Pancake Pantry in Gatlinburg
The General Lee at Cooter's Place

Dad at Cooter's place

(Click on images to see close up)

Howdy Pardners!

Be it ever so humble, there's truly no place like home. I am so glad to be back! I've said it before and I'll say it again, I'm a bit of a home body. I worry about the chickens and the piggies while we're away. I miss our big fluffy water bed. I miss the quiet beauty of our little valley in Amish country. I missed the peak week of our tomato crop! Drew brought a huge bag with him to work today. We maybe went a little overboard on tomatoes this year! Oops...

We had a very nice trip, but we ate far too many high calorie snacks and I jumped right back into my workout routine this morning to counteract the week's worth of carbs and sugar. I've never in my life seen so many pancake houses. There's one every two feet in Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge. Folks in Tennessee must really love pancakes! I tried to be sorta good by having buckwheat instead of chocolate chip, didn't even use syrup. But let's face it folks, pancakes are pancakes and you might as well just slap them on your arse because that's where they're ending up anyway.

We spent a day at Dollywood, which was surprisingly light on rides and heavy on commerce. I made my family sit through two and a half torturous hours of time share presentations/strong arm sales tactics to get our Dollywood tickets at a 100 dollar discount. My husband was about to freak after the second closer was sent to not so gently persuade us to buy into a time share points system that magically changed parameters with every rep. I finally put my foot down and we escaped with tickets in hand. Nothing is ever really free is it?! The two biggest rides were closed so we settled for two rounds on the carousel, and a smattering of other minor but still enjoyable thrills. The park itself was really charming, but all things considered I'm glad we went for free instead of plunking down a small fortune. We have some fun Dollywood photos to share.

Our ‘cabin' (using this term loosely as it was more of a luxury retreat) was hugantic and on an incredibly steep cliff high in the mountains of Gatlinburg. I don't know what possessed people to build houses on these cliffs, that must have been quite an architectural feat! I couldn't really sit out on the porch because I'm afraid of heights, but I tried a few times to conquer my fear and enjoy the view. It had 6 bedrooms, four floors, TVs in every room and a hot tub, pool table and air hockey game, and I'm really sorry none of our friends or family could join us, but we enjoyed having a stress free, agenda free week immensely. The mountain views from the windows were incredible. What a gorgeous place. We dined at The Alamo on my birthday, I have no idea why there was an Alamo themed restaurant in Gatlinburg, but the steaks were yummy and it was a nice, quiet evening with the family. I can't believe I'm forty freaking five years old. When the hell did that happen?!

We loved the quaint town of Gatlinburg and didn't so much love the uber consumer vibe of Pigeon Forge. Dad took advantage of the outlet shopping to score some new pants that actually fit his newly svelte physique. I have to say that with all of the natural beauty of the Smoky Mountains; it seems counter intuitive to junk it up with cheesy boardwalk style "as seen on TV" shops and entertainment centers. I found it more than a little frightening.

We enjoyed a visit to Cooter's Place and each got some Cooter gear. If you aren't a Dukes of Hazzard fan, you may not know who Cooter is. Google baby! We were going to meet Cooter and get an autograph, for Dad who also almost met Luke Duke in NYC a few years back, but the lines were too long so we went back later that day for a swag buy. I scored a General Lee baseball cap and a matching "Breaker, breaker crazy Cooter on the airwaves" t-shirt. Yes, I'm that juvenile. Yee haw!

I've uploaded some photos here, the rest are on my laptop so I'll share those later on. Enjoy! Here's last week's TastyLinks^TM just a few days late. I'll be back tomorrow.

The Impatient Blogger Margot shares a project from her book Sparkletastic with Ana and Megan Araujo on this episode of When Creativity Knocks.

Stefanie Girard's Sweater Surgery You'll look fabulous coming and going this fall when you knit up this free pattern for a double sided cable scarf.

Layers Upon Layers Debe Friedhoff creates bottles of hope for those in need. "You can't sell hope!" Debe says. "You can only give it away!"

Crafty Princess Diaries Tammy has a new free metal clay project posted. This one is for the ID Me bracelet.

Craftside- A behind-the-scenes peek at a crafty world The glitter, fabric, fire and pens are flying this week at Craftside with cool lettering tutorials from Lisa Engelbrecht, lampwork beaded earrings, Modern quilt designs and patterns, knitting with fleece fabric and pictures of the Crafty Chica's Sparkle tour.

Aileen's Musings Meet Snaily the skateboarding snail, and check out the fairies in Aileen's gardens! Aileen has created free postcards for you to send to a friend!

About.com Cross Stitch Stitch this free Have a Spooky Halloween pattern to add to your Halloween decor.

About Family Crafts Did you know that September 7th is National Grandparents Day? Discover fun gifts you can start making today.

Madge on August 22nd 1964...age one! Check out that wicked cool carousel cake!

It's time once again to spread the linky love across the blogosphere. This week's edition of TastyLinks^TM is supersized and includes some tasty extras, happy birthday wishes and hearty thank yous! I'll be back on August 25th with a new round of links and to share some tales of our trip to the Smokey Mountains. So y'all come back now, ya here!

