It's Monday and believe it or not, I am blogging 2 days in a row. I hate Mondays, but then if I didn't have to work on Mondays, I guess I would hate Tuesdays. But for some reason, today wasn't that bad. I guess because I got a good night's rest last night I had no problems dragging myself out of bed this morning. And as Mondays go, it was just another day at the office. But I couldn't stop thinking about MDS and what could I make tonight. My DH is gone tonight playing sheepshead and so I told him that tonight I was going to sit and veg and watch the Bachelor. Do any of you watch it? I swore I was not going to watch it after last week with the babe that cheated on the bachelor - but they sucked me in. Supposedly tonight someone reveals they are pregnant.

Anyway, a friend at work asked me if I could whip out a 40th birthday card for a friend who's birthday is Wednesday and so while I was sitting at the kitchen table watching the evening news and eating dinner, I grabbed my laptop and whipped out this card. What do you think? I'm off to my craft room to "hybrid" it up. So that's it for tonight. Have a great evening everyone and check back tomorrow. I'm on a roll - 2 posts in 1 week - whoo hooo! [Chrissy must be so proud of me.]

The weekend is over and what another busy weekend it was. Saturday night we had a going away party and today Peter and I did the Sampson Stomp at the zoo and then came home and have been busy all day long. Made a turkey and had a nice dinner and finally sat down on the couch at 7:45 PM. Wow - I'm beat. But I now have a laptop I bought for myself with some Chrismas mone I got and decided to play in MDS. And in the 45 min. I've been sitting here, I created this digital card. I'm telling, this is really addicting.

I can't figure out how to rotate this picture, so you'll have to turn your head sideways to look a it. I think it's pretty obvious which way it opens up. I'll bling it up and then post it here in hybrid form. If you're intrigued, start to familiarize yourself with digital terminology. Hybrid just means, digital and physical embellishments, like stickers, rhinesones, ribbon, and stuff all of us already have. I know you're getting sick of hearing me saying this, but COOL HEY!

Alright so I'm back already. I just came out of my craft room, now mind you, it took time to take a picture of this hybrid card and then download it onto PSE 7 and adjust it a little bit, but overall, what did it take me, about 30 minutes to put a digital creation into a hybrid creation. Check it out!

All I did was added my grey background card on top of a black & white checkerboard piece of background paper and then that onto a cream card. The card dimensions on MDS is a 5x7, but this actual card is 4-1/2x6-1/4". I then added an epoxy exclamation mark by Oh No!, put a black grosgrain ribbon across the bottom where the green border met the 3 elements above, added a little circle paper clip and finally, went and used by glue pen and added glitter to the candle on all 50 candles. How quick and easy. DON'T YOU JUST LOVE IT???!!!

Alright, so I know, I know, it's been way too long since I've been on my blog. I can't believe how much time this blogging stuff takes. I'll keep this post brief and let you know that I purchased My Digital Studio from Stampin' Up in November and played with a little bit when I was home from my foot surgery, but since then, I've really been able to sit down and play, play. Check out some of the cards I made this weekend. Peter's nephew's 2nd birthday is next weekend and you know how it is with kids, they won't remember for a minute what cards they got unless the parents keep their cards, so my first thought was this would be a cute card to create digitally and I don't have to spend a lot of layering and cardstock on. Well, while creating this card, I found out how to create a blank page and copy elements from my card to a blank document and then I can cut that element out and put a dimensional under it and raise it up. Such as the boat. There is also a feature on MDS (my digital studio) where you can put a shadow on an image and the computer makes it look like it's raised right off the page. I think I'm going to teach a class so you can all see how great this program really is. Don't misunderstand me, I have PSE7 (Photoshop Elements 7) and that is a very powerful program, but MDS is so incredibly user friendly and with a few lessons, you could be on your way creating cards right on your computer. I should add a disclaimer and say that I was worried if I started creating digital cards, then what do I do with the enormous amount of "stuff" I already have. Well believe it or not, I have found that I am actually using more little embellishments than I ever did before because now it's just a matter of tweeking it with a little bling. The star on the boat in the photo, Chris & I had bought these little viales of stars, flowers and paperclips, probably more than 2 years ago around halloween, I may have used 1 or 2 here and there. Well one of those little crystal stars worked great on my little boat. And I printed out another boat, copy and pasted onto a blank page, and walla - I have another boat to cut out and layer it on top of the digital boat. You guys have gotta see this amazing product Stampin' Up has come out with.

Here's a couple more pictures of cards. 1st one is a going away card for my cousin and her husband that are leaving for Memphis, TN next week.

