The Bragging CT

This is from last year - need to get a new one with the shorter hair!

I create for and have created for in the past some wonderful designers. A bug part of my philosophy in life is that surrounding yourself with quality creates quality in you. I still remember the warm smiles last year when I gave the family history books to my brother and cousins. Everyone was sitting down with their books and sharing them with their spouses and kids. That’s where I believe that giving is not completely self-less. I couldn’t pay someone enough to buy the way I felt inside. They were great gifts and the quality from Darlene Haughin, RC Mama Designs, Beckie Wallace, Tirza’s Treasures, Veelana Designs and the host of other designers whose purchased and free kits with kits designed by me, Digitalegacies Designs, all made that great gift and wonderful feeling possible.

Yeah, I tend to get warm and fuzzy in general at this time of year. Well, okay, there are those who say I’m warm and fuzzy at ANY time of the year!

I wanted to do some CT cheerleading, something for which I am also known! First off, Scrap Bird is celebrating its first birthday this month! They have some great games and freebies and the whole store is 45% off! They have great designers; of course, Darlene and Veelana both sell there! But in addition to my bias, there are other talented ladies with whom I worked before I retired from professional designing. Believe me, a 45% off sale is an EXCELLENT opportunity to try out a new designer!


At Stone Accents Studio, also where both of “my” designers sell, there is much holiday bustle! Darlene is busy working on the upcoming bog train. The Christmas Carol Blog Hop starts December 11. I was so busy last year that I didn’t get to take advantage of too many of the sweet mini kits when they were free, but I’m going to try to have some time this year. We’ll see how bogged down I get with baking! While Darlene is busy with the blog hop details, be sure to check out the sales in her SAS store! Christmas favorites like Dear Santa and Frosty are on sale as well as some of her other kits!

Veelana has a wonderful new kit at SAS!


Jultid is classic Christmas shades with silver, which gives a very classy touch! She is doing an advent calendar freebie on her blog right now with a new freebie created with Jultid every day until Christmas! Definitely visit Vee’s blog if you haven’t yet. The brag book pages are just stunning!

While I was working on some pages with the new kit, I couldn’t help but play a little. I came up with a Jultid freebie to share too!

Click the preview to go to the download
Password is holiday-stories

You all now how much I like to talk, well, talk in the written sense, so my freebie is a few places to journal a little to go with the spectacular pages you’ll create with Jultid!

Jultid is on sale at SAS for 25% off its already low price!

Well, now I’m off to have breakfast and continue work on getting the house spruced up for decorating and entertaining and getting my shopping lists ready for Monday. I’ll still find scrap-time too. I’m sticking with my page-a-day commitment. This time next year, I hope to be scrapping 2010, not 2007!

Holiday Crunch Time Has Officially Begun

I turned in my last assignments this morning and my semester is complete. Now, I am a couple weeks of school behind on my Christmas stuff. Yikes! But I’ll manage.

The biggest crunch of everything is cleaning the house up and getting it ready. The kitchen counters will get a good scrub, but I’m not going to do the grout with the DT this year. That’s too time consuming and hard enough on the back without rushing it! So, no dead toothbrush scrubbing tiny circles in between the 1950’s design tile counter this year. That will make up some time!

We haven’t seen snow yet. I’m okay with that! This afternoon was an odd weather thing for me. I heard the rain. It was just a few windy pelts on the window, so I pulled up the shade. It was raining right next to us, but not on us. I looked out the front at our street and I could see the line where the street was getting wet, then it stopped. That was pretty cool!

The neighbors across the street and next door have some great lights up already and that prompted David to say that he might want to throw some lights on our bushes. I’m not die-hard on the outdoor lighting because where our tree sits, you can see the lights from the street and I spend as little time outside in the winter as I can, so I don’t see the outside of our house much at this time of year. But I totally enjoy the neighbor across the street’s lights from our living room, so I think it would be nice to return the spirit.

