Happy Halloween

I was hoping to have a halloween gift for everyone, but I didn't get a chance. Sorry. I will tell you that you can get an unreleased kit on Saturday at Scrappers Zone for free. We are going to be having hourly happy hour freebies all throughout the day. You will never know what kit is going to be free and you are going to have to look for it. Here is a preview of the kit that I will have for free on Saturday. Head to Scrappers Zone on Saturday if you want this kit for free. It will go into the store after than, although it will be a bigger kit in the store. For those of you that get the kit for free and want the additional papers and elements, I will be making an add-on of all the new stuff I add to the kit. There are also going to be lots of sales in the Scrappers Zone store. I hope to see you all there.

Here is a LO that was done with this kit. I actually made this kit in response to a search someone was doing for a kit to scrap her daughters first haircut. I am pleased with the way it turned out.

I have received some wonderful blessings in the past few weeks that I want to tell everyone about. These blessings confirm to me that I am suppose to be doing this (becoming a designer that is). I posted about getting CS3. I was also gifted a Digiscrapdesigners subscription from my MIL. Last week, I posted at DST looking for some inexpensive or free custome shapes for photoshop. I had several people tell me I should get a subscription to ActionFx. I posted back that I could not afford that because of my health issues and not being able to work and paying a lot of money out in medical bills. I wasn't looking for a hand out, but just explaining why I couldn't get the subscription. I got a private message from a designer gifting me some of her png shapes. There were LOTS of them. I am so grateful for her generosity. This weekend, I got 2 gift subscriptions to Action Fx. They are both 2 month subscriptions. I was blown away and overwhelmed by these acts of generosity. I emailed Al, the owner of Action Fx and explained to him that I had 2 subscriptions going at the same time. I requested that they be active one after another so I had 4 months. He emailed me back and said that he gave me a one year subscrption since the price was close to t he one year subscription. I am just so filled with gratitude for all those that have been so generous to me. I am also grateful to my Father in Heaven for sending these people into my life.

A big sale

We are having a big sale at Studio Style Design. This sale will take place the 30th of every month. Select things will be 30% off. Today, my entire store is 30% off. This will not be the case every month. Some months, I will only put select things on sale.

Things have been crazy busy around my house for the past week. Now that I am finally well, we took Andrew out for his birthday dinner last night. His birthday was September 29th. We took him to Gatti Town. We take him there every year for his birthday. His favorite food is pizza, and he loves to play video games, so Gatti Town is perfect for him. The hardest part was that the doctor wants him to lose a little bit of weight. He is the only one of my kids that isnt' super skinny. He needs to lose 13 pounds. He had to limit himself on the amount of pizza and eat a bunch of vegetables. The doctor said he can't have soda at all. I allowed him to have 1 soda last night since it was his birthday celebration. We don't drink a lot of soda anyway.

Today, we are painting pumpkins. We bought a few pumpkins at Sweet Berry Farms that we wanted to paint. They are small pumpkins, a little bigger than a softball. Tomorrow, we are going to carve our other 2 pumpkins. We have found in previous years that they start to mold in about 24 hours, so we usually carve them on Halloween day, or sometimes the day before.

TGIF

It's Friday. I have a freebie for you today. Here are some metal hearts I made just messing around. I thought they turned out pretty good. I love putting hearts on things. Even on a little boy page, they show the love you have for that person. I hope you all find a use for these.

download here

Even though it is Friday, it really isn't any different from any other day of the week. We have no big plans for the weekend. My husband is going to work for a few hours on Saturday. We will probably watch the UT football game, or at least part of it. Andrew is going to a friends house over the weekend. The boys have their yearly program for primary at church on Sunday. We are having the missionaries for dinner on Sunday. There is our entire weekend in a nutshell.

I have to finish up the boys Halloween costumes this weekend too. Jeremy is going to be Harry Potter. We found a great costume, but it is too big for him to I have to hem it up. Andrew is som sort of Pokemon. I have to sew some green balls to the back of the costume and sew a red sash.

I hope everyone has a great weekend.

