2 New Cards, Healthy, Wealthy & Wise

Good Morning!

Here's my last card with the My Little Shoebox paper. I really like using something until it's all gone and then moving on, but I'm sure it can get dull for you ladies. This is CAD #7, I also used it for a "mom's birthday using pink and flowers" challenge at Scrapbooking and Crafting Friends. My mom is a "more is better" kind of person so I really piled on the love. But, I'm also an obnoxious child so I gave in to my dark side and put HB2U which will send her into fits of irritation. LOL. I'm not perfect yet.


And here is CAD#9 which is made with Basic Grey Ambrosia:


Doing a Card A Day challenge with sketches is tricky. Usually when I do any "a day" challenges I have the freedom to make whatever I want. This is a neat exercise as I have to really work hard to wrap my head around some of them.

Among a lot of crafters I know, mixing paper companies and patterns is the holy grail of papercrafting. I love mixing manufacturers but sometimes, when thinking is harder or time is short, grabbing a bunch of paper that was designed to work together is just the thing. Don't let imagined "good, better, best" standards hold you back from making something on days when complicating the issue will make it impossible.

Healthy: I have the flu. And I sort of want to roll over and moan. Blecht. But on the happy-happy side of life I got my pain clinic appt. for next Wednesday. The hard part of pain clinics is getting accepted into the program so this is a huge step forward.

Wealthy: We've been doing the Dave Ramsey Total Money Makeover for 2.5 weeks and following a budget for six days. We haven't used our credit card since the 24th! We've "found" $700 (selling stuff, getting overcharges fixed, reimbursements etc.) and cut more than $400 from our monthly bills. Our gas consumption has gone down by half. Right now, thanks to the "found money" and cuts we are able to put 57% of our income onto our car payment. Isn't that cool? We should have that paid in no time. I wonder if Visa is worried that we died *giggle*

Wise: I've been reading a lot. Some light, some how-to books, nothing too heavy. I've also been setting goals for myself. I think I might start an art journal to record them and the steps I want to take to make them happen. To quote Alice in Wonderland, If you don't know where you're going, you'll end up somewhere else.

Please leave a comment telling me your healthy, wealthy and wise list.

P.S. If I owe you an email please forgive me. Between having the flu and migraines it's been a bad week and possibly the worst one for my back ever. With the meds and the yucks I'm a little behind.

A Card and a Winner :-)

I'm having so much fun making pink girlie cards. I don't know what is with me lately but I reach for the feminine stuff first.


Thanks for all the jokes, they definitely added zest to my comment section. You gals crack me up.

And the winner is:

Lisa n Roxy

Timestamp: 2009-08-10 14:37:00 UTC

Congratulations, Lisa! Please email me your addy. My email is nicolemaki at mac dot com

Digi!

Do you ever do something you thought you couldn't do and even though it's just a little thing, you're insanely proud?

Well, that's me this morning. I made this:


Snagging someone else's always felt wrong but I had no idea how to make my own. So I spent sometime banging away at it and I'm reasonably happy with the (simple) results. You've got to start somewhere, right?

The digi elements were free from Shabby Princess.

If any of you would like it for when you get pubbed please email me - I'm very happy to share.

P.S. One more day to enter the drawing for my RAK.
P.S.S This is my 300th post!

Simple Lay Out and a Trick

I really enjoyed doing a simple LO to drop into my album. All the scrapping I've done the last few months has been for guest design team spots which is a tremendous honor but can be stressful. It was nice to make something that wouldn't be judged, evaluated, submitted or even my best work. Just paper, adhesive, memories and an interest in recording them.


See the title? It's not really orange. What? I only had pale peach Thickers left so I covered the color with a deep yellow to take down the pastel-y-ness of the shade and then edged them in red making sure to pounce a bit over the yellow. I think they do a passable job standing in for a deep orange. To add interest I used my paint pen to make dots. The paint and ink sunk into the fabric top of the letters and it blended very well. I'll be adding coloring my Thickers to the tricks up my sleeve.

It's day three of our official budget and we've run out of flour, pasta, tomato sauce, coffee and the tires on our Explorer need to be replaced ASAP. This is sort of funny as I bulk buy those staples (like 50lbs of flour at a time) so running out is a fairly rare occurrence. Fortunately, I know exactly how much money we have for each category so I can test this whole plan under a non-stressful "crisis" and it'll show the holes in the system.

