home away from home

We spend 3 weeks each summer in sunny Matlacha Fl visiting my husbands family. But our time there isn't all fun in the sun. 

My mother-in-law is part of a women's charitable organization called the Matlacha Hookers. Before you get too excited, they're based in a small fishing village and everything there has a fish/marine life/island theme. Hookers....get it? Yes, well...These ladies work together to collect school supplies for their local Pine Island Elementary School (P.I.E.), are dedicated to several local fund raisers, and offer support to a variety of other community causes. 

The Pine Island Fishing Tournament & Derby is a big hit for the Hookers every year! The event raises money for P.I.E.'s accelerated reading program and other educational tools. Events in Matlacha often involve event promotions on t-shirts, and for that you need a design that people will wear. That's where the McKee family comes into play. The ladies turned to my mother-in-law, Karen McKee, to ask her son and daughter-in-law (me!) to do the design. Shirts advertising and promoting the event have a list of things that need to be included in the design each year, such as "Olde Fishhouse Marina", the title of the event, and the number of hooks appearing on the shirt need to match the year they're on (pictured is the shirt from last year, the "17th", so there are 17 hooks pictured). We designed the shirt as a team last year, and we designed it together again this year. I do the cartooning, Randy does the font and layout, and it's worked out pretty well. We may not live in Matlacha Florida, but as parents who want great things for their kids, educators who give their best to kids, and folks who love the area, we've adopted the community as our home away from home. And who can tell their mother-in-law no?!