About Family Crafts Now is the time to start sharing your Halloween ideas and, more importantly, photos of your home-made costumes, jack-o-lanterns, and haunted decorations.

About.com Cross Stitch A Pattern-A-Day in August '08 continues. Don't miss the new free patterns!

Aileen's Musings Meet Fleurita the Flower Nymph, she's quite the fashionista! Learn how to create your very own flower nymph and enter her in OTM's Art Muse Contest.

Craftside- A behind-the-scenes peek at a crafty world Gear up for fall crafting with a chance to win a Crafty Chica Bobble head and her book along with her tour schedule, touching quilt stories, a free Halloween raven template with a paper and jewelry tutorial, a fashion illustration guideline for sketching your new fall fashions and how to sew a book cover just in time for back to school.

Crafty Princess Diaries Links are still hot! And so is metal clay. Tammy offers some ideas for making metal clay links and then incorporating them into an easy earring design.

Layers Upon Layers Come meet Angela Mabray, the Crafty Goat, as she shares her recyled art inspirations!

Stefanie Girard's Sweater Surgery Practicality wins at Sweater Surgery and the craft supplies get a new home with a freecycled wood shelf how-to.

The Impatient Blogger The Impatient Crafter^TM Margot Potter has a special guest in her new craftertaining video sampling! Jenny Harada comes to the little school house to share how to make your very own fuzzy monster!

Jenny Harada shares her visit with the Potter Family to film a The Impatient Crafter^TM video in this charming blog post.

The divine Ms. Stacy McQueen aka The Craft Whore launched her new website with links to all of her brilliantly subversive crafty videos this week. Go see! Love the Valley of the Dolls style bio photos!

My dear friend Jean Yates' son is in a kick arse up and coming rock band called The Ruse. Vote for them to win at the MTV Music Awards here: http://la. mtv2. com/. You can only vote up until August 24th, so hurry!

The gals from Porch Stories gave me a super shout out this week, thanks gals! "Our porches are places of comfort and confidence. This is our online porch where we tell stories, brag & complain, swap recipes, show off our latest projects, ask for advice, give unsolicited advice.... and yes of course... gossip."

Don't forget Tammy Powley has a free metal clay project from her fabulous book Picture Yourself Creating Metal Clay Jewelry on her Crafty Princess Diaries blog! AND! She's got another new book Jewelry and Beading Designs for Dummies available on Amazon penned with her pal Heather Dinsmore! GO TAMMY GO!

If you missed the QVC shows I had this past week, you can always go to the Suspicion marcasite jewelry section at www.qvc.com and click on the videos on any of the marcasite items and up pops the latest video with yours truly. I didn't even know that until I wandered over there recently!

Thanks in advance to my bestest gal pal Inky aka Fiskateers Agent 411 aka Rebecca Peck for inviting us out to Margarita Madness tonight! I'm really excited to see her and my other bestest gal pal the incredibly talented and ever fantabulous Ms. Robin Beam! YAY!

HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY BIRTHDAY to my dear friend jewelry making superstar Katie Hacker! Please go show her some birthday love at her blog!

Don't forget our YouTube video we posted here earlier in the week. As always, if you post it in your blog, I'll give you a Linky Love shower when I get back from Tennessee! Here's the url: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-kv_MF2HEM

Phew. Okay so we're off to enjoy some R & R and I'll be back next week, another year older and hopefully another year wiser. How in the hell did I get to be 45?! Break out the chardonnay, the birthday cake, the Botox and the vat of spackle! Madge is getting OLD!

xoxo
Margot McBirthday Gal

While I was out on Tuesday getting my hair coiffed and back to school shopping with my daughter, my website went down. I returned to find only two lonely emails in my in box and I knew something was amiss. When folks are surprised at how quickly I email them back, I explain that the volume of email in my inbox on a daily basis is such that if I don't email them back immediately chances are their email will be lost forever. Yes, it's that bad people.

I was scratching my head thinking that maybe it was just a slow email day or something was wrong with Yahoo. Then my mother called us to explain that she had emailed me twice and gotten a bounce back with a permanent error code.

Oh...that's not good.

Thank God for moms! If we didn't worry so much, nothing would ever get done. It took me a half an hour of poking around to find an actual phone number to call Yahoo. Is it just me or does everyone make it impossible to contact them these days?! Sheesh. While on the phone with a very patient customer service representative who was actually in America and not India (kudos to Yahoo for not sending their customer service overseas), we deduced the problem was with our website. We had it fixed and my website and email were back online by 8pm.

So really we're talking eight hours of no email. No biggie, right?

Wrong.

Yesterday I had no less than five people tell me they had attempted to email me on Tuesday. Who else emailed? Oprah? Martha? Publisher's Clearing House? The Travel Channel? One quarter of one day of email issues and I think I may have missed out on every golden opportunity I've worked towards for the past five years.

Damn.

I figured I'd post one last time about this situation in the slim hopes that anyone who emailed me Tuesday might Google me and end up here and give it another shot. What more can I do?

