And the 1st Winner is...

Cowchipper! Congratulations!!! I'll send your present(s) out in the mail on Monday and you can come back and tell people what you won! Because you're the first winner the prize is a little more generous! Plus it did get a little bigger thanks to your efforts!!! Of course there will be another winner at the end of March from all the comments posted.

Remember only one comment per person per day :)

Now to tell you about the garage sale at one of the local LSS' today. It was awesome! I was so tired yesterday that I nearly cancelled, but my friend Janie worked so hard convincing me and was so happy to see that I was ready to go this morning, that it made it all worth it! It doesn't hurt that I had a good time and that on top of that, I actually sold quite a bit of my older stock of things! Of course the deals were just great, if I do say so myself, LOL! Thanks Janie for driving, for helping me set up, for going to get lunch, for helping me when there were so many people waiting to pay, for helping me take what was left home, etc, etc, etc, as the King of Siam would have said! You were wonderful as always!

I called my friend Marie Laurence and her hand and wrist are doing great, but she had a terrible migraine today, and the pain pills did nothing to make it any better. So given that 6 hours after taking 1/2 pill she had no problems/pain with her hand but the migraine was doing her in, I suggested that she phone the Doc to see if it was OK to take something that would work on the migraine and perhaps even on the pain. Hopefully she reached him and is now resting more comfortably! If you want to see some pictures of her taken at the hospital, you can visit her blog.

For obvious reasons I didn't get any crafting done today, so I thought I would leave you with a picture that has been published and has won me an editor's choice award. It was taken from a cruise ship as we neared an island in the Carribean. The picture is entitled "Island Magic".

A Long Day

Well my friend had her surgery, but the day started in quite the rush. The surgery center called her and left a couple of messages last night, but she never got the message till this morning at 7:30. The messages were telling her that instead of showing up at 9:15, she needed to be there by 8:30!! Oups! She has a 45 minute drive to get there, so she got ready and then called me at 7:50. Now it's me rushing around so I can be sure to get there and translate everything for her and her husband.

Everything went pretty much as planned except that her husband hadn't planned on staying with her all day. Given that this was her first surgery and that as the "official" translator I had to sign as having received all the instructions for her care, I did not want her to be alone. So we told him to go to work and I drove her home and stayed with her till he could get back. I got home feeling really tired and still needing to get things ready for the scrapbook garage sale tomorrow. But I am so glad that everything went well. ML could move her fingers and that is what counts!! She also emailed me tonight to let me know that she is starting to feel the block wear off (think epidural for a wrist) and that she was good this afternoon and rested. For a while there today she was trying very hard to stay awake!

I also needed to get some cards done for the challenge on the RCS card challenge so I squeezed that in. I'll post one of the cards here. Yup and it's a Christmas card challenge to make sure that we have them done early in 2008! A great idea from my RCS pal Lynne!

I'm having some problems getting pictures uploaded, so I'm afraid the baby pages and the wedding pages will have to wait till I have more time! I just wanted to go ahead and post something so that those of you competing might get another chance to comment.

BTW, I plan on a monthly contest, same rules, so keep on coming people! I've enjoyed reading what you have all posted!

Today is Cram It All In Day!

OK, I know I should be working harder on the website, but I took some time today to do some must do girlie things like paint my hair, read some of my favorite blogs, add some digital kits to my ever growing and never used digital scrapbook library and of course I went to Curves. After having that knee replacement surgery in March 2007, I need to impress the surgeon next month when I go in for my one year checkup!

At any rate, I always enjoy taking a trip over to the Faith Sister's Blog and seeing what's up. There is always something inspirational to look at there and we can all use some positive creativity in our lives. OK so maybe it's not everyone's bag, but I for one enjoy taking a look from time to time.

I'm a big fan of Krystal Hartley's digikits, so I also went over to Polkadot Potato to pick up her Tweetie Bird Kit. It's just too cute! Of course, I don't have time to digi right now.

Tomorrow morning my french friend, Marie Laurence is having carpal tunnel surgery on her right hand and I'm the official interpreter. I recommended the Dr to her so it's extra important to me that she get the best of care and that her husband gets all the instructions needed to keep her comfy and safe, post op! So I'm happy to spend the morning with them to ensure that there are no communication problems. Saturday I'm selling some stuff off, or at least I hope to at the Whim-so-Doodle garage sale. So that will take care of most of the morning and the early afternoon. Sunday I have one of my S4O customers coming over to see the progress on her daughter's scrapbook which I am completing for her. The challenge here is to make my pages flow with hers. So I really need to get working on packing for the sb garage sale and get some more layouts done so that my customer is happy with the pages.