We want to get a new tree this year. We had one of those prelighted ones, but a huge chunk is burned out and we filled it in last year with a string of lights. It was more wires than ornaments I think! We do still have that tree just in case. I’d rather use it again than not have a tree if we don’t get a new one. But I’m definitely going to add getting a tree to our schedule. Maybe we can do that when we get our ornament for 2009.

I have baking and one meal to plan. I’ve been picking up a few of the sweets I serve at UNO and the Fabulous Dessert Bar, but I haven’t heard back from anyone yet, so I’ll be sending out the second email tonight or tomorrow with the RSVP request.

Did you see the picture at the top of the blog? Pumpkin Spice Almondina! Almondina are delicious cookies that I enjoy munching for a quick snack when I’m multitasking. I don’t have to cook or prepare them and they are low in calories too. 4 of the thin cookies are only 120 calories. They’re also great dipped in my coffee. They’re kinda pricey, but SO worth it! I hadn’t seen the pumpkin spice ones before, almonds and pumpkin seeds with fall spies, oh my! I found them when I was getting a prosciutto end for Pop. MY Italian store deeply discounts the ends while HIS charges full price. So I’m his supplier. Sofo is on the way, sorta, to his place, so I called ahead and asked them to hold the end they had for me. Good thing I called too. The guy right in front of me in line asked about the ends and they said they sold the last one already. That was to me, on the phone! Pop asked how much he owed me for it and I told him I just wanted some of the minestrone…and a day to spend cooking with him to learn how to make it!

One of the other things I’m working on is my Wife 1500 plan for January. Now, my wedding outfit still fits, but it’s not loose like I wanted it to be. My anniversary is three weeks from yesterday! The past few months have been hard on me and food was the last thing I was thinking about. For me, that’s key for controlling what I eat and losing weight. I have to think about food all the time. Sounds a little different, huh? But I need to think about what I’m eating and plan what I’m going to eat all the time. That keeps me planning and eating good tasting food in proportions and variety that are good for me. If I don’t think about food, I pop things in my mouth and don’t even realize I’m doing it. That’s how I am an emotional eater. When my mind is obsessed with something else, I don’t think about doing what’s right for me. For the Holidays this year, I am going to concentrate on food during the week and plan what I’m going to eat the day before and let myself relax on the weekends. I find that I can’t totally relax from the food obsession on the weekends once I’m in the swing of it and that’s good too!

Capture the Season

I wanted to share a layout I wasn’t supposed to have done. When I asked in comments about Capture the Season at Simple Scrapper about the template and if it was a tool or if we had to use it, I got a reply that it was a tool and the program itself was a tool to gather things to scrap in January. Hmmm…. In January, I’ll still be scrapping 2007. I try to do a layout a day in my catching up plan. I wanted to do Capture the Season to document some of this year while it is still happening. That’s ultimately my goal, to catch up and be able to scrap in the now, while the memories are still fresh and complete. So, I’m going to bend the rules a little. Can you imagine? Me? Bend the rules?? Perish the thought!

Stop by Simple Scrapper and join in for Capture the Season. The tips for collecting your thoughts to scrap when you have time are great for any time of year and wonderful if you want to collect thoughts and supplies for a wonderful crafting day in January too. But I’m doing the assignments in real time and sharing my layouts with you to encourage you to check out the great tips they have. Maybe you’ll find that keeping up with the program is more than you want to do while you are doing other holiday things, but give it a read anyway. You might find a few things that will make your scrapping easier and better moving forward!

So, here’s the assignment for week one from the site.

“The cornucopia is an ancient symbol of abundance and is a common image around the time of Thanksgiving. Share what is in your personal cornucopia basket this year with at least 4 photos of what is important in your life. Use a list format to detail all the goodness that fills your life with joy and love.”

Keep in mind the actual rules are to collect things to work on them in January. For me it keeps me motivated for my holiday planning and work, to take some time out to scrap the small stuff so I don’t sweat the small stuff. I just enjoy all the small stuff in a big way!

