My announcement...

In addition to Polka Dot Potato, I'll soon be selling at Digital Scrapbook Pages, aka Digitals! I'm very excited about adding Digitals. It's a fabulous store with lots of fun people, great challenges, and super digi stuff!

I was super busy yesterday working on a rush scrap-for-hire job. Photoshop was throwing fits, so I decided to switch to Photoshop Elements to make the pages, and it worked! I finished the job last night at around 10pm. I need the customer's final approval, then I am working with her printer that wants the file in .pdf format. Of course, I've heard of .pdf file format before, but I've never heard a printer ask for a .pdf. Interesting! This is for a school yearbook project.

I'm going to spend the rest of the week settling into Digitals and trying to figure out what is wrong with Photoshop interacting with my computer.

Have a fabulous day!

Works for me Wednesday...Digital Scrapbooking!

Works for me Wednesday bloggers can be found at the link at the start of this sentence.

So, what works for me? Digital scrapbooking, of course!

I have always liked the idea of scrapbooking. I loved reading about it, talking about it, and even going to events. But I did not get a lot of pages done when I was paper scrapping and I didn't feel like I was very good at it. (Remember that I am not very good at cutting a straight line.)

In one of my scrapbooking reading sessions, I was reading a special edition of Simple Scrapbooks about computer scrapbooking. My mother had gotten it for me because she knows I like computers and thought it might be a good fit. I read it with some interest but was kind of like, "Whatever works, but it's not exactly for me."

But one night, I was googling computer scrapbooking and found Scrapbookbytes, where I finally "got it". I could take my digital photos (which I was starting to amass A LOT of) and add them to a background, use my fonts and some backgrounds, and make a page. Then, I could make as many copies of it as I wanted to.

Here's the first page I posted online, which I think was  a scraplift of Brenda Kempf's page:

I simply scrap more when I digiscrap. So it works for me! I have been digitally scrapbooking for about 4 years and I think I've completed about 500 pages. That's pretty good for me.

Interesting in digiscrapping? Check out more info about it here:

Creating your first layout in PSE

Scrapbooking Questions forum at RAKScraps

Digiscrapping Tutorial site

I have a secret...I am adding another store where I will be selling my digital scrapbooking supplies! I'll tell you later, probably tomorrow. I want to make sure I'm all set for the big announcement! Just to be clear, I will be staying at Polka Dot Potato, too. I really love it there, but I also felt it was time to add another shop.

Have a super day, everyone!

One year!

Yesterday marked one year for me as a designer. I'm pretty sure that the first time I uploaded a quick page to Kathryn Balint's shop, that it was May 26th, 2007. It has been a wonderful year of learning the ins and outs of designing and online business. I am grateful for this past year, and am looking forward to this coming year.

I have interesting plans I want to tell you about for my one-year celebration, but I will tell you in a few days. I am still waiting for a couple of things to fall into place.

I would also love to share pictures with you, but that would mean getting them off of my memory card, which would mean moving things off of my hard drive to my EHD or a DVD, and I am so bad at putting that off!

So, for this Tuesday-that-feels-like-a-Monday, I will leave you with this blog meme I found: Take 5 Tuesday.

5 things you do every morning

1. Spend some time reading the Bible or doing Bible Study (but I admit, I didn't yesterday.)

2. Write up my blog post if I haven't the night before (you'll be able to tell if I did - I usually have the ones I write the night before post at 3:00 AM)

3. Check my e-mail

4. On school days, I alternate between making lunches super early and making them right before we have to leave.

5. Check my Google Reader, and the new posts on a few forums. I use Mozilla Firefox and have several permatabs for this purpose. I found, though, if I un-permatab one that's very active and really easy for me to read too much (like DST), and make myself type in the address in the address bar, that I'm less likely to check it too many times a day. Saves lots of time!

Hope you have an excellent Tuesday!

Enjoying time with my family...

Hope that you are too!

I plan to show you fun pics from this weekend tomorrow. But in the meantime, don't forget to check out the one-day sale at Polka Dot Potato! Everything in my store is 35% off! Sale prices will show up in your cart.

Have a great Memorial Day!

So hard not to eat all that chocolate...

