It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…

It’s hard to believe that just one short week ago it was Thanksgiving! Our house has gone from “fall” to “holiday” in a matter of days. We put up & decorated our trees and set up the “Snow Village” and train set! We have 7 trees of various shapes & sizes (all artificial because of some allergy issues). Can you tell we LOVE Christmas!!!  Everyone helps out and it’s so much fun…but not so much fun, or help, when it’s time to take it all down.

Just a quick LO of some of the trees. (Thanks to Katie Pertiet for the papers & elements).

I found a great centerpiece idea in the “Southern Living Christmas at Home” magazine that looked really pretty…and easy to do (one of my main requirements)!  You take a large glass jar, some beautiful cut branches and add a product called “Snow Real” to make the artificial winter wonderland.  I was able to find the Snow Real at Linens-n-Things , but the magazine suggested a website called soilmoist.com.  Probably any craft store would also carry it.  I haven’t made mine yet, but here is the photo from the magazine.

On your mark…get set…SHOP!

Now that Thanksgiving is over and maybe we’ve gained a pound or two…it’s time to start Christmas shopping to work some of that turkey, stuffing & apple pie off!  I think shopping is great excercise, even if you do it from behind a computer screen (just get up & run in place for a minute or so, okay maybe not)!  Anyway, one of the best things about shopping is when you can save some $.  Probably most of you know this already, but when I took my Mom to some stores earlier this week it was news to her…so I thought I’d pass this along.  She didn’t know that you could use JoAnn Fabrics coupons at Michaels and that you could use Linens-n-Things coupons at Bed, Bath  Beyond!  Some stores will let you use their competitors coupons to get the discounts, so it can’t hurt to ask them.

I’m always looking for gift ideas and it seems like alot of people love to get gift cards.  At my local food store they always have a rack of various gift certificates you can buy to stores like Nordstroms, Old Navy, KMart, Best Buy, etc..  Now don’t get me wrong, they are all great stores but nothing really unusual.  However, I did see a couple of gift cards that I thought were just a little bit different and would be great to give especially to any guys in your family that are hard to shop for.  They had gift cards to MLB.com, NFL.com, NBAstore.com and even Ebay!!!

Blessings…

Happy turkey day!  I didn’t want Thanksgiving day to go by without letting you know how grateful I am for my friends and family (especially my friends /family at JS).  

We’re having Thanksgiving dinner at our house and I came across a cool idea for a vase  for the centerpiece (using a fall LO I did for the NWR class)!   I bought 2 inexpensive tall glass vases at Michaels, making sure I could fit one inside the other.  I printed out the LO, 81/2 x 11, and placed it in-between the 2 vases.  This way you can see the LO curved around the outer vase, but it stays dry when you put the water & flowers in the inner one.  (Does that make sense?)   

As a little “favor” for our Thanksgiving dinner I made up small cards and inserted them in magnetic photo pockets (that I found at Linens & Things).  I can’t send out the magnetic pockets to all of you, but I can give you the link to download the cards!  Click on the 4shared link under the photo!

Enjoy your day…hopefully you find some quiet moments to count your blessings (you are one of mine)…watch the Macy’s parade…take a nap…and watch some football!

   http://www.4shared.com/file/30016632/6d0bda7/thanksgiving_freebie.html?

Snippets from a Boring Life…

So…if you had told me 6 months ago that I would have a blog, I would have said you were hallucinating.  If you had said I would be creating digi-scrapbook pages and designing digi kits with my 14 yr old daughter, I would have thought you were dreaming.  If you had said I would have friends from the Philipines, Great Britain, Sweden (not to mention many states here in the US)  that I had never actually met before, I would have sent you to the doctors for a check-up! 

But, thanks to Jessica Sprague and her amazing “Up & Running” and “Now We’re Rockin” with Photoshop classes all of the above is not a dream…it’s a reality.  I started taking her first class in June and prior to that I had never tried digi-scrapping or PSE.  I had only just started using a digital camera a month before that!!! 

 Which brings us to my very first blog posting.  I don’t really think I’ll be writing about my daily activities…although you may get a snippet or two from my very boring life!  Suffice it to say I am a SAHM to 2 great (really) kids doing the usual SAHM things, and am loving every minute of it!   I’m sure this will evolve as it goes along, but I’m thinking I’d like to use this blog to pass along great tips/ideas/techniques that I find along the way. 

Thanks for visiting and please stop by the comments to say “hi”!