time flies!

20 years ago...
1. I lived in Rexburg, Idaho
2. I loved to play Barbies and ride my bike
3. My best friends were Amber, Lisa, and Mandy
4. I was seven years old, and in second grade

10 years ago...
1. I had just started my senior year of high school (WOW!!!)
2. I was very quiet and not very happy
3. I worked at Mack's Drive-In
4. I looked forward to starting college

5 years ago...
1. I had recently transferred to Utah State University against my better judgement, hated it, and dropped out after a semester of anxiety attacks.
2. I worked a crap job and was looking for any way out
3. Steph and I had lived in Logan for a year
4. I bought my car, Ditto.

3 years ago...
1. I had made a close friend who would later become my sister-in-law
2. I got promoted to a less crappy position, which made my job SO much better!
3. I struggled with some relationships and had a very difficult year
4. I had scrapbook pages published in a magazine for the first time

1 year ago...
1. I had just ended a friendship with a guy that wasn't right for me
2. I considered going back to school, but didn't feel good about it
3. I decided that I'd like to retire at 30 (everyone needs a dream, right!? LOL)
4. I started focusing on my hobbies, which I'd neglected during the above friendship

So far this year...
1. I started an Etsy shop
2. I finally got my car paid off
3. I took a vacation to Bryce Canyon (note to self: finish the scrapbook already!!!)
4. I'm still living in Logan and I love my apartment

Yesterday I...
1. Had an awesome dream about the guy I like and spent all day wanting to cuddle with him
2. Painted some candlesticks for my bathroom
3. Organized my craft area (it's almost done!!)
4. Skipped church to avoid attending the Linger Longer - and I'm on the LL committee.

Today I...
1. Woke with a headache :(
2. Bought a $30 home decor item for $3 with a little help from a 40% off coupon and a gift card (IMO, gift cards do not count as money because I don't have to consult the budget in order to use them)
3. Need to do some laundry and dishes
4. Want to sew!

Over the next year...
1. I want to get my debts paid off
2. I would love to improve my photography skills
3. I need to focus on being a better person
4. I could make my peace with falling in love...

the winner is...

Comment #4 (as was chosen by the random number generator) Congrats, Sweet 'n Sassy Baby. I'll contact you for sizing and shipping info.

I'm working diligently to get lots of stuff posted to my shop this week. It's gonna be awesome!

I have a few projects in the works too, which I'm hoping to finish and share soon :)

under construction

The results are in and the Owl blog design is the winner. I'll be getting that set up in the next few days, so if things look a little wonky, please bear with me.

peek

I have been busy making jewelry to add to my shop. That's the easy part. Next comes photography and coming up with a decent name/description. The photos already in my shop aren't as great as I want them to be. Getting a great shot of jewelry is honestly a pain in the butt. I'm trying though. (click to enlarge photo)

The bracelet above is one of the very first pieces I ever created and I get compliments on it every time I wear it. I have a couple made up to sell now as well. I just can't come up with a name or a description. Help a girl out! In fact, I'll make it a giveaway... please leave a comment with a name/description for this and I'll enter your name into a random drawing to get one of these babies free! (I'll announce the winner on Monday morning, so get your suggestions in by Sunday night).

sick day

Today has been such a good day. I was sick last night and woke up feeling crummy, so I took the day off work. I was already awake and had no desire to lay about all day long. I wanted to be productive.

I've been busy all day. And oddly, I only feel sick if I stop or slow down (that's good incentive to stay busy!!) My Etsy shop has been neglected for a while. Sure, I've added things here and there, but I haven't focused on it at all. The biggest reason was that I needed to buy jump rings and I just never sat down to place an order online. Silly, that a 30-minute task got put off for two months... whatever. LOL. I finally placed the order and it came last week. Since then, I've been cranking out jewelry. It's so fun to see something new come together. Now, all I have to do is take a bunch of photos and try to come up with some great descriptions. Be watching. It'll be awesome!

I want to work on some other projects tonight, but I can't decide if I want to scrapbook or if I want to work on projects for my bathroom redecoration.

Oh, a SAD story about my bathroom. I bought fabric about a year ago and made a shower curtain. It's cute and it's central to the whole decorating theme of the room. I noticed that I squirted some hair dye on it when I was coloring my brother's hair a few weeks ago :( It's not totally obvious, thankfully. If I could get more of that same fabric, I would make a new curtain. I can't, so I'm gonna deal with it.

