Busy Bee Update - Mixed Media Piece

Wow!  What a week!  I do have a lot going on and I'm not really managing to catch up, just barely making things work...barely!  I promised one of my friendly neighbors that I would give her something to auction off at a fund raiser for a little 11 year old girl who lost her mom in a tragic jet ski accident on the Ohio River back in July! I actually just finished it, it is still drying! I hope that it makes a bit of money for this great cause!!

The flowers are all hand made. I just love making my own flowers!  I used a lot of paint, tinted satin modge podge, an 14x11 canvas, some Life's Journey charms. There is also a lot of glimmer mist used, LOL!

Coupon Post of the Week

Well would you believe this is my 300th post?  I suppose that if I were a post a day person it wouldn't have taken me this long to get here, but hey, 300 is still noteworthy, right?

Well how about these coupons for the week!




AC MOORE
Valid today and tomorrow only (Sunday, September 19th and Monday, September 20th) get $5 off $20 or more purchase. Plus 40% off any one regular item good till the 25th and the usual 50% custom framing. Click here to print your coupons!

ARCHIVER'S
Here is theie latest ad and their latest 30% off coupon! Did you know that if you can show the staff at Archiver's the latest coupon on your smart phone, they will will happily accept it instead of having to print a copy?

HOBBY LOBBY
Click here for HL's latest ad and here for this week's 30% off needlecraft Kits coupon! Really? Needlecraft kits? Stamping items are at 50% off and there is more but for some reason there is currently a problem on thier site, so I can't tell you any more!

JO-ANN'S
Nothing new

MICHAEL'S
Nothing Yet!

Please note that I will update this post if and when I receive anything!

Post CKC Update

Well CKC Cincinnati was fun and I had some really nice people in my class!  I'm not sure about working at the breakneck speed required for such classes. I know that it's expected, but that part of it, not having the time to really interact with my students, is my least favorite aspect! Not everything went as planned in my class despite the huge amount of preparation I did.  However, without all that preparation, there is no way my students could have finished their projects.  With the help of the class schedule, (there was no class scheduled after mine), we got enough wiggle room to allow the students to finish all but a few very minor details of their Sun Catcher mini-book! I want to applaud all of them for their hard work and kindness during the class! I'm sorry we had to rush through all of it, but you sure were troopers! If any of you wonderful people are reading this and you email me with your snail mail addy, I'll put a little surprise in the mail for you!  Really!

Sunday was all about tidying up the house and just chilling with my kitty by my side! As for yesterday, I had to deal with some family emergencies, nothing terrible, just time consuming, plus tidy up and clean the the scraproom and vacuum and clean the whole house in preparation for today's scrapbook buddies meetup!

So there you have it in a nut shell.  By the way hubby made my day this morning, he told me that he really, really is quite fond of me!  He is such a sweetie!

BTW, I wrote this yesterday and it seems that I was having issues with my computer. So, for some reason, the entry didn't post! Grrrr....

Coupons!

Here are the coupons for the week of September 12-19, 2010




AC MOORE
New coupons from AC Moore!  I guess I should go back to posting them as I get them. AC Moore seems to be giving out some good coupons that are only good on Sundays these days.

ARCHIVERS
New ad and coupons from Archivers!

HOBBY LOBBY
Ah yes!  AS 40% off coupon this weeks and a new ad!

JO-ANN's
If you got a new flyer in the mail as I did, bring the whole flyer in with you and get them to scan your address! This will ensure that you continue to have coupons mailed to you!

MICHAEL's
Michaels is feeling generous!  They have multiple coupons including a 50% off any regular priced item!  Normally that means that loads of items are on sale!

Bussy Bee Update!

What a fun but exhausting day I've had today!  After picking up Celine at her home, off we went to the Duke Energy Center for some scrap therapy! The CKC convention is in Cincinnati for the weekend and while today we shopped, tomorrow I am teaching my class.  We planned on spending two hours, so that I could go home and finish my powere point presentation for the class!  You never know when you are going to need those office type skills again!

So what is of such interest to Celine?  She really, really liked the Technique Tuesday class board.  I have to admit that I really like the color choices and techniques on this as well! 