A Great Weekend

This weekend, we did a family trip to Sweet Berry Farms. It is about an hour outside of Austin. They have a pumpkin patch this time of year. In March, you can go out there for strawberry picking and you can pick blackberries in May/June. The kids loved it. We did a hayride, the kids and the husbands did a giant maze that was cut into a corn field. We made our own scarecrow. I need to go get a pole today to put it up in the front yard. They had some great pumpkins out there. They are way better than at the grocery store. The kids bought small pumpkins and they are going to paint them today during school time. We did this outing as a celebration of my daughter turning 15. Her 2 best friends came out with us and her cousins and her aunt. She is really close with Aashlie who is 13 (her cousin). My best friend met us out there and they all did the maze together. I didnt' do the maze though. I have some mobility problems and I wasnt' sure what it was going to be like in the maze. I got lots of great pictures while we were there. I took 118 pictures in 5 hours. Niether my best friend or my SIL brought a camera, so I was the group photographer. It was so nice to have a family outing like that. It has been a long time since we have had a day like that.

Here are some LO I did yesterday of our trip. These first ones are done with Kim Cameron's kit Pumpkin Juice. It is a perfect kit for those pumpkin pictures. It is so full of elements that you can use it on a lot of LO.

This is my family. From left to right, we have Andrew, Rachael, Jeremy, Patricia and Stan.

These are my daughters favorite cousins and her best friends. From left to right, there is Jessica, Aashlie (cousins), Rachael (my daughter), Amira and Megan (DD BFF).

This is my SIL and her kids. From left to right, there is Aashlie, Travis, Margie, Brandon, Megan and Jessica.

Here is a LO I did with my own Halloween kit. It is called Going Batty. My kids think some of the elements look like the bat symbol from Batman . You can get the kit at my stores: Studio Style Designs and Scrappers Zone.

I have decided I don't really like to scrap with my own designs. After I finish the kit, I am kind of tired of seeing it and I don't want to look at it again. Maybe if I was doing a LO 6 months after I made the kit it would be better. I just finished the kit last week though.

Dropping out

I decided last night to drop out of the contest. I was getting so stress out by it. I was hating everything I was designing for it, I wasn't sleeping and I was getting grumpy with my family. We got the next theme and I almost cried when I saw it. I thought and thought about what I was going to do with the theme and finally came up with a subject that I liked. Through a conversation that took place on the private contestants forum, it came out that my subject would not be accepted for the theme. I couldnt' bare the thought of having to do a kit with a theme I didnt' like. It was hard enough last week doing a color palatte I didn't like. I got into designing because I love doing it. I was not loving it over the past week and I was really questioning my decision to become a designer. I feel such a huge relief now that I have dropped out. It was a hard decision for me to make. I am not a quitter and I usually finish what I start. I'm glad I make the decision to drop out though. I am trying to explain all this with out giving away the contest theme, so I hope it all made sense.



I don't know if they are going to delete my kit from the contest forum, so I thought I would post it here so if you still wanted to get it, you could.

Get it here

I did decide that I was going to continue making the kit that I was going to use for the contest. I love the subject I chose. I will post a preview of it when I am done, as well as a link to where you can buy it.

My daughter Rachael turns 15 today. Time sure flies. She is excited to be learning to drive this year. I'm not, but that's ok. She is a joy to have in my life and I can't imagine life without her in it.

Round 2 uncovered

Here is my round 2 kit for the design contest at Just for the Scrap of It. Our theme was little boys age 3-7. My son is 5, so perfect. He loves Legos, so I chose that as my theme for this kit. My daughter initially suggested I do cars. Jeremy loves the movie Cars, and he loves Hotwheel cars. I am so glad I didn't do cars. A lot of the women did a car type theme. The site owners has asked that we link everyone to our gallery on JFTSOI rather than straight to the 4shared link. Later in the week, after the voting is done, I will put up the 4shared link. I would love everyone that likes this kit to register at the site so you can vote for me on Tuesday and Wednesday. Leave me some love it you like the kit.

get it here

I will put up a reminder tomorrow for everyone to go vote.

Voting results and a freebie

I made some pretty chrome frames for everyone this week. I hope you enjoy them.

get them here

Now for Round 1 voting results. After torturing us for almost 2 days while the votes rolled in, they told us that everyone will be moving onto the next round. This was a decision they made before the contest even started. They wanted the first round to be a trial run only, but they didn't want us to know because they wanted us to try our best. I am now hard at work on my next kit. The theme is a little bit harder this time. I have a great idea for it that I think lots of people will like. I am not thrilled about the color palatte though. I like some of the colors, but 2 of the colors in it I don't care for. I guess that is part of what makes it challenging.

Studio Style Designs is having a Grand Re-Opening tomorrow. Everything will be 25% off. There will be lots of freebies. This is my second store and I am trying really hard to get it stocked before tomorrow. I will be uploading things all afternoon. I hope to see everyone there.