Anyway, I'm rambling and I have things I can be doing. Have a good one!

hand sanitizer: the new lighter fluid.

I'm not an "outdoors enthusiast" but I do like to go camping once or twice a year - generally for family reunion. This year, we got a motel room for reunion, so we haven't taken a chance to camp.

We realized that Summer is over, Autumn is about two weeks long, and then snow comes (ugh!), so we spent yesterday evening around a campfire up Logan Canyon. Well, for some of that time, we sat around blackened pieces of wood. They would not catch fire! We quickly burned through almost all the paper items we had and any pieces of dry wood or brush we could find. Still nothing.

Hand sanitizer to the rescue! Steve squirted some on the wood and it lit up and stayed lit for the rest of the night. (Disclaimer - hand sanitizer should probably be used as a last resort. It was slightly explosive.) We had bratwurst and s'mores and cuddled with cute babies until our bladders needed to be emptied, then we put out the fire, loaded up our camp chairs, and came home to sleep in our warm houses and soft beds.

To be honest, I had camp food, fun conversations around a campfire, cold, and a full bladder, and a great night's sleep. With the exception of a great night's sleep, it sounds like camping to me! LOL Thanks Steve, Jen, Austin, and Mason, for a fun evening :)

um, okay....

I fell asleep at 5:00 yesterday afternoon - woke up an hour later to use the bathroom and take out my contacts - went back to bed - got up about 3 hours later to shower and change into pajamas - and then slept clear through until my alarm went off at 4:30 this morning.

Total, I slept for about 10 hours and for me, that's a TON! I'm so hoping that I'm not coming down with something. That's the only time I really ever sleep for a long time. It felt so awesome though!!

progress report

I've been working on my five projects and I finally have some progress to report! My black and white quilt is done! Wahoo!! My scrapbook closet is getting VERY close to being done, my Bryce Canyon scrapbook has two pages left to complete, and the bathroom decorating has only a few projects remaining. The living room will take a little more work. I need to sew some pillow and decide what other things I want/need to decorate with. I may have also worked on some jewelry, decorated my bedroom, worked on the blog makeover, and created some cards. So much for sticking with the five projects... Steph and I stopped by DI to look for old books we could use for decorating purposes. This is one case where it's probably okay to judge them by their covers. LOL. We ended up getting 13 books for $20 and have books to match many of the rooms in the house. I loved the little "Mustard Seed" book and one of them is titled "My Crooked Family." LOL There's also one we bought that doesn't actually match anything in the house, but is a poem that my Grandma (and now my mom) shared with new mothers, called "Day Old Child." We thought it was sweet to have something sentimental.

to answer a few questions:

Thanks to everyone that voted on the blog redesign yesterday. I'll make my decision and get everything changed to the new blog design later this week. I think I'm deciding between two at this point.

Many of you asked how I make these designs. I use Photoshop Elements (any photo-editing software would work) and I read a lot. I wanted a 3-column template and played around with adjusting one of the templates available through Blogegr before I decided to just find a template online that I liked and make the changes I wanted to it.

I found a free 3-column template and changed it a lot! LOL. I haven't been trained in html, but I used a lot of trial and error (and the preview button) until I got things looking the way I wanted. The Blogger Help is a great resource. There are several other great resources available online that I have bookmarked at home (I'm blogging from work). If anyone is interested, let me know and I'll post the links. I found the things I learned about html pretty fascinating and I may consider taking a class or two to learn a lot and creating even better blogs/webpages one day.

Back to Photoshop... I download a lot of digital scrapbooking freebies. I think I've only ever paid for a handful of things. There are numerous resources available online for this as well. I check here quite often and snag the things I know I'll use. I did take one digital scrapbooking class online that I honestly thought was a joke. The teacher was really good at doing things herself, but couldn't teach to save her life. I just started playing on my own and learned what I know in Photoshop that way. There are lots of awesome free tutorials online as well that I DID learn from. There are also classes you can pay to take that I've heard awesomething things about.