I spent a little bit of time yesterday working on the party favor for the Volunteer Appreciation Dessert that is happening Sunday at church. This is what I went with:

Char from Digiscrapchat is part of a candy wrapper business called Delight Designs/Heavenly Promises. She sent over enough foil sheets (which is such a nice touch now that Hershey's has the vacuum-sealed wrappers) and wrappers (on super nice paper) to wrap up 48 chocolate bars. The instructions had some very helpful tips with it that made the wrapping turn out nicely. Thank you, Char!

What is with this weather? It rained yesterday in the afternoon, and I even saw a little bit of lightning. Not usual for this time of year!

We are settling in for a long weekend here. It's Memorial Day in the US, and the girls have Monday off of school. I need to make some plans so I'm not getting a chorus of "I'm bored" from the kids! I guess this will be a trial run for the summer.

In shopping news, here is Polka Dot Potato's sale announcement:

So get planning this weekend and shop on Monday! Sounds like a plan to me!

Still waiting for my Bind-it-all. I realize now it is coming Parcel Post, so I can stop stalking the UPS guy, LOL! I think I will e-mail the seller if it doesn't come by tomorrow. It has been 2 weeks.

Hope you have a super weekend!

It's time!

I'm Queen of the Day today! Hooray! Check out the thread in the forum here: http://www.digishoptalk.com/boards/forumdisplay.php?f=12 

I'm not sure that it will be posted super early in the day, so you might need to check back a little later in the morning.

The scheduled blog post thingy by Blogger is working well! I can even still write in Windows Live Writer, set the "publish date" at the bottom of the page, and it works!

I found a blog meme called Friday Fill-in. Here are my answers (using last week's questions).

1. There is absolutely NO way you can get me to go on a reality show.
2. 100 degree plus day this week reminds me that summer is almost here!
3. I cannot live without my laptop.
4. Joining a gym (eventually, not now) and good sushi are two things I'd like to try.
5. When life hands you lemons ask if you can trade for oranges.
6. Family vacation is my favorite childhood memory.
7. And as for the weekend, tonight I'm looking forward to watching a movie, tomorrow my plans include scrapping and Sunday, I plan on going to church!

Have a great weekend!

Guess what?!

Tomorrow I will be Queen of the Day at DST! It's in this forum here, and come tomorrow, you should be able to check out my thread - there will be a little goodie in there for you.

I am still waiting patiently for my bind-it-all to travel from Florida to California. It has been about 10 days, but I didn't pay for speedy shipping, so this is to be expected. I have end-of-the-school-year things I want to do with the machine, so I'm hoping it will come today! Or tomorrow! Either is fine with me.

I don't feel like I've blogged enough pictures lately, so I'll put up an oldie but a goodie:

Me on my third birthday. Aren't I a cutie? I have scrapped this picture before, but I still like it (and probably could scrap it again!).

The 2peas blog prompt from yesterday was:

Why is creativity important? I think that you will hear a lot of people say that it is an outlet for them, and I think that is true for me, too. When I am creative, I think that I get something special from the process and the end result. I'm also of the opinion that being creative and using your gifts can be a great way to bring glory to God.

Today, DH and I are going to watch National Treasure 2, and maybe get a date shake. Not everyone knows what a date is - I'm not sure I was too familiar with them before I moved to the desert - but they are grown plentifully around here. In fact, our county fair is called "The Date Festival". Anyway, date shakes are very good - really, once you add all that ice cream to it, it's bound to be tasty!

Have a great Thursday, everyone!

Wednesday already!

It just happens to be Wednesday, and I know that many people do a "Works for me Wednesday" post. So I'll tell you what works for me for a personal finance program. I'm not affiliated with it in any way - I spent some time on Monday researching what would "work for me".

I have used Quicken & Money in the past, but I don't have disks for them anymore, and I didn't want to go buy them. I used a simple Excel spreadsheet to track my checkbook, but I'd have to hand enter each post. So I searched for a totally free program and found this: Metalogic Finance Explorer. It is intuitive in certain areas (not too hard to learn how to import your downloaded files from your bank) and not intuitive in others (had to figure out how to delete their sample accounts, and, it really wants you to only look at one month at a time. Which I think is a great discipline, but I'm not sure how great that is when I want to look at the year as a whole.

Anyhow, it is a nice little program, and it is free.

Onto other news...

If you missed out on picking up on my items from the Potato Bar, I have re-packaged them and put them in my store. My most favorite one is this:

Vintagely Framed Mini Kit

I have lots of cleaning and catching up plans for today - hopefully I will get bunches done!

Have a great Wednesday!