The 2nd one is a 50th birthday card for a friend at worked that ordered one. The candle is from Big Bold Birthday stamp set and I just cut, and pasted until I had 10 across, highlighted all 10 and created a grouping and then copied and pasted that grouping 4 more times to create 50 candles on his cake. Gotta love that!

I'm going to head to my craft room right now and spoof this one up. Check back for more this week. This is very addicting. Thanks everyone for being loyal and still checking out my blog.

WOO HOO - Here is my first digital scrapbook layout I made using Stampin' Up's Digital Studio. It is 8.5x11" Let me know what you think. It's a very cool program that can be picked up fairly easy once you get the basics down. I love the shadowing effect you can put on things to make them look dimensional - look at the stars. The flourishes on the bottom are from one of their stamp sets. I do have to say you get a LOT with the program, but not as much as I thought. I thought it was going to be their entire catalog now digital and it's not like that at all. Here is a list of some of the things you do get:
(1) all cardstock colors including in-colors; (2) All punches (that you can make any size you want); (3) 4 different designer kits: Christmas; sunny day, Summer and birthday and all of the components that come in those kits, such as die cuts and borders; (4) buttons (not designer buttons); (5) circle brads in most colors; (6) eyelets; (7) stitching and staples; (8) grosgrain ribbon plain - no polkadots or stripes; (9) I don't know the exact number of stamp sets but I would say there are probably 30 sets available to use; (10) you can add video and/or music to your pages; (11) availability to make just about any size scrapbook page, cards, calendars and other multi media projects, such as posters. The only thing I've had time to learn is the scrapbooking and then I created a card, but I can't show it to you yet because I have to give it to Chris for her birthday since I am unable to stand for any length of time in my craft room just yet. So I'll try to post it next week; (12) background papers, quite a few, but I didn't see any designer papers, other than those in the scrapbook kits. And I'm sure there are a lot more things that I haven't even discovered yet. I went online to see if there were any digital downloads available to purchase yet and there are not. I'll keep you posted if anyone is interested in this. I would love to hold a class and teach you the versatility this program has, so if you are interested in purchasing the software, please click on the link on the right or contact me.

Also any fonts you have loaded onto you own computer you can use on your pages and any other digital elements you may have purchased from another designer can also be used. You do need quite a bit of space on your computer for it to run quicker. I downloaded the program to a new external hard drive I purchased about a month ago and I work off of that, so that helps but I also realized that you need a DVD player on your computer and we have an older computer so I only had a CD player. The good news again is that you can pick up an external DVD player for about $50. An option I could have had here was to take my CD to someone's house and my external harddrive and download it without the additional purchase of a DVD player, but ironically, we received a DVD from Peter's sister in the mail all about the Schweitzers and if we didn't have the DVD player, we wouldn't have been able to view it. So if you don't have one, it may be worth the investment to go out and get one. The external harddrive rocks. It is 1 terabite and I got it online for $100 thru Amazon. It's small, it's sleek and I feel like I have my own personal harddrive that I can put my photos and digital elements on and not have to worry about it crashing. If my main computer crashes, my hard drive does not - interesting hey.

So I've gone on long enough, I'd love to hear your thoughts about My Digital Studio from Stampin' Up. Is it something you would consider purchasing or is this something that you would never consider. We at Stampin' Up like to call it a Digital Paper Crafting Solution.

YEAH - I'm up and running with a new and improved blog. I can't believe first of all how badly I had messed mine up, but that I actually have a working blog with ordering buttons, and a slide show and everything. How cool is that?

As most of you know, I had some foot surgery a week ago and so I am off of work trying to heal. For some reason, I'm feeling exceptionally groggy today from my medication. So I'm not going to stay on long but thought I'd just post a quick picture of my foot that I took while laying on the couch.



I have a lot of halloween and Thanksgiving cards that I made this year that I would love to post to my blog - so maybe in little increments I will be able to get to that. Until now, back to the couch for a snooze. I haven't even had a desire to get up and create anything, so I am obviously still in the early healing stages. I thought it would take a lot to keep me down, but I haven't had any problem just laying around (and having Peter wait on me - hey why not use that to my advantage in every which way I can right?)

Let me know what you think of my new and improved blog

Testing the siggy

Weekend projects

So I finally had a free weekend - meaning we didn't "have" to be anywhere. I had a lot of things I needed to get done in the yard before winter sets in and as cold as it got on Saturday,I'm guessing that's not too far away. Anyway, I was able to play in my craftroom a lot this weekend and my goal was to use some of the stuff I had in my stash to make some halloween cards. I LOVE halloween - but mostly just love all the cute stuff out there and the colors - who can't love these colors.