However, we were only there for 2 hours, right? Well not quite, we were having so much fun figuring out everything that we both like and disliked that we stayed 5+ fun filled hours!

OK, I really need to get to bed... here is the picture of the little sun catcher who wanted to be a card and grew to be a mini-album!

Finally, below is the board that my class was publisized on just outside the convenion door! 

Thanks Pat for putting the board together.

My portion was a little bigger than she expected,

but she was gracious in letting me add my 12 by 12 portion!

THIS WEEKS COUPONS

Here are the coupons that I've gotten so far this week:

AC MOORE
AC Moore had a sale this weekend, but nothing that I've gotten for this week.

ARCHIVERS
Archivers has a new coupons and a new ad. The coupon is only good until September 8th. I was over there Saturday and they had a lot of new things in.

HOBBY LOBBY
Well I'm getting a little dissapointed with the Hobby Lobby coupons. I'm starting to wonder if they are hurting a little! This week's ad is far more interesting than their coupon. Take a look and let me know if you agree with me!

JO-ANN's
Did you know that from time to time, you have to let the cashiers at Jo-Ann's scan the address portion of the flyer you get by snail mail? If you don't they stop sending them to you! I haven't gotten any by email in a long time. Has anyone out there reading this?

MICHAEL's
Did you know that Michael's limits the number of coupons they give out? If you wait too long, you will get a message that says something like we've given out all our coupons! Honest! So here are the current coupons.

Do let me know if you've used any of the coupons that I've posted! We all like to hear what people are buying and any deals they may have gotten! Thanks and have a great week!

Giveaway - August Winner and New September Giveaway!

I used the Random.org generator and the winner is:

Number 9!  Shelley you have one week to contact me!

AND NOW FOR THE SEPTEMBER GIVEAWAY!

I will be giving away one of the following.  The winner gets to choose between:

The Limited Edition H2O Cricut Cartridge

OR

$25 worth of Scrapbook Supplies including but not limited to -

2 sheets each of the following Best Creations paper released at CHA Summer 2010:

Now the important stuff, how to enter! You must be or become a follower of this blog, and post a link to this giveaway on your blog, tweet or on facebook. You must enter your link in the Mister Linky and post a comment telling us where you've posted and confirming that you are a follower. Here is the Mister Linky box.

The winner will be announced on this blog on October 1st!  Good luck and please spread the word!

COUPONS!

Here are the coupons that came in this week:



AC MOORE
AC Moore has a 40% off coupon good until September 4th.

ARCHIVERS
You can still use this 30% off coupon for a few days until August 31st!

HOBBY LOBBY
WQell what do you know, HL is back on track with a 40% off coupon! You can view this week's ad here, which includes 50% off Spare Part embellishments, paper, wood mounted stamps, albums and xyron products amongst other things!

JO-ANN's
I seem to only be getting coupons via snail mail now! If you are getting their emails with coupons, please let me know!

MICHAEL'S
Michael has the usual framing coupon and a 40% of any regular item and 40% off certain artist supplies good until September 4th. Click here to print the coupons.

Have a great week and please let us know what you bought and what you saved using the coupons!

Busy Bee Update

First, let me just say that Charlene has been a godsend this week! She showed up and helped me before the Scrapbook Buddies Crop (there is a link in the right sidebar to the Scrapbook Buddies Meetup group) and she drove back here today and spent the day helping me label things and pack them up for the Cutting Out Alzheimers Crop tomorrow!  I quite honestly could not have done it without her! Charlene, you are such a blessing, thanks!!!

The craftroom looked like this before the crop. 

You can see that I had it back in some sort of order and ready for friends to come and have fun and I must say that our Back to School Scrapbook Buddies crop was loads of fun!  We were only four, Charlene, Julie and Tina, but we laughed a lot and actually got lots done!  Tina and I also discovered that the Meet Up iPhone app is amazing!  We uploaded this picture to the meetup site in seconds!  Way to go Meet Up iPhone App developpers!!

From left to right: Charlene. Tina and Julie.

I have to get up really early tomorrow, like at 6am, drive 45 minutes and then unload all the stuff I'm bringing to sell at the crop and set it up!  I hope that people will buy lots as I would be most appreciative if my load were smaller and lighter on the way home!  My wallet having loads of extra cash would also make my day! I'm hoping that doing it this way for this time will work as I'm basing it on having only a couple of tables!  I was going to bring a couple of tables, but oups, the van is loaded and I forgot the tables! I guess I'll live, haha!