P.S. I'm actually writing this the night before and trying out Blogger's new scheduled post feature. Since I'm a West Coaster, I thought I'd try posting it at 3:00 AM so it would be posted when the East Coast folks wake up. Hope it works out!

Happy Birthday to Kathryn!

It's Kathryn Balint's birthday! Leave her some love here!

Not much going on today besides that. I need to work today - and I get to do some fun things with that. I'm planning a Volunteer Appreciation Dessert for this next Sunday. I'm giving wrapped candy bars as favors, so I get to design the wrapper today and get those printed. I also need to go pick up what I can for the dessert - the stuff that won't spoil yet, anyway!

The girls are going on a field trip today, and for once, I don't have to drive (but had to pay for the privilege of not doing it - everyone's paying extra for the bus). 

Tomorrow, I think I will tell you about the nifty little free personal finance program I downloaded yesterday. I've been trying to keep track of things in Excel, but this does a better job for me. I tried something like Windows Live Accounting, but it wasn't very intuitive. This one worked a lot better.

Have a great Tuesday, everyone!

It's been one year?

Almost! I started selling quick pages at Kathryn Balint's store last year - I am so grateful to her for my start. So, I am in the middle of planning an anniversary celebration. I'm hoping to announce it next week. Check back for more details!

It's also almost been a year since we moved to this house across town. I really love living here! I am looking forward to it being a year so we can get on average payments with the electric company before the summer electric bills start coming in (gulp!)!

So today is Give me Five Monday. Last week's entry on favorite candy earned me one Google search result for lick-a-stick. Funny. (I can tell how many people look at my blog and how they get there by installing code from here: http://www.statcounter.com/.) I'm reaching into the archives of her site for this one:

Give Me Five favorite things to do in your favorite season of the year.

Well, my favorite season in the desert is spring - it would be like a lot of people's mild summers, I think. Because summer out here is just plain HOT. We had some guests from out of town yesterday - missionaries that we just met - and I told them at 100 degrees, I just can't agree that it's hot yet. Because it will get 20 - 25 degrees hotter than this! I'm sure that people that live in cold climates do the same thing with the cold.

Don't get me wrong - I love the desert, and the wonderfully mild winters!

What I like to do in the spring:

1. Not run the air conditioner or the heater!

2. I'd have to say that one of my favorite things when the weather is just right is to take a nap on a chaise lounge! It's so wonderfully cozy.

3. Get to wear one of my long-sleeved shirts occasionally. I try not to stock up too much on these because I just don't need them, but it's really nice to be able to wear them!

4. Admire others' gardens - I just don't have a green thumb.

5. Watch the end of hot air balloon season - it's mostly during the winter, but they still fly balloons for part of the spring, I think, before it gets too windy.

Have a wonderful Monday, everyone!

A layout to share

I made 2 layouts yesterday! One I shared in yesterday's post. Here's the other one.

Everything is from KB and Friends. (Find more detailed credits here.)

I am loving Pioneer Woman's Photography Actions. If you have Photoshop (not PSE, sorry!), you will want to pick up her free set of actions. I used "Fresh and Colorful" and "Quick Edge Burn" on the photos in the layout above.

I've started going through a Bible Study that my friend Laurie and I are going to discuss via phone once a week. It's this one by Beth Moore.

To Live is Christ

I used to be in a Bible Study once a week that met on campus, but it doesn't meet anymore. I really miss the accountability of digging deeply into God's Word each day. This study helps me do that!

Have a great Sunday, everyone!

Spring musical

 

Spring musical - Gallery

Twice a year, the girls' school puts on a musical. It was set at a camp, and I offered to make a simple camp logo, so that's what was on the t-shirts of every elementary student that night. That was fun to see!

I also got these shots - they do hand motions to most of the songs.

(No, I didn't burn the edge in Photoshop - I was actually shooting the picture between two people.)

We've already been out and back today - the local 4-H club was having their produce sale. This was our first time attending one of these sales, and we picked up lots of goodies - acorn squash, grapefruit (the size of your head! OK, not quite that big, LOL!), corn, grapes, watermelon, and dates. The girls are interested in joining 4H so I will be looking into that.

We are all trying to move a little bit more in our family, so we are looking into classes. DD#1 is interested in gymnastics and DD#2 is really excited about ballet. Now to figure out how to budget for these classes!