Here’s my first layout made with parts of the Pumpkin Pie Spice blog train from last year. Yes, I guess I do love anything pumpkin. Hmm….

Credits: Pumpkin Pie Spice blog train kits

from Eden Lane Designs and SPinkD

Be sure to check out Capture the Season at Simple Scrapper!

Links

Almondina

Simple Scrapper

Photoblog Wednesday

PROGRESS!

All three of them on the bed with Daddy, no growls or hisses for about five minutes Sunday morning! We're getting there!

The Next Semester Starts Soon!

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of USC. All opinions are 100% mine.

I got the rough draft of my paper for school done yesterday. Like I said I was going to do, I stepped away and will finalize it today. I have on e set of case studies to finish up tomorrow and then I’m done. I tallied my grades and I know I passed already, but the last two assignments just might earn me my A!

The coolest thing about taking my term online has been the flexibility. I have made dinner while doing class work, taken a break to run to the store in the middle of a review and yesterday I did 2 loads of laundry. I bet I can even fit that multitasking ability in as a plus in an interview. Well, at least for an internship – I can research a problem AND get coffee for the boss!

Now I know not everyone reading is an aspiring change-of-careers computer geek, but in this tough economic time, isn’t it a good idea to make your bottom line worth more, not less? Less is what your job market value is if you are out of work for an extended time and it leaves a hole in your resume. But if you are stagnant jobwise from a bad economy and school is increasing your knowledge and abilities in the workplace, your value increases and it puts you in front of everyone who’s waiting for things to get better when the market starts to open back up.

Okay, maybe you are working now. Ever wonder how much easier the holidays would be if that first number on the paycheck was a couple notches higher? Hmmm? An online class or two that you can wrap around your work and family schedules could open that door for you too!

If you have a teaching degree and are in the teaching field already, you can earn a Masters of Arts in teaching as a USC Trojan without ever leaving your current job, working around your life and choose to do it in as little as 12 months through their accelerated program! As a USC student studying online you’ll have the full status and all the benefits of a regular student in an education program that ranked #22 in the whole United States, with the invitation to walk in the commencement ceremonies and a free lifetime alumni membership.

Now you must be thinking of the prestige of belonging to a student body like that, for life, the convenience of earning your Masters of Arts in Teaching online and the MORE MONEY it will bring you after you complete the degree! I’m on my way to geekdom and I’m excited a out the thought of this degree. I‘d love it if just one of my readers got the program informationand gave this a try. Could you be the one leaving me a comment a year from now with a link to your photo at commencements? Or maybe you'll be telling me about the first paycheck at your new job that’s twice the last one from your previous job? I’d love it if you were!

Holiday Sugar Cookie Blog Train

I really hope they’ll let me remain part of the designers group at DST when it’s time to renew my dues. I’m a retired designer now, selling a few retired items at discount prices, but not active in a store. I’m concentrating on catching up my own scrapbooks, but I still enjoy doing blog freebies and I really love blog trains! The DST Designer forums are where I join with other designers to work on the biggies! It’s not a DST blog train, but DST is where we all have the opportunity to network and create these huge kits for you to collect all of, or select the pieces ala carte for your own personal stash!

I so loved being part of Christmas Around The World last year and for my holiday party this year, I’ve collaborated with 99 other designers to bring you Holiday Sugar Cookie!

Every addition is the designer's own style and interpretation, but the same theme and swatch, so at a minimum 3 papers and 5 elements from each...you do the math, 100 designers offering that or more! The kit is huge and the possibilities endless!

Check out the full list of designers at the Blog Train Blog.

Here is the Digitalegacies Designs contribution:


Click on the preview to go to the download page
PW gimme-sugar

I hope you enjoy this 100-car mega train and have fun creating wonderful layouts with it!

Next stop Color With Caryn.