Scrappinfor5 and Woodlandbliss, I'd be happy to help you. Keep in mind I'm not a professional. LOL. Sandra Collins and Lemon Cupcakes, I'd be happy to answer any questions you have as you learn. I'll get the links to the resources I used if you want them. I'll try to answer any questions you have as well. Again, just a hobbyist trying to make my own blog look good, but I'd be happy to try.

rough drafts:

Ok, I finally got the rough drafts of the blog makeover options done this weekend. You could really help me out by voting on your favorite. If you have any thoughts, you can leave a comment too. Suggestions too, if you have some. (click to enlarge)




These really are just rough drafts - they won't really have two "profiles," for example. Oh, and I thought up another blog idea last night that I may create at some point this week. Yeah, I may like playing in Photoshop a bit... LOL

collaboration

Stephanie and I make an awesome team. One of our favorite things to do is to peruse the fabric store and come up with great combinations. We try to have an idea in mind beforehand so that we know how many different fabrics we'll need, how much we'll need, and what theme or feeling we have for the finished project, etc.
(click to enlarge) In this case, I saw a similar quilt in an old magazine I had laying around. It was a much larger quilt, on a different scale, and was bright green and hot pink. I knew I wanted to create a quilt with lots of great colors - and I knew that I wanted it to be boyish.

I liked the brown print a lot and used it as my inspiration for the other fabrics. Ideally, I would have backed the quilt with the brown as well, but I didn't for two reasons: 1-I wanted the print on the back to be less busy than that, and 2-The other fabrics in the quilt were much less expensive (it's backed with the red print).

I got the fabrics home, cut, and laid out, and then sewed it all together. It's a super simple pattern and it came together pretty quickly. We liked the circular theme throughout many of the fabrics and wanted the quilting to follow. We picked a pattern with a varied swirl and Stephanie got it marked and started quilting.

Stephanie finished the quilting and binding last weekend, so we were finally able to give it to my newest nephew, Mason. My sister-in-law loved it. I hope they get a lot of use out of it!

random

I look forward to Thursdays because I get to watch Bones. It airs on Wednesdays, but I don't have tv reception and I'm too cheap to pay for it, thus I watch things online the following day. Such a fun show. It combines humor, science, and logic. Perfection! I sometimes think I would have made a great scientist - this is, of course, before I remember that I'm far too impatient, I hated both of my chemistry classes, and didn't like wearing lab goggles. Yeah, I'll stick to a non-scientific profession. It's best for everyone!

I ordered some adorable papers from Adornit, which happens to be a local scrapbooking company, on Tuesday and I got them today. I'm excited to play with them. There is a great one with little stylized trees on it. So cute! Yay!

I've been working on the blog makeover and I think I'll be posting some options on Monday and I may let people vote. I have a favorite or two and my sis definitely has a favorite. We'll see how things go.

Work went well today. I got in a silly mood and started laughing so hard that I had tears rolling down my face. My coworkers were laughing too, but I think they were laughing at me more than they were at the conversation. Haha. That works for me! They laugh at me a lot. Once I get comfortable with a person, I let my funny side show.

My tummy hurts. I ate some sugar and I shouldn't have. I didn't have a wednesday weigh-in this week because I didn't see the point in weighing myself when I've been cheating on the diet for over a week. I blame my brother. LOL. I was doing really well until he had a craving and my sister-in-law and I ran to the store to indulge him/us. Luckily for him, he has the metabolism to pull it off. Me, not so much.

I'm kinda dreading work tomorrow because last Friday sucked so bad. Hopefully we won't have a repeat. I'll snap if we do.

Anyway, life is good :)

update on nothing

I haven't blogged much lately because there hasn't been anything I particularly want to document or remember. That sounds bad. I was sick, and then I was stressed, and then I had some issues with a friend of mine, and then I was stressed again. Oh, and I got a flat tire. See, nothing that needs to be publicized.

My stress level is good now. I don't get stressed easily, so this month has been weird. I'm feeling better. And things are okay with my friend. She apologized 250,000 times and I let it go (I don't like to hold on to things that are relatively trivial).

I've been working on my 5 projects, trying to get them done. I'm honestly SO sick of being limited on what I can work on. I'm never doing that to myself again. I will just try not to start more projects (as in new hobbies). LOL

I've been working on the blog remodel as well. It's coming along... One of these days...

In happy news, Meg took our family photos on Saturday and we had a lot of fun. Steph and I, and our parents, had dinner at my brother's home on Sunday. It was fun to play with the kids and eat yummy food. We bought Office season 4 today and we're not telling anyone (except anyone reading this) because we want to actually have a chance to watch it. It seems the other seasons are always on loan to someone.

Oh, my 2-month-old nephew has a tooth. It's not a front tooth either. I was the same way - got teeth early, and not in front first. Still, it's weird to think the he's got a tooth already!