We have a 50th birthday to go to tonight - my friend, Debbie, is celebrating this milestone birthday. She's the one who I made the arrow album for. No one that knows me will be surprised that I have already given her the album. I am horrible at waiting to give people their presents! But sometimes I have given scrapbook pages as presents, and then I haven't gotten to see people open them (or even heard from them that they liked it ). So when I had breakfast with Debbie earlier this week, I gave it to her, and I got to see how much she liked it! So much fun.

Well, I need to go get the rest of the day planned. I would really like to kick back but feel like I should do something...like mop!

Have a great Saturday!

New templates!

Want to make a quick brag book for a friend or family member? Or maybe you're a designer who wants to make a quick page set the easy way.

Brag Book 2 on sale for $1.99!

Brag Book 3 on sale for $1.99!

I released set #1 a while ago...if you haven't picked it up, and you'd like to get all 3 sets, I have a bundle deal going on for you!

Bundle set - on sale for $5!

These are also OK for scrap-for-hire, as are all of my products at Polka Dot Potato.

I'm off to plan my grocery shopping trip. I will be back tomorrow with pictures from the girls' spring musical from last night. They were so cute in it!

Potato Bar still on for a little bit!

It was supposed to end last night - Ashley will probably take it down this morning. So shop while you can!

My Potato Bar

Apparently I made people cry yesterday with the Matt, Liz, and Madeline link. Sorry! (Especially you, Mitzi!)

Quick meme so I can go and package up items - I have been procrastinating that.

There's this site that compares your age to songs & other rock n' roll events. It was sort of weird reading through it as it seemed like a soundtrack to my life! Maybe not my favorite songs, but I definitely knew all the songs!

When these songs were topping the charts
and these events occurred your age was:

I Shot the Sheriff, Eric Clapton: 1
Silly Love Songs, Wings: 3
Elvis Presley Dies: 4
Do Ya Think I'm Sexy, Rod Stewart: 6
Another Brick in the Wall, Pink Floyd: 7
John Lennon is shot to death: 7
MTV makes its debut: 8
Who Can it be Now, Men at Work: 9
The recording of We Are The World: 11
Walk Like an Egyptian, Bangles: 13
Didn't We Almost have it all, Whitney Houston: 14
Back In The U.S.S.R. is released exclusively in Russia: 15
Nothing Compares 2 U, Sinead O'Connor: 17
Emotions, Mariah Carey: 18
Fleetwood Mac perform at Bill Clinton's inauguration: 19
The Sign, Ace Of Base: 21
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum opens: 22

OK, now off to package things up. I'll show it to you tomorrow!

Around the internet

I thought I'd share some of my links today. Some of them are blogs that I recently started reading after a "what blogs do you read" thread at DST.

matt, liz and madeline

It will make you cry everyday. It's the story of a new widower with his 7-week old. Warning: there is a little language in every post.

I've Paid For This Twice Already

This person's journey through debt reduction and saving money.

Money Saving Mom

Deals that can be had through coupons and creative shopping. I'm especially intrigued on the CVS deals, but I have to sit down and figure it out.

Somewhat Muddled Musings

I mention this because my friend Darcy recently (re)started her blog, and now you can order custom fonts off of it. And here's a great teacher's gift idea:

Lifehacker

I pick up at least 2 great tips each week about must-have applications or solutions.

 

Also, there's a giveaway here at another blog for 2 e-books - one on breakfasts, and one on ideas on fruits & veggies:

http://heavenlyhomemakers.com/blog/giveaway-time-two-new-healthy-recipe-e-books

I'm hoping to win the fruit & veggies one - I can use all the ideas I can get!

Today, I think I'll do some cleaning after having breakfast with a good friend! I also want to sit down to think about my priorities instead of just running off in my usual million directions.

Have a great Wednesday!

Watching the Survivor finale...

I read too many blogs today...I know who won! But it doesn't really matter. I didn't watch this whole season, but it's fun to just watch the last one because they have that mega-long recap.

The O-wires for my bind-it-all came yesterday - now just waiting for my bind-it-all to come!

Onto the brag book quick pages available now in Angela's stores!

 

Scrapdish

and should be available soon at:

Digital Freebies

Digitals

I had so much fun making these! Ultimately, I knew I would be making my own album with these pages, so I made them extra special.

Pick these up to make your own teacher gifts! Mine are all getting printed and I'm just waiting to get them bound up and given away! Seriously, it took me as long to pick out pics as it did to use these quick pages.

