Yes, it's an update! A REAL update! Let's see... where do I begin?
Let's go back to where my life began to have no semblance of order! :-) THANKSGIVING! My family came down (as I've already written about) and my great grandmother decided to stay with us. Well, her room is my craft room, so my time was limited in there. She went back to PA for the holiday with my uncle the week before Christmas, which didn't leave me much time to get ready for the holiday here! Needless to say, I did MUCH last minute Christmas shopping, baking, and cleaning! Christmas was wonderful with my family here in Florida! The holidays always remind me how blessed I truly am to have the family that I have, both biological and in-laws! So I survived Christmas. Then, right before New Year's, my uncle returned to go back to work (he's working in central Florida temporarily)... with my great grandmother! She loved the weather so much that she decided to come for a bit longer. That weekend, I had to go to Gainesville to start training for my job for three weeks.... which brings me to two weeks ago when I came back to Jax and we took my great-grandmother to VA to meet my Mom to take her back to PA. It was so great to have her here! She appreciated getting out of her house and away from the ice and snow for a while and I loved having her here (even though I didn't get to visit much with her on the second half of her trip).
Since then, I have spent as much time as I can undecorating the house (sad!) from the holiday and have been trying to get caught up on the cleaning and laundry that has been forgotten and neglected since THANKSGIVING! LOL! No... my house wasn't like one of those on "Hoarders" and we did have clean clothes to wear, but for a type-A neat freak who has had nothing else to do but clean her house for the past 18 months, it was driving me NUTS! I have also been getting used to my work-at-home schedule and getting back of the groove of even having a schedule!
Part of my new schedule is ME time! Soooooooooo.....
I have finally gotten some time back in my "play room"! Between Thanksgiving sales, Christmas gifts, after-Christmas sales, and New Year's clearance sales, I've gotten quite a few new things to play with (including a bunch of new cartridges, new papers, new stamps, and my new favorite tool, which I'll share below.) And I've gotten even more time to play with everything this week because (whether fortunately or unfortunately), my hours at work have been cut almost every single day to low volume of orders so I've been only getting a few hours of work a day, but that's been leaving me time to do what I really LOVE to do!
So here are some projects that I've done!
A very simple layout about my great-grandmother napping with our dog Princess. :-)
Another simple layout... again of our dog with Grammy. It was an ongoing joke that if you couldn't find the dog, just find Grammy because that's where she'd be!
One of my newest toys that I got just this week is The Cinch by We R Memory Keepers. I have been playing with it all week and I LOVE it!!!
Here is one of the projects that I made using The Cinch. I have been wanting to come up with a way to keep the cards that we get for the holidays or birthdays, etc. So.... here's our album of our 2010 Christmas cards! I bought the chipboard album covers and the binding wire and decorated it and put it together!
I also made a quick album of the all of the birthday/Mother's Day/Father's Day cards that we got as a family in 2009. For this album, I used old cereal boxes cut and covered in paper for the covers. :-) It's not at all fancy and I could have spent more time decorating it, but for this one, I was more interested in getting the cards all together for posterity sake since many of these are the last cards that my grandmother gave to us before she passed. I may re-do the covers someday, but for now, I am happy with them being in an album.
I have made some very quick and simple Valentine's Day and birthday cards that needed to go out pretty quickly, so again, nothing great, but I'd still much rather send out a simple handmade card than a store-bought card! :-)
My craft room is a disaster right now since I've been trying to put everything away, find homes for everything, and organize it for the new year of creating, so hopefully I'll get to spend some more time in there this weekend and get a few more things done! Hubby has to work tomorrow night..... and I'll be a football widow for ONE more Sunday, so perhaps another update with more projects and maybe a video will be coming on Sunday??
Hope you are all well, and dry, and warm!!! Happy Crafting!
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