Oh, one more thing, I got an email a couple of days ago from Josh at Giveawayscout.com asking if I would consider adding my blog to their website... you bet! They have a great listing of all sorts of giveaways in all sorts of categories! I know that I'm going back to look for places to go and win things!Linking is always good for everyone involved as it raises their online presence.  It's especially good for me right now since my latest blog giveaway for the Cricut Home Accents cartridge is coming up in just a few days!  Have you registered yet? For the details go to http://mccplg.blogspot.com/2010/07/win-home-accent-cricut-cartridge.html

Well night all!  Hope you have a great weekend and I'll be back posting on Sunday!

Coupons and This & That

I have a big week coming up!  Wednesday is the first Scrapbook Buddies meetup of the season and Saturday is the Alzheimers crop in Warsaw, KY at which I'm vendoring!  Then the following week is all about getting the final things ready for the CKC Convention  in Cincinnati.

As you can see from the mess below the kits for the CKC Convention are already being worked on and what a mess I've made...again! For some reason creativity and making a mess seem to go hand in hand for me!  But at least things are starting to all be in a place where they both belong and can be found!  Yeah for organization! More on that in a separate post!

If you know me you know I hate throwing out scraps.  All the circles and ovals are what was left between cuts of the other elements. Anything that could be saved as a strip was, as you can see below! So this is what one might call the marriage between the cricut, the old style punch and the regular cutter!

I do want to post the very few coupons I've gotten for the week! What is up with that anyway??? Since I do a search, I'm pretty sure that I haven't received anything from Michaels and as far as Archivers goes, they are still working on the coupons they sent out in the mail last month! Hopefully something else will come out soon as I've used my coupons already!  Whah! Whah!  I want more coupons, LOL!

AC MOORE
Here is your AC Moore ad and the accompanying coupons are here!  You can choose to take 25% off your whole purchse today or 40% off any one regular priced item.  Of course exceptions are in place as usual. But the prices on the Cricut Cartridges look really good for those of you who are near an AC Moore store!

HOBBY LOBBY
What only 20% off a regular item? Very strange! I wanted the treat and I'm feeling a little tricked! Click here to get the coupon and here to see all their weekly specials!

More later~~~

Wooops! Catch Up Post!

Well here we are Monday evening, (well it was when I started this post, LOL) and I've got so much to talk to you about! First I need to get back to Saturday!  I decided Saturday morning that I just had to go take a peek at what was going on!  After all, in the Cincinnati area, Stampaway is very, very big!  Now bear in mind that I am not, not not a stamper.  Do I have stamps, yes! Why? Because they are pretty! Do I use them? Well once in a while I do, a little more since I've moved here! OK, bcak to Stampaway!  As soon as I decided to go, I called my friend Charlene and left a message!  I'm on my way!  Hope you're having a great day! She called me back!  OK, you talked me into it, I'll be there and call you when I get there!

Let's just say that I was very lucky. I found parking just steps away from the door! Someone pulled out just as I turned the corner, yeah! After buying my ticket, I decided to staret downstairs.  A zoo I tell you!  A human zoo of people milling around! No space to walk and little air to breathe! After a quick walk around, I'm out of there! Well as luck would have it, I bump into Misses Tina, Gina and Melissa as I'm walking up the stairs!  Just as I'm saying hello, the phone rings. it's Charlene, she just got there with her hubby! I;ve got to get to Charlene, so I quickly say hello and goodbye to the three A's and go catch up with Charlene.  I explain that with her walker, she might be better trying upstairs, cause downstairs is very, very chaotic! We start walking and then I see him.

The Tim. Mr Holtz. It isn't that I've never seen him before or talked to him, or even that I don't already have a picture of him!  It's that he is actually doing a demo! Somehow, Charlene and I end up sitting down right near him. I've never had a chance to watch Mr Tim in action and he is facinating!  It is obvious he loves what he's doing!  He keeps at it far longer than anyone expects and then he hangs around the Stamper Anonymous booth and is still helping people! Yes he is a good salesman, but it is his enthusiasm for crafting that makes him a good salesperson. If anything, he impressed me more in this setting than he had when I saw him those two previous times at CHA.