I feel the need to get organized to make sure I'm not forgetting anything! Lots of stuff happening this week - a musical at school, summer planning going on at work, and needing to get the Potato Bar re-packaged and a couple new items in the store. I might actually use pen and paper to write down a list - gasp!  

Speaking of the Potato Bar, the last day to pick up the Potato Bar items is Wednesday! The items will still be available (after I put them back in the store), but not at these super bargain prices!

Shop my store here.

I added my Twitter badge and Facebook badge last night - there's one on either side of my blog. Twitter seems interesting, and very handy for updating my Facebook profile "what I'm doing" thingy at the top of the page (once I installed an add-on in Facebook). I also added a Firefox plug-in that allows me to Twitter using the address line in the browser. Very handy!

I hope you have a great Tuesday!

I finished an album!

How frustrating not to be able to share it with my blog readers! But I don't feel free to share pictures of DD2's classmates on my blog, so I'll just show you the kit it was made with.

And the brag book will be available very soon! Angela's putting them in her stores, and I'll show you the previews when she posts them.

I am getting 4x6's printed for the teacher and us, and then I put 4 2x3 pages on a 4x6 so that I could make a (really!) mini album for her classmates. The prints for 4x6 albums would have cost too much. Now I'm just waiting on the bind-it-all and the coils to arrive in the mail!

Mother's Day was great! The extra presents the girls gave me when I got up were chocolate (yum) and candles (smell so good!) DH put the TV stand together, but we're going to wait until the swivel turntable comes for the TV to get it all set up. I made a Del Taco/ice cream run for dinner, and I spent most of the day scrapping the album.

I found a blog meme called Give me Five Monday. I'm going to take one from her archives and blog on that today.

Five favorite candies of all time

1. Dove milk chocolate bar. I am craving one right now just blogging about it!

2. Lick-a-stick. Not a current fave, but I'm remembering being in second grade and dipping the sugar stick into the flavored sugar, and just being so happy! Now, the thought turns my stomach a bit.

3. Caramello. Chocolate & Caramel - how can you go wrong with that combo?

4. Jawbreakers. Now, I try not to eat these too often anymore as I am afraid I will break a crown. How's that for feeling old?

5. Milk Duds. Interesting & stupid story here. I hid some in the freezer from the kids a couple of years ago, and did not wait for them to defrost. (duh!) And hence, I broke a crown. Ouch, and so embarrassing.

Well, it's lunch making time, so I better run. Have a wonderful Monday!

Happy Mother's Day!

Especially to my own mom and my mother-in-law, Happy Mother's Day!

I didn't blog yesterday - I was working on the quick pages I was making for Angela Sharrow - they're all done! They should be in the store by tomorrow. I made them with her School Days kit. It's a brag book of over 20 pages - perfect for a little album to give to your child's teacher, or to make a little keepsake album for your child!

Right now, I am using it to scrap an album for my youngest daughter's teacher. I really hope she will enjoy it.

After scrapping, we had a bowling birthday party on one end of the valley, followed by a wedding on the other end of the valley. Dave did the ceremony, and he forgot to tell the groom to kiss the bride. Oops! They ended up kissing, anyway. My role at the weddings is to get the marriage license signed, which is not a huge deal, but I end up sounding uptight when having the witnesses sign the license. "Do not abbreviate. Write legibly. Do not cross mistakes out." If there is a mistake, then it can delay them getting their marriage certificate, so I try to get it done right the first time.

Want to see what I got for Mother's Day? Actually, there will be a few more little things when the girls wake up, I'm told, but this is what I got with a gift sent along to me for Mother's Day:

Bind it all

After using my mom's machine last week, I was hooked. I am planning on using it to bind the book for DD2's teacher, and I was thinking of making wallet-sized picture of the same book to give to her classmates. This will be perfect.

And DH wanted to give me a TV stand for our bedroom TV - our TV is on a kitchen cart. We got this one from Wal-mart.

Cool plasma TV not included . I also got a swivel turntable for the TV off of eBay. Our bedroom was originally 2 smaller rooms in this house, but the original owner made it into one big room - so it's big enough to have a little sitting area. So we can swivel the TV to watch a movie before bed, or I can swivel it back to watch a little TV while I'm on the computer.

I think I'll go do a little cleaning (don't tell anyone - it's Mother's Day!) so I can enjoy the day a little bit more than having to pass by a dirty kitchen.

Happy Sunday!

