Packing, packing, and OH! how wonderful! more PACKING!

I just spent the last 3 or 4 hours packing some boxes for our move. And i feel like i hardly made a dent. *sigh* Boy, do i ever dislike the moving process. The worst box so far was the dish box i just did. Those take forever because of all the wrapping. My favorites are the book boxes - they go pretty quickly. As of today, i have almost all our books packed up. Which was quite a feat, considering we have about 5 bookcases full, including cookbooks. Plus the random laying-around-because-someone-is-in-the-middle-of-reading-me books.

I did get to do a little stamping this morning, though. I made a card for an upcoming wedding, which i will post (after i give it!) at some point. I also started a couple more turquoise and white bookmarks to finish up the cardstock i cut for my open house events.

The other day i started working on the design for our "just moved" notes. My first design was very cute (if i do say so myself). It would have been one piece, not folded, with our new address printed on the back:


but then my husband mentioned who he'd like to send them to, and it's a LOT of people! There's NO stinkin' way i'm making 80-90 of the above. It took me an hour and a half to make SIX of them for a swap! So i came up with a simpler design. They'll be something like this:

I chose the yellow because i have yellow envelopes already, and the green because i thought it looked fresh and summery with the yellow. However, my (possibly colorblind?) husband said my color choice was perfect because we're "moving to a green and yellow house". Now, folks, our new house is indeed green, but it's green with creamy off-white trim. NOTHING like the "Yoyo Yellow" on the card. When i informed my hubby of this, he said that at least the green (Garden Green) was the same green as the house. It's not, but he didn't seem to really believe me about that part, and hey, if it makes him think i'm clever, then he can go on believing it, right?!

I chose the Loads of Love stamp set because it's cute, but also because my sweet but misguided husband (who has never moved an entire household) had originally suggested that we save money on a truck rental by using his little Tacoma pickup for the move! I think we have now agreed not to do that (*phew*! close call!) but this stamp set with the stuff piled in the back is a reference to that idea. Oh, if only it were that easy - just pile your chair, lamp, plant, and one box in the back of the truck and go!

Earlier today i cut all the brown cardstock for the base. My "did-some-packing" reward for later tonight will be to stamp the truck & its load. The rest will have to wait until my Stampin' Up! order comes in since i didn't have enough of the green and yellow on hand.

Well, the next box is waiting to be packed, so it's back to work for me!

It's HERE!!!

At long last the new Stampin' Up! Catalog has arrived! I have never in my life been so excited to see a brown-clad UPS man. Perhaps he had already encountered some crazy Stampin' Up! demonstrators today, because he literally dropped the box on the porch and RAN down the street back to his truck. It was quite funny.

Anyway, the new catalog looks great so far. Lots of new stuff and plenty of fresh inspiration. Beginning July 1, you can view the catalog online at the SU! website. (www.stampinup.com) Or, of course, you can contact your friendly local SU! demonstrator (like me!) to find out how to get your own Fall Winter Collection 2007. :-)

Rehearsal invite

Here is the finished invitation i mentioned a few weeks ago. I think they came out pretty good (if i do say so myself). They did take a bit of work, but since they were fun colors and a fun design, i didn't mind. The most time consuming part was punching the holes and attaching the brads! It was hard to hold the vellum straight while punching the holes in the right spot, and opening the brads got a little frustrating. But then i discovered my new favorite use for my bone folder and things went much more smoothly thereafter. You can slip the bone folder in between the brad "prongs" to separate them and press them apart. MUCH easier, quicker (and less dangerous) than doing it with your fingernail, which is what i had been doing!

Father's Day card

I'm finally getting around to posting the card i made for Father's Day. This one went pretty quickly, but that's because it's not a very complicated design. Both my dad and my father-in-love liked it a lot. I was pleased because it's such a challenge to make something "manly" when most of my stamp sets feature flowers!

Pastel grapevine

So here is the card that was one of the projects we made at my Stampin' Up! Kickoff open house events. It featured pastels, using versamark. My guests/customers really seemed to enjoy making this one, which i was happy about because (to me) it's an intermediate project and i had a range of skill levels at my events.

Summer bookmark

This is the other project we made at my open house events. Everyone liked this one for its quickness (especially those who did the grapevine card first!). Even people who had never done any stamping before had this one finished in about 10 minutes. And since most of my customers are teachers, i think they'll get a lot of use out of a summer themed bookmark!

a busy Saturday

Well, the husband is away today, which for some reason inspires me to get a lot of stuff done. Good thing, because i have a list a mile long! I have a pile of things to do for my first SU open house next week, plus a little work for the invitations i got hired to create, plus general house cleaning, topped off with doing a little packing! (we're moving this summer, and i have a huge pile of empty boxes taking up space in my dining room.) *phew*

I've been pretty productive this morning. Hopefully i can keep up my momentum for the whole day and just plow through my list!