Not getting ANYTHING done!

I've been trying to get my Christmas cards designed.  Thought I knew what stamps I was going to use.  Got them, love them, but the idea I had in my head did not translate well onto paper.  Unfortunately, the stamp I want to use is one I don't own.  And I'm having trouble talking myself into buying the set since I probably won't use it again after this year.  I did pick up a stamp at Michael's today with my 40% coupon that has potential.  We'll see where that leads.  It's also really hard for me to get in the Holiday mood when it's still 75 degrees out.  SIGH.  Maybe I'll get some stamping done tomorrow?  Don't hold your breath..... 

It's been a long and wild week!

I had good intentions of doing some stamping this week.  Julee was having a sketch challenge going over at Verve Visual for the new stamp release.  I had planned on doing all 5 of the daily sketches in the hopes of winning the new stamps.  Unfortunately, "life" had other plans this week which included me being suddenly away from home for a few days.  All is well and back to normal here, but Russ was in the hospital for about 40 hours and then we spent a day at his mom's house before we came back home.  Needless to say, no stamping got done. :-(

I thought I would take a shot at the challenges yesterday after I was all done with things around here, but was only able to do the first two challenges.  So here are my cards for VSHR1 and VSHR2.  All supplies but the rhinestones are from Stampin' Up!:

Both cards use Baja Breeze Textured Cardstock (from the In Color assorted pack 111345), Whisper White cardstock (100730) and Ski Slope Designer Series Paper (112994, available until January 18, 2009 in the Holiday Mini Catalog), and the stamp set used is Season Of Joy (110384) which is on page 34 of the Fall Winter 2008 Idea Book and Catalog.  The inks used were Baja Breeze (111833) and Silver Encore (101039).  I used the large oval, 1 1/4" and 1 3/8" circle punches on VSHR2 along with silver brads (104336) and white taffeta (109070).  VSHR1 also uses the Silver elastic cord (109866) from the Holiday Mini Catalog.  And since there is no such thing as too much bling, I added a few Swarovski Rhinestones from my bead collection.

Thanks for looking, and if you are looking for an online party this evening, be sure to check out the Verve Visual Release party over at Splitcoast!

The Verve Swap

This is a slide show of all 24 cards that were sent in for the Verve Visual Swap I hosted last month.  There were 3 groups of 8 swappers.  Julee (Vervegirl) was in all three groups and I had one other gal (babitoons) in two groups.  Some truly STUNNING work here!  They are not separated by group, they are in alphabetical order by the artist's Splitcoast name.  Enjoy!

Make a Smilebox slideshow

I'm glad October is OVER.

And I'll be even MORE GLAD when the elections are over tomorrow.  I voted a while ago and the political ads were already driving me crazy THEN.  I won't even turn on the TV or radio now.  I'm just SO SICK OF IT.  And now I'm getting the phone calls.  3 or 4 a day reminding me to vote and support this candidate or that measure.  UGH.  STOP ALREADY!  

So, October kinda sucked overall.  Starting off with putting Taz down was bad enough.  Then my father-in-law passed away on the 15th.  Then I got food poisoning on the 19th and wasn't eating normally until the 27th.  While our trip to Disneyland at the end of the month at least ended the month on a good note, it wasn't enough to erase the general suckiness that was October 2008.  Good riddance.  

I'm currently working on a 6x6 recipe swap page for a crock pot swap I'm in with my Spamily.  I have the prototype done and the pieces are all cut out and in various stages of completeness.  I'm hoping to get that in the mail by the end of the week.  I'll post it here after the swap is mailed back out, which won't be till the 18th.  I'm still waiting on the last swap I was in to come back to me - the Christmas swap with my Swappers Anonymous group.  Sigh.  The postal service has not been my friend this week.  As soon as I'm done with the crock pot recipe swap, I need to get in gear and start on Christmas.  I need to design and make cards and ornaments for our family.  I have the blank ornaments at least, it's just a question of what I'm going to stamp on them.  Then there's gifts for the Spamily.  Eek!  Russ' mom and sister are going up to the cabin Thanksgiving night.  We had planned on going this year, but that's too many people up there for me to be able to work on my Christmas stamping which is the whole reason I go up there at Thanksgiving.  Russ thinks he might want to go up there with them, which is fine, but I will be coming home to stamp.  TOO MUCH TO DO!  LOL!

I have my mom asking for our Christmas wish list.  I have no idea what I want this year.  Everything we want is big ticket stuff (we got a new TV so we need a new DVD player and would really like to upgrade our audio system from the one we've had since the late 80's/early 90's.  I'd like another pot in my Calphalon set ($100).  Stuff like that.  And Mom hates doing gift cards.  Oh well.  I have started going thru and throwing/donating stuff out of my house and the thought of getting more "stuff" is really not appealing right now.  I donated stuff last week that came home from family Christmas gatherings last year and the year before and was still in the boxes it came in.  Ugh.  Hopefully it will make someone else happy this holiday.  

I need to finish cleaning out the "storage area" that our living room turned into.  I have boxes of stuff in there that came home from Dad's house in 2004 that just got stacked and stored in there.  I got through a few boxes before October went to the dogs, but all progress on that stopped on the 15th.  My hope is to actually put up our 7' Christmas tree this year.  We haven't had it up since 2002 when we discovered that there was no way (in this house) to keep Taz out of the living room and keep her from eating the tree.  Yes, it's artificial.  She loved to chew chew chew the branches and then she would barf little artificial tree bits all over the house.  Then she would repeat the process.  We tried spritzing the branches with bitter apple.  Didn't help.  Little monster.  So, this year, provided the mice in the garage have left the tree alone, we will have a BIG tree again.  We've had a little 3' thing on top of the entertainment center the past several years.  Now that the entertainment center is gone, it's big tree or NO tree!  We'll see what happens!  It would be nice to get my Hallmark ornament collection showcased again.  I've been collecting selected Hallmark ornament series since 1983 and have a collection that FILLS the 7' tree PLUS the mantle.....  Hmmmm...  Just realized that I need to find a new location for my Candlelight Churches.....  they used to go on top of the entertainment center, under the little tree.....  hmmmmm....

OK - enough babbling.  Off to work on my swaps!