Email, the world's most highly imperfect form of communication has taken over my professional life. It is holding the key to my success or failure. One of my very important contacts in a new venture has a recently implemented spam filter that has decided my email is spam. This has me in a dither, what to do?! I tried emailing from my personal account, but who knows if it reached them. I mean let's face it, our emails may not reach their destination a good ten percent of the time and we have no clue. It's almost like sending out a message in a bottle. Then we sit around chewing our fingernails wondering why they've not responded or if they did and it got lost in the ethers or if maybe they don't like us and think us smelly.

I read recently that we spend so much time emailing people it's become the great modern time sucker. Probably closely followed by the text message, which is as far as I'm concerned like having a ball and chain around one's leg. People are obsessive about this texting, they're texting while driving, they're texting while conversing with other people...which is so far beyond rude it needs another category. It takes me ten minutes to text ‘OK' and quite frankly I'd like to keep it that way. We are far too connected and yet more disconnected than we've ever been. We have more pathways of communication, yet we have more communication epic fails than ever before. It's a conundrum to be sure.

We are going to the Smokey Mountains of Tennessee next week. This means no internet or computer for six glorious days. You can email me all you want but I won't email you back. Try not to take it personally, I won't email anyone else back either. I won't be able to approve comments or respond to them. I won't blog, Twitter, write on your Facebook wall, read your MySpace bulletins or participate in any form of viral marketing. I'll be sitting on a porch on a rocking chair sippin' some moonshine and pickin' a banjo. Then I'll be going to Dollywood and a few huge flea markets in search of some kick arse ephemera and vintage jewelry. We have an 8 bedroom three story cabin, but unfortunately none of our friends or family were able to come along. So it's just the three of us and our dog Mrs. Fellerbee. Our Amish neighbors will be caring for the pigs, chickens, tomatoes (which have cruelly waited to ripen until the week we're away) and watching our house to make sure all is well. Tomorrow I'll blog my weekly links and then it'll be no Madge until the 25th of August when I'll post more links and maybe a photo or two from our adventures and I will be another year older and hopefully wiser.

PLEASE DON'T FORGET! The deadline for 1MB or smaller jpegs of your Kewpie Doll Contest projects is due to my inbox by September 5th! margot@margotpotter.com

xoxo
Madge

When Creativity Knocks. Back at Winter CHA I filmed a segment for Ana and Megan Araujo for their new web show When Creativity Knocks. It just this week dropped on the site, I guess on Tuesday when everyone in the free world tried to email me and got a permanent error code back. Ergh. My husband said the Pope emailed 3x and gave up. I thought that was pretty funny.

So here's the video link for your craftertainment http://www.whencreativityknocks.com/craft-and-hobby-episodes/videodirectlink-22.html.  Thanks so much to Ana and Megan and best of luck with this new venture. I think it's a fabulous concept and they make a great team. We had a blast filming this segment.

I just found out yesterday that my idol Julia Child is even cooler than I previously imagined. It's been revealed that she was an OSS agent...a female spy! HOW COOL IS SHE?! She wasn't always a cook you know. She was a journalist. She got married and moved to Europe and she studied cooking in Paris in her late 30s. It took her ten years to get her book published (in her late 40s) and then the TV show deal came when she was 50! Which just goes to show you that it's never too late to do anything you can imagine.

When I grow up, I want to be the Julia Child of crafting! "With enough glitter, anything is good." Madge paraphrases her idol Julia Child

PS:
My friend craft and jewelry making guru supreme Tammy Powley has a free project on her blog today! Go see!

(Two quick pre-post heads ups: I've got 1-3am EST and 1-3pm EST Suspicion Marcasite shows tomorrow at QVC so I'll be back to blog again on Thursday! We're going on vacation next week so after Sunday the 17th there will be no further posts until we return on August 25th as I will be totally lacking in internet access! And for those of you who like to plan ahead, August 22nd is my most auspicious 45th Birthday, so that means only 9 shopping days left! I like ephemera, books, vintage jewelry, apothecary chests and other repurposable vintage storage units, craft supplies, sparkly things and shoes, in case you were wondering!)

Several weeks back I mentioned a special guest coming to the little school house to film a The Impatient Crafter^TM video. Any of you who read her blog may already know, but those of you who don't (who should by the way because she rocks and she makes the coolest kid food and plushies I've ever seen)...those of you who don't may be scratching your heads and wondering who it is. Today after an epic editing effort by my ever patient hubby (and me) we have taken one hour of footage and carved it into a little over 9 minutes of craftertaining fun and frivolity!

So without further blather, we are overjoyed to present the one, the only, the delightful Jenny Harada! Jenny is shows us how to create our very own huggable, lovable and not too stiff Moldy Cloud Monster! Insert the roaring of the crowds here!

Here's the Link:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-kv_MF2HEM

PS IF YOU TOOK MY SURVEY AT SURVEY MONKEY PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT SO YOU CAN BE IN THE RUNNING TO WIN THE BOOKS!