Desperate Pastor's Wives....

and other books I bought. I had a gift certificate and a coupon to shop with - and got everything at a bargain!

I picked up these two books at the Christian bookstore the other day. I haven't read them yet, but am looking forward to the chance for some reading time!

I Heart Bloomberg. I love many of Melody Carlson's books, and this looks like a fun book.

Desperate Pastors' Wives.  I imagine I'm going to get a few weird Google search results out of listing this, but I really want to read this novel! I'm married to a pastor. I'm sure there will be characters with whom I can identify in this book. Really, though, we are really blessed to be at our church, and I don't feel like a Desperate Pastor's Wife - more like a stressed-out mom just trying to keep it all together!

I don't have any projects to share with you today - I am working on a set of brag book pages for Angela Sharrow and while I'm at it, a set of brag book templates. Since the book I am working on will be at least 20 pages, it helps to plan out some of them with my own templates. You should be able to pick those up in the next week or so.

Well, my virus program is updating and Windows keeps telling me I need to restart the computer because of an update (might be XP Service Pack 3 - hope it works OK!), so I should skedaddle. Have a fantastic Friday!

A tiny bit hybrid...

I added some ribbon, anyway! So I did a kinda hybrid project yesterday.

I am on Darcy Baldwin's creative team, and she came out with this:

 

Circle Brag Book

So I said to myself, "Self, let's make some CD layouts!", except I used a DVD because I have lots of those on hand, and only a few CD's. I felt like I need to keep those on hand for people that don't have a DVD drive. Hey, it happens.

But I digress.

I made these 2.

 

Memories

Smile

I placed both layouts on an 8 x 10 (since yesterday was free 8 x 10 day at Walgreens) and cut them out with this little beauty.

You put the finger through that handle thingy and it is supposed to be easier to control. If I still had my circle cutter, I wouldn't have had to buy this, but since I don't, and this cost under $4 from Target, I bought it. I placed my layout on top of the DVD (which was on top of the cardboard photo envelope - I didn't want to cut the carpet, but I'm sure I'm dulling the blade) and traced around it. It worked out pretty good. When I saw the photos, I thought "whoops! I missed that white piece at the bottom!" but it is actually glue.

Then, I used my crop-a-dile to cut a hole through the layouts and the dvd. I added a piece of ribbon from the $1 spot at Target for a hanger. You can see the finished product in the photos above.

Onto other news - today is a day with just my hubby. He has the day off today, and we cleared our schedules, so it's just us during the school day. Yippee!

Have a great Thursday, everyone!

I punched something!

With my Crop-a-dile, LOL! It's a scrapbooking tool that can punch holes and set eyelets in materials like chipboard, thin metal, etc. I bought it so I could punch holes in CD's, but now that I have experienced the magic of setting an eyelet (really, I giggled when I did it - it seemed so magical!), I'm imagining all sorts of other possibilities.

My non-Potato Bar items are still on sale in my part of the store at Polka Dot Potato. The sale will be over sometime this week. Also, don't miss out on the Potato Bar - this is the last week for those deals!

Inspired by Jessica Sprague, and too overwhelmed for a picture a day for a whole year, I am taking a picture a day in May. I want to capture some of real life as well as some artsy pics when I can. Here's what I've got for the first 4 days.

 

 

 

Today I'm hoping to get some things done - the library, buying some gifts (thankfully with some gifts cards I have - I'm trying to be nice to my budget!), and a little tidying around the house. It's nice to be back home!

Typical Tuesday...

After DH being for eight days, me traveling for a few of those days, and things being a little topsy-turvy lately, I am glad to welcome a typical Tuesday to my life! Back to work, back to school, back to life! :)

So, today I've found a blog meme called "Ten on Tuesday". Here's today's theme:

10 Places You’d Love to Travel To (That You Haven’t Gone to Yet)

1. I think I would like to go to a lot more of Canada than I've traveled to. I've just crossed the border in Washington, and New York. It would be fun to explore more of Canada, including Quebec. I took 4 years of French in high school - I've lost most of it now - but it would be fun to see if I could pick it back up.

2. Would love to see more than the airport of Washington D.C. I purposely chose it as a connection flight once just so I could pick up some souvenirs. Lame, I know.

3. I'm interested in visiting Alaska - but in the summer. :) I've never lived where there is snow!

4. I haven't visited any of Europe!

5. Would love to go to China, to see things firsthand. It would be great to visit Kimberly - even though we didn't meet when we both lived in the States!

