It's Christmas in July!

Well, at my Etsy shop anyway. I am taking part in a Christmas in July sale going on now through July 22nd. I have listed several holiday cards just for this sale and many other products will be listed over the next week. I will try to list something new every other day or so.

You'd think it would be easy to take a couple pictures of each card and just list them, but of course not. I have a light box I made out of a cardboard box and some special white paper. The paper is attached using thumb tacks and it's best to use the light box outside. Okay, you see where this is going. I was in a big rush to get the pictures taken on Tuesday last week so I wait to the sun is up over the pine trees in the back yard and shinning on the deck. I then pack up all my cards, my light box and my son so we can go outside. I get the box setup and then come back in for my son and then I get maybe two pictures taken and he is not happy, so then I rock him a little in his car seat and all is well. I take maybe another two pictures and he's not happy yet again so we rock some more. This time the wind decides to make an appearance and try to blow my box apart. Thumb tacks went flying this direction and that direction. So, I pack it up and go back in the house. Looks like no pictures today. When Wednesday rolls around we try it again. It is not winding and it is beautiful out, my son is sleeping and he's just been fed so I have some time to play! I ended up taking 147 pictures! And yes I did end up having to fight the wind too because it decided it just wanted to play with my fun light box again. I swear, if its not my cats its the wind - everyone wants a piece of the light box. If my husband would have just helped me take all these pictures on Monday when it was so nice out and he had the day off I wouldn't have had to go through all of this, but no he decided to power wash the driveway instead. Yeah, who does that!?!? Really?

Well, I'm no photographer, but here is one of my favorite cards.

I love using the Bazzill Bling cardstocks because they just add a little something extra to a card. I use Bling on almost all of my cards. I just love the shine it adds to a card. For this particular card I used two different methods of embossing. The red squares have been dry embossed and then I stamped and heat embossed the Happy Holidays phrase. My favorite is to actually use both methods on the same area. It makes for a lot of work, but looks great in the end.

Stop on over to my Etsy shop at http://www.creativecardsolution.etsy.com/ to see my Christmas in July specials right now! Plus I'm giving away a free gift when you buy a Christmas card during this great sale!

Evil Wallpaper

I know I am slow to post again, but I have been working on painting my living room. Not an easy task with a 3 month old baby and 30 year old wallpaper to remove. My parents came for a few days to help us as the room has been bothering them as much as it has us. We bought our house last June and still hadn't painted the living room or several other rooms in the house actually. Last June when we bought the house we ripped off the old wallpaper and then that is how the room has sat for way too long. Every time my parents came to visit they would work a little at a time to remove the old paste stuck to the walls. I swear the previous owner used wallpaper paste in addition to the glue typically on the back of the wallpaper. It took one solid day to remove the paste from the last wall and a half. Then finally we could do prep work to repair the horrible condition of the walls. The previous owner just simply put spackle on a hole and then painted over it - never sanding it down to level. And they just slapped paint on the walls and never carefully cut in around anything or cleaned up paint runs. Talk about a pain to fix. But now, after 3 days of hard work, our living room is finally painted! Of course now I have some touch-ups to do and the fireplace to work on, but we have made a lot of progress. As soon as it is completely done I will be sure to share a picture.

So, last night my husband, our little guy and I went to go get groceries around 9pm. We made it about 10 minutes and through about 4 isles before some random lady starts talking to us. I guess we are just too nice because we stood there in the middle of the grocery store for an hour talking to this lady. By the time we got away from her we had heard about the birth of her four kids, her own birth, the birth of two of her grandkids, her religious and politic views, what her husband does around the house and how handy he is and what he used to do for a living. She even offered to babysit our 3 month old son. Hmmm...I don't think so. I mean really, did we need to hear her entire life story? We have a night time routine and a feeding schedule to stick to. I'm not a mean person, but at what point do you stop being so nice? I even had to explain to her how my Moby wrap worked and answer a million questions about my labor and delivery of my son.

Speaking of feeding schedules, gotta get ready to feed the little munchkin now. He should be waking up soon.

My very first!

This is my very first time blogging. Not that I am really all that interesting, but I tought I would give it a try. So here is a little about me. I am a new mom to a perfect baby boy. He is already 11 1/2 weeks old and I just can't figure out where the time went. So when I have free time, i.e., my little munchkin's nap time, I will fill you all in on the wonderful little moments and not so wonderful moments of being a new mom while trying to run a business from home, be a good wife and do all the household things that need to be done. I love making handmade greeting cards when I can, but our little guy makes it pretty hard most of the time. I also have two wonderfully overweight cats who like to try to "help" me with my cards. My youngest cat Snowball has a tendency to steal small pieces of paper from me. It might sound cute, but it drives me crazy. Just when I get something cut and set it aside it disappears thanks to her. Okay so it is really cute, but I just wish she wouldn't do it everytime.

It is officially summer and boy has it come in with a bang around here. We had some crazy strong storms here yesterday that dumped about 2 inches of rain at my house. Normally I wouldn't care, except I have a hydrangea that likes water, but not too much. I just tried to revive it from a storm we had a few days ago and now more rain. The pot has about 2 inches of standing water on top of the soil just like it did the other day. It is now just sitting in mud and not doing so good. I tried to scoop as much water out as I could, but I just cannot seem to get any water out of the mud. It doesn't want to dry out at all either. It really makes me sad because my mom and sister bought this hydrangea for me when my son was born in April. I am really more like a brown thumb, but I was really trying to keep this alive and was doing really good for once and now mother nature has other ideas for my poor hydrangea. Looks like I need to try again to revive it.

Well the little guy is sleeping very soundly so I need to take this rare opportunity and go fill a card order!