Steph and I did some bargain shopping today. We got 6 shirts and a pair of shoes for $27.00. Yeah, we're freaking amazing. We saw an adorable plaid jacket and knew it was coming home with us, regardless of cost. Then I saw it was on clearance for $7. At the register, it rang up $4.20. Yeah - SO awesome! Now I'm just trying to think up an awesome necklace to make and wear with it.

sunday's snuggle

This is my newest nephew, Mason. He is such a precious baby. We snuggled on Sunday and ended up falling asleep on the couch together. There's something so peaceful and hypnotic about a baby. I need to borrow him once in a while to just have a totally awesome nap! (it kinda reminds me of that episode of Friends when Joey and Ross fall asleep watching a movie and have such an awesome nap that Joey attempts to get Ross sleepy so they can nap again...LOL!!)

My brother and sister-in-law asked me to take some photos of him, so I dropped by their house bright and early Monday morning. It was stormy and cold, which was awesome for me (I love storms) but not so awesome for a teeny little bundle, so we took some photos inside by their big living room window. Mason takes after me... he hates being in front of the camera. He fussed every time he heard the click, saw the flash, or saw me coming at him. He got fed up with us and fell asleep. I wish the weather had been better so that we could have gone outside and used the natural light. Hopefully there's 2 or 3 decent enough photos in the 180 I took (LOL, but also a little sad).

wednesday weigh-in

The diet slid a little this past weekend... It was Labor Day. That's how we're justifying it, anyway. I can handle sugar, but white flour kicks my butt. It makes me sluggish and I think it causes breakouts. Sugar doesn't affect me, so long as it's in moderation. I was starting to get hungry despite having just eaten, so I've started eating more grains now as well.
I was surprised that I lost anything after enjoying food Sat-Mon. LOL. I'm more likely to see the added weight this week, I guess. I'm back to being good as soon as the orange juice in front of me is gone :)

Today I'm going to weigh-in on: taking time for myself. I once read that intorverts need time alone to recharge, while extroverts need time with people. I'm definitely an introvert! Years ago, when I had a busier social life, I would schedule "time off" so I could just do my own thing. Now, I have plenty of alone time during the week and practically none on the weekends - and it's taking its toll!

I'm trying to find ways to get what I need on the weekends so that I can function at the start of the new week. I have to take care of myself, and this current trend of mine leaves me frustrated and exhausted right off the bat. Perhaps changing my work schedule to half-days on Tuesdays or just setting aside some time for myself - without errands to run - on Mondays. I'll come up with something :)

better

I had a nice, relaxing day. I finished running the errands I hadn't completed yesterday, ate lunch, and spent the rest of the day being creative. I split my creative time between scrapping (digitally, today) and beading.

My Etsy shop is looking pretty bare... not that I mind really. It's bare because things are selling :) I placed a small bead order today and I'll be placing a larger one in the next week (from two different companies). I also made 2 necklaces and a pair of earrings, and discovered a cute set I made while I was on vacation in July and totally forgot about.

The digital scrapping was focused mainly on the blog makeover. I'll have four proofs soon that I'll share and then decide which I want to commit to (for a little while, anyway). The one I worked on today is adorable. Haha.

I want to do some traditional scrapbooking as well, but I need to get some other projects done before I take more on. One of these days...

*sigh*

This past weekend was pretty fun. I didn't get anything done, but I babysat two of my nephews and hung out with my brother and sister-in-law. We had dinner and watched a movie, which = me, asleep on the couch. I cannot just sit and watch and not do something else. I like to be working on projects while I watch movies. I'm a multi-tasker extraordinaire. LOL

I'm really starting to hate my work schedule. I have Sun/Mon off, which is fine... but I attend church and choose not to shop on Sundays and then end up running errands ALL DAY MONDAY and get no chance to unwind, work on projects, clean, etc. Tuesday comes and I crave some time to be creative. By the time my 8 hours is done today, I'll be mentally exhausted and I won't get anything done this evening. That will continue to happen Wed-Sat and then I'll start my whole frustrating weekend over again. Sigh.

I am incredibly frustrated today. I'm not going to get into it. My normal tolerance for all things minor is completely absent. The girl sitting about 6 feet from me badly needs some mucinex. I want her to go home so I don't have to listen to her. Scratch that. I want to go home. I'm ready to flip out.

**Edited to add: I worked for one hour and then took the rest of the day off. I ate bad stuff (sugar) yesterday and I think it's messing me up.**