6. If I went to Texas, I'd want to meet Darcy Baldwin and Ashley Smith!

7. North Dakota to visit my aunt - I've never been!

8. The Mall of America, because apparently, I'm not above planning a trip just to go shopping.

9. Would love to take a tour of the Holy Land in Israel, if it were safe.

10. I think that going to Japan would be great, too!

It was hard to come up with these - I live in California, which is where a lot of people travel to - and I've visited Hawaii, Washington, Arkansas, Virginia (almost forgot about that one - which is silly. I lived there for a couple of months!), New York, Florida, and Arizona. I've been in airports in 4 or 5 other states, but I wouldn't say that it counts. And I've been to Mexico.

I should get going - a lot to take care of on a Typical Tuesday!

Mini-arrow album

First of all, do you see the blog header on this blog centered above everything, or not? I see it off-center, but someone else sees it centered. I'm so confused...! I did a little blog makeover on my blog yesterday. I know just enough to be dangerous to my blog.

So, onto the other album I've made recently. I was scrapping with my mom this weekend (it just happened to be iNSD - we didn't plan it that way!)

Well, we thought that the Maya Road arrow album in a binder was the same size as the Maya Road mini-arrow album. Not so!

I bought this from Sweet Shoppe Designs:

Road Trip Mini Arrow Album by Dani Mogstad

I also used a star and the blue paper from the My Scrapbook Art NSD kit. The font I used for the poem was a font from Darcy Baldwin's grab bag at the digichick, DJB Kyle, I think!

This was the perfect album for my subject: the grandkids of my friend who is having a birthday later this month.

I didn't have a ton of pictures, but I wanted it to have a decent amount of pages. So on the left side of the inside pages, I included a poem by Thena Smith - "Only God could create a little boy". Perfect for this album. Thanks, Thena!

Here are the digi-pages. The arrows are pretty small, so they fit on a 4 x 6 canvas.

  Cover

 

Back cover

We discovered, after I had done the first page, that the arrow would not be going on the arrow album that we had purchased. It wasn't only the wrong size, the arrow album in a binder is a different sized arrow. Who knew?

So, Mom suggested the Bind-it-all she has. Those are pretty cool machines!

 

Bind-it-all

We needed a little something to put between the pictures - and since this is just a fun album that I'm not thinking will need to be around in a hundred years, we just used cardboard from a shoebox.

I was not allowed to do the cutting, because I can't cut a straight line.

We did the gluing and attaching, let it dry, then did the binding.

After that, we added some ribbon, all from Michael's.

Here's how it turned out.

Adorable, huh? We made two - I am friends with both the mom and grandma of these cute little boys, so I wanted to give them each one!

DH is coming home today! He has been gone for 8 days, helping his mom move to Arkansas. I have missed him so much. It will be great to have him home!

Albums to share with you...

I've been working on two albums. One I'll share with you today, and one I'll share with you tomorrow, or in the next couple of days. This one is for Mother's Day. Both moms have already received it, so I can show it to you.

First, I started with the Misty Cato's album I featured a few blog posts back.

Spunky Girl - only $3! (actually, I just checked the price - it's $2.21 right now! NSD pricing!)

And I made these digital pages...

 

 

 

Cute, huh? I really like how it turned out! It didn't take that long.

Then, I decided that I wanted to make it into a little book. Most brag books that you buy have way more than 10 pages. So, I decided to order a little flipbook from Wal-mart's photo center online. It wasn't too expensive - I think I ended up paying about $12 for both - but I did the in-store pickup. Shipping would have been more than the books. They arrived in the store 5 days sooner than the estimated time - that was nice!

From the previews, I could pretty much tell it would look like this. I wasn't thrilled with how small the first page turns out, and with the white border around the pages. The thing I didn't like most, though, was the printing on the back of the photo. My 7 year old asked, "Mommy, is that a story? Should I read it?" I do understand why it's there, but I wish I would have come up with something to mask it. Overall, though, I was satisfied with the product for the cost. Here's picture of the album finished.

Both moms loved it. I was so glad I made it! I might print another copy for myself.

For the actual NSD, I did a little scrapping and a little scrap shopping. I was able to finish a quick page book (which I'll show you tomorrow!). I also did some shopping with my mom - we hit a church rummage sale. I got so much for so little! We needed a new vacuum, so I got that and an electric broom for $10! They are both fairly new.

Have a great Sunday, everyone!