So with all of this creating and posting, I'm getting in the mood for a class. Have all of you see the cute little chipboard books that Stampin'Up is selling in their Occasions Mini catalog.

They are only $4.95 and you can get them in the shape of a bird, flower or heart. So how would you like to attend my class on Tuesday, 9th - 6:30 to 8:30 PM at my home and create a cute little "Things I Love" Heart chipboard book. Class fee will include: (1) chipboard heart book; (2) Designer Specialty cardstock (in Occasions Mini) and other miscellaneous items I will add to the class to create your own one of a kind mini book. We will only be covering 4 pages (hearts). The cost of the class is $20 and I will need you to reply to me at stamperwithdayjob@gmail.com no later than Friday, January 29th so I can pre-order the class materials from Stampin'Up. I am limiting the class to 7 students, so hurry up and sign up for this class as I'm sure it will fill up fast. As a bonus, I will throw everyone's name in a hat that signs up and I will draw 2 names. One person will receive the free hostess merchandise and one person will receive the free hostess set.

So I'm anxious to get together and start crafting again with all of you and look forward to hearing from some of you.

As a bonus to those who sign up, I will throw in the instructions to create this 4 photo display or candle holder for you to create with the extras from your materials.

I have also decided to offer my kits for purchase to anyone who would love to make these projects but just can't find a way to break away on a week night. The kit is still $20.00 plus shipping. Email me if you would like to order a kit to create at your leisure or maybe even give as a gift.

Hi everyone. Well as much I've been oohing and aahing over MDS (My Digital Studio), I still love all my stuff. I don't know if it's the feel of things and being able to play with all of those little extras or what. But I love my buttons and punches. This card uses the scallop border punch that you can earn free with a $50 order from me through Stampin'Up. The butterfly is Stampin'Up's punch as well, but that has been in the big catalog since it came out. I did however, punch first one in light pink and then a 2nd one using the clear acetate w/black polka dots that came with the halloween paper pack last fall. Punches work great with acetate and creates a nice layering effect. The red corduroy buttons are in the Occasions mini catalog and available now in this red or pink.

Here's another very quick card. The butterflies are made using Beautiful Wings Embosslits available now in Stampin'Up's Occasions mini catalog. The brown textured cardstock and a little rub-on in white is all you need to create this cute card. I did wrap some silver cord around each of the butterflies for centers and then attached them with a mini glue dot. I'd love to see someone else's spin off of this one.

Good morning everyone and happy Saturday and I'm glad to see you all made it to the weekend. First things first this morning, I finally trashed the rest of the Christmas cookies that have been sitting in tins on our counter. Enough of those and way too tempting to just eat one every once in awhile. Then I talked to Chris for a little bit and then fired up the laptop and poured myself a cup of coffee.



I had purchased some digital downloads from Stampin' Up yesterday and thought this would be a good time to download those. The nice thing is I can download them to my laptop and then later, when I take my flash drive over to my desktop and I have a few extra minutes, I can go to Stampin'Up's website and download those same things onto my desktop. You can download MDS onto 2 computers in your home and that applies to elements you purchase as well. One of the things I purchased was "The Write Stuff" digital kit because it has some tags in it with the curly label in the kit which I could duplicate by punching if I wanted to add depth that way to my project. The one thing I would warn though is to be sure if you are putting a curly label tag on your project, make sure you don't alter the size too much - or a little tip - punch a curly label out and hold up to the screen on your computer to see if it comes up the same size on your digital card as your punch size. When I create a card in MDS, I view it at 75%, but when I would be comparing label vs. digital, make sure you are viewing at 100%. So here's the digital card I made this morning.


Have a great weekend everyone. My company holiday party is tonight, so I don't know how much I'll be creating tomorrow, but who knows. I've got a few other cards I made to go to the club 10 hostess in January and I'll post those either later or tomorrow.

May you always have time to play and create something beautiful.

I'm baaaaack. Here is the card all hybrided (is that a word?) up.
Of course, there is a little glitter on the top of each hat on the tassle and then there is gold glitter paper on the band and top of the red hat on the zero in 40. The only other thing I did was I put white pen stitching on the 4 and the 0. Layered it with a scrap of red cardstock I had sitting on my table, then black and then on a vanilla card base.

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