Oh and of course, I do have to eat, so off I go to McD's to eat a ceasar salad with grilled chicken! I am trying to be good. But I know that when I stop "trying" I'll succeed. To me the word trying is rather negative as if easily fortels that you expect that you might not succeed. So hopefully I'll come on here soon and actually say, I am now seriously changing my eating habits. All that gym work would truly pay off if I were to take modifying my eating habits more seriously. But more on that later, LOL! For now, I'm still trying, haha!

I'll post one of the pages from the baby album later. They are not my usual style but when you are scrapbooking for others it really is about what they want and agree to pay for. Oh and if you're wondering, I do have my customers sign a document where they choose to let me share their pictures and I do have permission to share this album. To me that is very important, especially when you are dealing with baby books.

More later...

M-C

Working Hard on the Website

Putting together the new Not Just Scrapbooks website is taking up a lot of time! There are so many aspects to it and I lost a week waiting for the provider to actually make it possible for me to upload everything to the site. There wasn’t a lot of incentive to work on pages that might never work. Finally we got everything squared away and I’m working hard to get everything up and running. For now I am a team of one so I hope you’ll indulge me.

I have to go back and work on links and see if everything matches up. I still have to add items in the store and that ain’t easy, as they say. At least now I can probably work on it a little faster, but more so in the morning as right now I am pooped and it’s 10:31pm my time. I did do something fun and booked a cruise for hubby and I to go on in August. It’s our first Carnival cruise and we are going to four places that I’ve already been to, but the good thing is we are shipping off from our home port so it’s only a 20 minute drive to the terminal. How fun is that!

Last couple of cruises I’ve actually taken my small HP printer, a TLC 6x6 scrapbook kit adding a few elements and scrapped the trip as it happened. I’m going to do that again as it’s so much fun! All I need is my cutter, a pair of scissors, some scrappy glue, a slick writer and some photo paper and I come home with only the last couple of pages to complete.

It’s not fancy scrapbooking it’s more like capturing the moment as best as possible.

Here are the front pages of those two trips.
The two books are filled with journalling, pictures, and in between the pages, the daily information sheets. I really like the fact that on the Ryndam we also got a daily news update as that will help ground the time spent on the cruise with what was happening around the world.

I know I promised pictures of my set up at home for my crop store, but I didn't get to that today. So I must apologize and promise that you'll see it all soon, perhaps as early as tomorrow! Meanwhile the prize for the drawing has grown a tiny little bit as a few people have trickled in mostly friends of April's! Thanks Cowchipper!!!

Will it be a magazine? A page kit? A mini album? something both bigger and smaller? Only a few days left till you find out who and what! I can hardly wait! Keep the people coming! Remember anyone that comes has a chance to win and the prize gets bigger the more people that come and leave a comment. One entry per comment and no more than one entry per person per day! Enjoy!

Time's a Flying

OK, so which one of you stole all my time away? Seems like I can never stay on yop of things! I forgot that I had a teddy bear show to go to. My first since leaving the Tampa Bay area in 2004. I met up with my teddy bear collector buddy Tami who I met while I was working for Arthur Andersen.

Amazing how small the show was as compared to the days just before the 150th birthday of the teddy bear. It makes you wonder if somehow the media has something to do with creating the hype that transforms a hobby from small to huge and then back to small again. Could the same thing happen or even be happening already to the scrapbook industry? Everyone that had gone to CHA said that this one was very poorly attended compared to that of previous years. It was also obvious that things were turning around based on the very small number of new companies in the innovation hall. What more, most companies had lowered their 1st order minimum and many were eager for business. Another trend seems to be the purchasing of one company by another, and I'm not speaking of the great absorber, EK Succes, but rather more like 7Gypsies now owning Chatterbox. This is not to say that scrapbooking is dying, but rather that the rapid growth of the past 7 years or so has come to an end. The hobby is now coasting and manufacturers are trying everything they can to attract younger scrappers.

I was going to post pictures of the store I have up for crops at my house, but that will have to wait till tomorrow as time did get away from me again today! I've taken the pictures, but they need to be downloaded from the camera, resized and uploaded to the blog and it is a little late. It will have to wait till after the gym and the visit of my scrapbook buddy. We are going to work on our itinerary and schedule for the 2nd annual Tampa Bay Scrapbook Treasure Hunt. We had fun doing it last year and hope that this year we will be even more successful and win the $1000.00 shopping spree.