 I was hoping that I could get him to sign a book for my friend Kenda.  You see it's her birthday and I want to get her something special. She is a multimedia artist and I wanted to get her something special. And I did, and he, Mr Tim did sign her book and wish her a happy birthday! OK, well I confess, I did get one for myself but that honestly was a secondary consideration.

I was also finally able to lay my hands on one of the T.H. flower dies, which I've been drooling over for months but was sold out everywhere I went!  Even at CHA it didn't see it displayed at all this time and I feared that getting it was a lost cause! Now I just need to take some time to use it!

Before I Take Off to Stampaway...

I wanted to share the progress I've made in the craft storage area and in the craft room.  There is a lot more to do in the craft room and a sort of mini sort by type in the storage area, but we worked pretty hard on this!

First you need to know that it was almost impossible to walk in the storage area and it was becomming quite dangerous!

Now it's neat and tidy! 
Behind the rack in the back are all my racks etc for when I go and sell at crops etc. The shelves on the left hold all my "other" crafts, painting, bear making and knitting/crochet. The shelves on the right hold my scrapbook items, mainly stuff that I need to sell!

Thank goodness I only had to work one day alone, though I did accomplish a lot in that day, and then Evan came back and helped me finish it off! We even took three boxes of teddy bears (all of them in new condition) to the local women's crisis center! It felt great to know that they would be going to people who would hug them and hopefully feel a little better for having them to love! Thank you Evan for all your hard work, I am so relived to know that this part of the work is finished! He even changed the lightbulbs in the garage and on the front porch for me!

As for the craft room itself, its come a long way from this on Monday:

To this:

but it still has a long way to go to even get back to where it was pre-storage area cleanup! More on that later!  Now it's time to go and see what all the press about Stampaway is about! Have a great day and weekend, my friends!

Working on my Scraps

What?  Working on your scraps?  What does that mean!  I can see some of you really wondering what all that means! Well... it means that I finally took everything out of my very huge storage closet and am trying to put it back together! With my usual luck though, while I had excellent, and I do mean excellent help in the form of my friend Tina's son Evan yesterday, unfortunately I just heard that they have a family emergency and Evan has to go out of town! Evan, Tina and family, my thoughts and prayers are with you! I hope your trip ends in a positive!

So I am now going to tackle what I need to do down there a little at a time!  When I moved last year, with my shoulder injury and subsequent surgery,  I pretty much had to concentrate on the more vital things and while I did set up the actual scraproom, we just piled all the boxes in the storage area.  Over the last year, I just pulled what was urgently needed and the place became a worse and worse mess. So since I'm vendoring at a crop at the end of the month, and getting serious about selling off my inventory, I'm working as hard as I can on putting things right! Though I hesitate to do so, I guess I should show you what it looks like now, with all the boxes all over the place. I bought 8 additional shelf units and 30 bins or so to put things back together! Now that is what I call a big job!

Oh My Gosh!

Wouldn't you agree that this is just a little overwhelming!

One more thing, if you are reading this, have you entered to win the cricut cartride giveaway?  Even it you already have that one, think of a charity crop or a friend that you could gift it to! Even previous winners are allowed to enter!

It a Coupon Post!!!

Week of  August 8 to 15, 2010

This week's internet navigation tip: It is always a good idea to use your right mouse button on a link and open the link in a new tab or window.  That way you don't lose the page  where you came from.
AC MOORE
They have a new ad and coupons! (50% off one item August 8 to 14 + the standard 50% off framing).

ARCHIVERS
Like they say, the coupons are in the mail, literally. They are doing free make-n-takes of three projects, ending today (Sunday August 8th), so that's where I'm off to as soon as I post this!

HOBBY LOBBY
Here is HL's latest ad, which is about 30% of Wilton products. It is usually easy to find this weeks store ad in the email but not this week.  I finally dug it out here and here.

MICHAEL's
Here is a link to the contents of the latest Michael's email I got this past Thursday. View their latest ad! Didn't see any coupons from them yet!

Well folks, like most bloggers, I love comments so please feel free to leave one when you come and get your coupons!