Vote

My friend Jackie Smith is an incredible artist. She does the most intricate cards and they're gorgeous. I truly admire them. Especially since there is not a chance I'd ever have the ability or patience to do them. She is a finalist for the Heartfelt Creations Design Team and I urge you to go check out her blog at Stamping4you and vote for her. She's awesome.

In the meantime, I wanted to share a very simple card I made with one of my new Unity Stamps.

I Did It!

I did it! I finished Nathalie's first year. Well, I did that a couple of weeks ago, but yesterday I picked up all the pages from the Scrapbook Store (I always get them scanned; I'm paranoid about something happening to my scrapbooks and losing all the photos and memories). Then last night, I sorted them and got them into scrapbooks. That part always takes me forever, so I am so thrilled!!! Yeah. And today, I sorted the scans into folders so I know which pages went into which book and I'm ready to create again.



This scrapbook page is another simple one I did for my February Paper Pack Kit. I love that you can do the same design with different paper and cardstock and embellishments and it looks different. No one is going through your album saying, wait a second; she did that layout before. No one notices! And you go with what works, right?

Honey Pop

At the beginning of February, Tim Holtz showed off his February tag for his 12 Tags of 2012. On it, he showed Honeypop paper and I was totally sold. He used his die cut for it, but when I went searching for the paper, I discovered Inky Antics actually has stamps that they've designed to work with this cool paper.

I ordered a few sets and made a card for my last card class. I love how it turned out and it would be perfect for a kid's birthday!

Front:



Inside

Distress Markers

They arrived!!!!!! Well, half of my order did anyway. I don't know exactly what is going on other than my distributor ordered hundreds of sets and Ranger sent them 20. Yup. 20. How crazy is that.


But I got 5 "sets" today and I know I have some excited customers!! I wanted to do a quick video to show you how cool the White Picket Fence Marker is. It colours and you can't see it on the dark paper, but as it dries, it gets darker and it's so cool!! It's kind of like magic.

Click here to see a video demonstration

Quick Card

I'm falling behind again. Not totally due to work, but also due to the fact that I don't have very much to show. But I'm spending my day in the craft room, so hopefully that will change!!

Here is a quick card I made for my class last week. The saying is one of the new stamps from Unity Stamps and I love it!!

I Love You

A quick post from me. I'm just about caught up but I have to leave to pick the kids up from school in a few minutes.

Here is a page I created for my February Paper Pack Club.

Life Gets in the Way

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to create whenever the urge hit? Regardless of anything else that might be going on?? In my little dreamworld, that happens, because in my reality world, it certainly hasn't.

I have barely stamped or scrapped at all lately. This pesky little thing called work seems to be getting in the way. I have a pretty flexible job (I have my own company and do administration work remotely) which is so great. But when it's busy, it means a lot of evenings and weekends and it's been busy lately.

I did sit down and scrap on Friday though. Of course, I had to spend a couple hours cleaning and organizing the disaster that I shared on Friday, but I did manage to get a scrapbook layout started. Not finished though. I was hoping to finish it this weekend, but no luck. But it's just sitting there waiting for me. Part of it is that I think it's missing something and so I'm not terribly inclined to go finish it until I can figure out what it's missing.

I do have a card to share that I made last month for my technique club.

And, yes, those are Candi in the corners. I seem to be putting those on everything lately!!

Overwhelmed

I'm feeling overwhelmed. It's been a busy couple of weeks. I went to San Francisco for a few days and then there is all the catching up to do. Then work was really busy this week.

Combine that with the fact that I've received two boxes of product and have been picking items out of them, but haven't yet unpacked and dealt with them and it's overwhelming. I had my Quick Cards class yesterday and so my focus has been on making cards for that. On the plus side, I had some new stamps and new product with which to play, but my craft room is a disaster.

Costco had a huge sale on photos and so last weekend, I went through the last batch of photos and did my order. So, I have those to deal with now too since I picked them up yesterday.

My cousin is coming over today to scrapbook and I'm so excited. I REALLY want to scrapbook. I am so close to finishing Nathalie's first year. So close I can almost taste it. Like if I focus, I can finish in the next week. But I can't get to those layouts until I deal with my room which I really DON'T want to do.

I don't know why I let my room get so bad (well, I do and I keep thinking after each major clean that I'll never do it again), but then when I focus, I find I can clean and deal with it generally in less than half an hour. It's just finding the motivation to start the process. It's so much easier to ignore it.

But my cousin will be here any minute, so now is a great time to start. And hopefully when I get past the overwhelmed stage, I can get to the creative and blogging stage.

Here is a photo of my room as you look in from the door
There is a ton of new Candi all over the floor as I was sorting it last night. I have stuff all over all of my counters and my paper cutter.

Here is my work space. Yup, not working there. I just dumped most of my stuff from my class yesterday on top of the mess that was there from creating the cards for yesterday's class.


And a view of my guest space. There is a box full of product. My Big Shot needs to be put away along with a bunch of magazines. I'll probably move it to my spot so at least my cousin has somewhere to start.
I'm really hoping that tomorrow, this room will look a lot different. A couple scrapbook pages would be an added bonus!!

I know that this happens to most people. It's how we rebound back from it and get back into the groove that really counts though.