But first I wanted to post the pictures of those home decor items I mentioned in my blog last week. So here goes, the one that has all of the fall words is hanging in our bathroom and the other 2 are in our back porch area. I'd love to hear what you think of these - but I think they are too cool and a great way to use up some paper.0

Waiting for a new blog

Thank you for everyone that keeps coming back to check out my blog. I am way out of my element when it comes to formating my blog and I realized that when I tried to take an online class to "bling out my blog." As I mentioned in my last post back in September, I am on a waiting list to update my blog. So please stay tuned and thank you for being faithful for coming back and checking it out.

I did want to pass along a little tip to you about how to use up some of that background paper we're all hoarding. I have a few pictures in my house that are just squares - they are flat on top and flat on the sides. They look like a 10" box but only 1 or 2 inches deep - away from the way. I picked up 2 of these a year or so ago at Pier 1 and they had painted flowers on them - one had a tulip and 1 had a hyacinth on it. Well spring has passed and I like to change out my pictures for the season and so I took a piece of background paper that I had and cut it down to 10x10 and put temporary tape on the back of it and stuck it to the front of one of the pictures. I wish you could see how cool it looks. I have 1 hanging in my bathroom above our towel bar and 1 is out on our back porch. When Fall is over, I will switch it out for a Christmas paper. When I was putting up the 1 on our back porch I saw that I had a little frame hanging next to it - I think it's 5x7 and it has a mirror in the center of it. I took a piece of brown background paper that had a large dark brown (tone on tone) magnolia and cut it down to 5x7 and put it over the frame. I then took a few orange rhinestones and placed them here and there on the center of the flower to catch the light and give it some depth. It looks great next to the 10x10 picture I have next to it. I'll try and post some photos of it when my blog is updated. A lot of you may or may not have heard of people "wrapping their pictures on their walls like Christmas packages" for the holidays. Well this is right along those same lines, only you don't have to wrap it around the frame - just set it on top using removable tape.

So think about using your scrapbook supplies for home decor. I know we've all read a lot of articles about using our scrapbook supplies for home decor and wall rub-ons are a big thing right now, so this fits right in there. I hope you'll try it out and email me a picture of what you've done. I've got a few other home decor ideas using the numerous amount of scrapbooking supplies I have, so watch for more tips.

Until next time, get those creative juices going. This weekend I plan on making halloween cards. I LOVE halloween - not so much the whole gouls and goblins thing, but the colors and all of the cool embellishments that are out there. So I will post some of my creations next week.

Hello everyone. It's been way too long since I've posted on my blog. As you may or may not remember. I was taking a class to "bling out my blog" and I kept promising an even better blog for you to all view my creations and read about my life. We I guess I'm more computer illiterate than I thought because I was never able to figure out how to "bling out my blog," and so it's been sitting. Have you ever started to work on a project and about halfway through it looses it's appeal and you just dread finishing it and so it is left unfinished. Well that's the case with my blog.

However, I am happy to inform you that I have found someone to help me with my blog. Her name is Michelle Laycock and she designs blogs. How cool is that! So I know she is very busy and my turn will come up any day now, but in the meantime if you are checking in once in awhile to see what's new, I apologize and hope you will hang in there with me and continue to check back.

I have been working a lot on little mini books for myself over the summer and have been making a lot of cards and selling them at work to friends who love my creations. I still haven't found a way to photograph them so they look as beautiful on my blog as they do in person. So many blogs I visit show you gorgeous photos of their creations. If anyone is reading this and has any tips, I'd love to hear what your thoughts are on this.

I am heading to Minnesota for the weekend for Scrapfest - more specifically, the Mall of America - and can't wait to get some great ideas from the vendors there and the classes I've signed up for.

I hope you all had a wonderful summer. It's sad to know it's coming to an end, however, us here in Wisconsin are finally getting some beautiful summer days, so we're not complaining too much about the gorgeous weather we've had.

Until I get back from Minnesota, have a great week and check back for my new and improved blog coming soon to a location near you.

Just thought I would touch base with all of you that come back and check my blog. I don't know why I find this updating my blog so frustrating. I can read an instruction and then sit back and scratch my head and go WHAT? But give me some stamping supplies and tell me to create something and I'm all over it, but give me something to learn on my computer and I'm like a fish out of water. So bear with me, I'm still under construction and hope to be up and running with a new and improved blog real soon, and if not, then I'll just start posting some great cards I've been making lately - at least I can handle that. Thanks for checking back.

I just wanted you all to know that my blog is under construction so please don't take me off of your favs just yet. I am in the middle of a "Bling Out Your Blog" online class and hopefully it will be fabulous by the time I'm done with the class. So thanks for being patient and checking back for any new posts. I have a lot of cards I made in the past week or so but don't want to post them until my blog is done.