Birthday Wishes

Sending out birthday love to my brother, Dan, today. Hope your day is filled with much fun and laughter! Love you.

Hero Arts has Giveaways

Be sure the check out the Hero Arts blog this week. They are having giveaways and launching a new website all week long. AND… next week they will be starting their CHA sneak peaks!

I love this time before CHA when all of my favorite companies are releasing sneak peaks of their wares. It’s like Christmas to me!

Update

I’ve been a busy crafter lately. It seems that I have my hands in a lot of different pies… just the way this big girl likes it. LOL!

First, I went up to Berkeley to have a little “Me” time and take a class at a great little store, Castle in the Air. What a cute little store – filled to the brim with lovely little, hard to find goodies. I could have spent a small fortune in this store! Thank goodness I was so busy with my class that I didn’t have too much time to shop. The bad news… they have an online store! Ugh… there goes my pocket book! Anyway, here’s a little glimpse at the lovely I made in class:

Isn’t it just the cutest thing ever? I still have not decided what to do with it, but, rest assured, it will find a special place in my home – far from all pet’s jaws!

Speaking of pet jaws… Check this out:

I posted a photo of this on my Facebook page and someone commented that it looked like… well, doggy yuckies! LOL! It’s not, I assure you. This is what is left of the witches head that I had started this week. Check out the eyes! It’s kind of funny. Really… at this point, all I can do is laugh. Trixie decided that the witch was really ugly and she needed to be chewed to pieces. LOL! Oh well…

So, I thought I would share my latest “Sunday Morning Journal Notes” with you…

These are from the Sunday morning services. This has been so incredibly therapeutic for me, I can’t even tell you. I know that it looks like I’m not paying attention to the message that is being taught, but really it has been helpful for me. Not only do I hear the message in church better, but it has helped me to spend some time thinking about the message after as well. Love that! Of course, the weekly devotion time is not going quite as well…

This is from a couple of weeks ago. For some reason, I just can’t seem to get myself into daily devotion time. I will keep trying, though, because I know that is key in my spiritual life.

Lastly… but certainly not least(ly)… SILVER BELLA! Sign ups have started for all of the swaps! Not only am I hosting 2 incredible swaps, but I have signed up for another 5! That’s 7 swaps. The good news is that I have TONS of time to work on these. And since I was called for jury duty tomorrow (UGH!!), looks like I’ll have some time to get started on them.

Anyway, two of the swaps involve embroidery. I have done some embroidery over the years, but I most certainly would not call myself a master of it. So, I decided to work on a little piece to get myself familiar with some of the stitches again. Here’s what I have so far:

I cannot tell you how much fun I have had with this! I have always loved stitching, but I guess I forget how much I really enjoy it. I’m looking forward to the two swaps involving stitching. I’ll keep you posted as to how it goes…

Shopping Adventures

Last week, my dear friend Cheryl and I headed up to LA for some fun shopping adventures in the Garment District. I’ve never really been there… maybe once a very, very long time ago. What a very dangerous place for a fabric/trim lover to be, let me tell you! I’ve never seen so many fabric stores in once place… EVER!

Well, we stumbled onto two absolute treasures. Of course, I don’t remember the name of either place, but I’ll definitely be visiting there again! The first store was filled from floor to ceiling with every kind of trim you would ever want to get your hands on! Holy smokes! I could have spent an entire week in this place and still not seen everything they had to offer!

The second place was a fabric store that had nothing but “remnants” and they sold by the pound. Of course, their idea of what a remnant is and what my idea of a remnant are two totally different things. They had boxes upon boxes filled with yards of fabric. A lot of them were duds, but if you were willing to dig a little, there were some treasures to be found. I found some great pieces of linen for embroidery, velvet, tapestry, upholstery… amazing stuff!

Well, I only have photos of the trims, but it’s worth drooling over…

And today, I received a package from Pink Paislee. I can’t tell you how excited I am about this! Last week, they posted on their blog that they were having a warehouse sale. However, because they share their warehouse space with another company, they are not allowed to let the public in. So, they put together boxes of goodies to ship out. According to the post, it was to be $150 worth of product for $45 plus shipping.

Now, I’ve been to a few warehouse sales in my time. They are always filled with SUPER old product that you really don’t want to buy, but feel obligated to because you made the trip down to the warehouse. (You know you’re giggling because you’ve done it, too… hee hee) So, I was a little leery about buying a box of product sight unseen. Well, let me tell you, it was worth every single penny! Check this out:

I’ve added it up… $159.28 worth of product! I would have had to pay $172.42 (with tax) to get all of this from my LSS. Here’s what I got:

Over 50 Papers
1 Topsiders chipboard
2 Ribbon Cards
7 Alpha Stickers
8 Rub On Packs
1 Enchanting Sticker Book
2 Boxes Chipboard Shapes (from Winter CHA new lines)
2 Packs Epoxy Brads (From Winter CHA new lines)
2 Clear Stamp Sets

AMAZING… plus I got one sheet of paper from a new line to be released at CHA Summer.

So cool!

One last thing… Tattered Angels, the makers of Glimmer Mist, will be changing their packaging. You can read all about it on their blog here. But I wanted to let you all know that Glimmer Mist is the same great product with a Fabulous NEW Look!