The pain clinic is sorting my details out and I'll be meeting with them for my five hour appointment sometime next week. Thanks for the prayers.

You still have two more days to enter my RAK drawing: Leave a joke (of any sort) in the comments for an entry and follow my blog for a second entry. You can read more about it here.

Hello Willows, hope your having fun hopping :-)

Flat and Not-So-Flat

I've been really into making mailable cards lately. I love piling it on as much as the next gal but as I said earlier this week - lump tax bugs me. Here is a mailable card that I think has as much detail and texture as it's deeper cousins:


Stamps Used: Butterfly Queen by Bombshell Stamps

Speaking of piling it on, I made this very over the top valentine with a bunch of my red and pink color kit from Gauche Alchemy:


Remember, leave a joke ( off-color is fine) in the comments for entry into my drawing for a RAK. Follow this blog for an additional entry. Thanks for playing.

P.S. Welcome Willow Traders Blog Hoppers :-)

Card a Day #4, a RAK and Budget Cuteness

I've noticed that I alway use up my generic cards first so I thought I'd make one for Sketch 4. This is a sketch that was used by Caardvarks back in the winter and I was really unhappy with how mine turned out. It was nice - albeit intimidating - to take another crack at it.

On this card I used a printable image of the tree and rainbow. They were previously available by Marieke Vermeulen Design and I have got so much use out of them. Here's the card:


When we refinanced our mortgage last week we were delighted to learn that our next mortgage payment isn't until October. This is HUGE as we can put the entire mortgage payment on other bills and pay them down much, much faster than we planned.

I also put together our emergency fund:


I really need to be literal right now and this insures our emergency cash isn't spent elsewhere.

And our envelope system - I bet you knew it was going to be cute :-)


Yesterday we visited the doctor and Avery has pink eye. Yuck. I always think of it as a little kid disease - and a gross one at that. He's had it for a week and none of us have caught it so all that hand washing must be working. I also heard really good things about the anesthesiologist who is taking over my case - what a blessing as I've been nervous about the whole thing. To be honest, I've been having nightmares about the pain clinic. I know it's not designed to cause pain but my experience with medical treatment is that they fix one thing and make something else horribly worse. One med I took solved a neurological problem but kills your liver - fast. I had to go to the fire station every other day to have my vitals checked. Uncool! I can only imagine what torturous plans the docs have for me this go around. (Now where did I leave my optimism? Must have been in my other pants. *snort*)

I'm rapidly approaching my 300th blog post and am thinking about sending a RAK out. Here's the rub though, I could really use a laugh so you need to tell me a joke in the comments. You get one entry for the joke and a 2nd entry for following my blog. I'll draw a winner on Monday.

The RAK will include:

The Budget Starts Today!

I have a new online friend named Christy who is a real sweetie-pie. She sent me an envelope of stamped images so I could try out the new Hot Rods from Bombshell Stamps. I thought that was super nice of her.

Here's the card I made, I was really intimidated about coloring a shiny surface but I think it turned out okay. Shannon is awesome about posting her images in color so you can see a suggestion of how to color yours.


Today we start our budget officially with envelopes and everything. We've been doing smart things for over a week but the big bad budget goes into play this morning. Wish me luck. So far I've cut over $350 dollars from our monthly expenses and "found" close to $300 more. It's four kinds of crazy to be able to find so much money in a week. We just hadn't been paying close enough attention.

For anyone else embarking on budgeting and economizing here is a list of low hanging fruit we started with:

*Check cell phone plan. DH was able to drop from 900 min. to 450 per month which saved us $30/month
* Scan bills for overcharges and call to correct them (We found over $200 in mistakes)
* Make sure you've submitted reimbursable work expenses.
* Cut non-essentials. Our list was embarrassingly long but none of it came all at once. HBO one month, Audible.com six months later, Netflix, Game Fish, craft kit clubs - seriously, it all adds up.
* Make sure your tires are full and aligned properly, oil is clean, fluids are topped off, brake pads are thick enough etc. With cars, prevention is key. We didn't notice a misalignment and now we have to replace our tires a mere eighteen months after purchase because of funky wear. That could have been avoided.