Nose to the design stone

Where oh where have I been? It feels like I've been immersed in PhotoShop forever, but really I had a lot of other odds and ends happening that kept me completely out of there for too long, so then I dived back in to get done once I finally got past all that stuff. I'll spare you the boring details (even if I could remember them at this point). There was stuff in there about running numbers so we could figure out our spending account contribution for next year, a project for Matthew for school that fell through the cracks, sorting through clothes for a charity donation for a very needed tax deduction, dental checkup for Kaylee, etc., etc., etc.

We did manage to sneak in a bit of fun though. The four of us went to the Science Night at Matthew's school this week, which was really cool. Favorites were the UV bead bracelets, screamer balloons, some sort of water bottle game based on the weight of compressed air, smashed frozen roses, and a mini-planetarium movie inside an inflatable dome. Between the latter and looking at the moon through a high-powered telescope, and listening to an explanation of how craters are formed, Matthew was dreamily occupied with thoughts of becoming an astronaut during our story time that night. :)

Mark took the kids out trick-or-treating Tuesday night. Matthew was a Storm Trooper and Kaylee was Snow White. They went out for about an hour while I stayed in and passed out candy. Of course, they had a blast and are enjoying their carefully rationed haul.

I also slipped out to go play Bunco again Friday night, although I didn’t win anything this time. There seems to be a beginners' luck thing that often happens, and it was going full force as a newbie walked away with three out of the five prizes. LOL And nope, no pictures of me in the tiara. Maybe next time. ;)

So what have I been working on so diligently? Remember when I released my Rich Autumn kit, I said that I thought I might do a Christmas kit along those lines? Of course you do, and if you don't, just nod and pretend you do. Well I did a Christmas kit that completely coordinates with Rich Autumn. It all mixes and matches. Now granted, you probably wouldn't want to use Santa with the leaf paper or the silk leaves with the snowflake paper, but a heck of a lot of both kits works together. Very cool. So once the kit itself was done, then I decided to do some fun gift tags… and some cards… and a couple of quick pages… and then I decided to offer just the alphas in case someone wanted to use them with the cards or quick pages. And then, after I did all that, I decided to offer the whole shebang as a collection along with Rich Autumn. I'm just so glad to have it finished. Even after all the designing was done, it still took me two full days to do all the packaging and write descriptions and get it all posted to the store. Granted, that was with a lot of interruptions from the kids and such, and Bunco was in there, but still, it was rather tedious. I'm holding off on putting it in stock because we're going to run a special ScrapDish newsletter promotion, so if you aren't subscribed yet, you might want to run do that. ;) I'd post a sneak peek, but really all you have to do is go look at Rich Autumn and imagine that translated to a Christmas theme. LOL

So now I'd like nothing more than to take a nice break from designing, but I have three small design projects due by Friday, none of which I've even started yet. Yikes. And today I am dealing with the mountain range (not just one mountain, but an entire landscape) of laundry that has accumulated on the master bathroom floor (which is where I sort it), and we need to finish up that project of Matthew's that I mentioned before. And I woke up with a terrible headache from allergies. I took my meds and it's mostly gone now, but it's still not how I'd like to feel with so much on my plate.

Oh, and Mom, I got the email and will take care of it, just don't want to pull it up with the little miss running around to see. :)

Ok, better wrap up and get to work! :)