Winner Winner Chicken Dinner

Me & My Shadow Giveaway

Wow, you guys really opened my eyes for future tutorials. Some of them are outside of my comfort zone, but because I’m dedicated to providing answers to them I may have to enlist some people who are far more talented than I am to provide tips and tricks. Others I read and thought “I can totally do that…” so I will work on them as time permits!

On to the good stuff! I like to post the Top 10 people from the list randomizer so that the people in positions 2-10 can see how close they were to the golden ring. Haha! Just kidding, it’s actually my neurotic need to do things in 5s and 10s.

Karen C won the coveted seat in the Me & My Shadow Classroom at Big Picture Classes. And she also won a place in my heart for putting the “C” at the end of her name, because it made it a lot easier for me to track her down in the comments.

Grow With Love: Staycation Giveaway

I have to admit that I had totally selfish reasons for asking you all to list your favorite summer memories. I just wanted to live vicariously through all those wonderful vignettes you created. Some of them I could have written myself (like catching fireflies in jars) and others I wish I could have lived (like spending summer on a beach in France, for instance). I’m going to bookmark this post so I can revisit all of these comments in January when it’s 30 below zero.

Heather’s comment was so timely given that 4th of July was just this past week!

Congratulations to both Karen C and Heather! I’ll be contacting you soon with information about how to claim your prizes (note: no actual chicken dinner will be included – false advertising on my part!)

If you didn’t win you can still register for the self-paced Me & My Shadow class over at BPC, and you can register for Grow With Love: Staycation through July 11th to get in on all of that summery goodness.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Coming Soon | In The Loop

New Release | Jubilee

Jubilee was created as an exclusive Premiere Member kit for ScrappersGuide.com for the month of June and now it returns to the nest. ScrappersGuide approached me back in February because they wanted a birthday kit that could be used for anyone, at any age, boy or girl – in bright, cheerful colors with a lot of hand-drawn elements. I like to think I covered all the bases with this one – and The Flock has been on my case for months to get it into their hot little hands. You’re not just downloading a kit here, you’re downloading a celebration. Be warned!

You can pick Jubilee up for 20% off through Sunday, July 10th.

To celebrate its (re)release, I created the Jubilee: Party On! element pack that includes a few little things that I pulled aside before sending it off to ScrappersGuide in order to keep the final file size down. I’m offering them as a free download to Cage Liner subscribers and Facebook Fans so see your newsletter and/or my Fan Page for a download link. No purchase necessary. They’re just a little show of gratitude. Consider them a mini-celebration!

Inspiration

A little inspiration from The Flock to get you going:

[Show as slideshow]

By Christine (Liahra) July Guest

By Dana

by Jeannie

by Jenni

by Kelly S

by LaRissa

by Leontien

by Lex

by Renee

by Steffi

Giveaway | Grow With Love: Staycation

Summer can be a difficult time for scrapbookers – or at least for this one. We talked about it a bit on last week’s episode of The Digi Show – about how summertime seems to be when we take the most pictures, yet get the least amount of scrapbooking done. I’m sure it’s a mixture of the kids being out of school and all of the events that are packed into the summer months, but also it can just feel a bit overwhelming to sit down with all of these individual, everyday stories and know where to start.

So I wanted to feature the Grow With Love: Staycation workshop from Sara Gleason & Crystal Livesay here as a shortcut to memory keeping success here today so that all your summer moments don’t have to wait until winter to appear in your albums! PLUS Sara & Crystal have graciously given me one seat in their workshop to give away here on my site (details below).

If you’re not familiar with the Grow With Love series, it’s an 8-week long workshop that combines journaling prompts, products and tutorials that guide you through the process of scrapbooking the moments in your life, with each series centering around a specific theme. This is what makes it a perfect summer project – because the majority of the thinking and planning has been done for you, allowing you to sit down with your photos and the products provided and fast-track the process. We all want to spend less time in front of the computer this time of year and more time with our families enjoying each moment.

The class is offered as both self-paced and enhanced workshops, with the enhanced version giving you access to a community where you delve further into each of the prompts, laugh together, cry together, braid each other’s hair – and get a complimentary exclusive kit from Jennifer Barrette as well as other exclusive articles, tutorials and discounts not available in the self-paced. (Some of these things MAY be exaggerations.)

Registration is open through Sunday, July 10th – but read on for a chance to win a spot in the class.

Giveaway Rules

To enter for your chance to win a seat in the Grow With Love: Staycation workshop, simply leave a comment below answering the question: What’s your favorite summer memory from your own childhood? 

Your comment must be posted by Friday, July 8th, 2011 at 11:59pm (midnight) EST. One winner will be chosen at random from all entries received. You can double (or triple) your chances of winning by posting about this giveaway on Twitter or Facebook (psst, there are “tweet” and “like” buttons at the bottom of the post even!) – just make sure you come back here and leave a separate comment each time in order to earn your extra entries.

And if you haven’t already, make sure you also enter to win a spot in the Me & My Shadow classroom at Big Picture Classes, which also ends this Friday.

Good luck everyone!

New52 | Week 27

It was the dawn of a new era here in at the Jones homestead, an era of more conveniently cooked meat.

I was never much of a grilling person before Tom entered my life. It always seemed like such a hassle – cooking food over an open flame. I’d done it on the few times I’d been out camping in my life and didn’t see what was all so great about it. They make big metal boxes that you can put in your kitchen – and you just turn a knob and heat comes out of them.

I figure it must be some sort of primal man thing, you know? “Man get food. Man make fire. Man cook food.” Except that the only hunting that goes on in this house is a weekly prowl through the grocery flyers to see who has steaks on sale.

Tom loves to grill. He comes from a long line of grillers. When we’re in Indiana visiting his family almost every meal is cooked in a backyard – it’s a matter of pride for them. They discuss their individual grilling techniques and enter into these battles of grilling one-upsmanship that quite frankly are a little disturbing to watch – I won’t lie. It’s weird. There, I said it.

He has always been something of a charcoal purist when it comes to grilling – and also a Weber loyalist. I bought him his trusty Weber Kettle grill shortly after we bought this house and over the years he has outfitted it with all sorts of accessories and contraptions. It also looks exactly the same as it did on the day we purchased it – minus a thin layer of ash on the inside, the only evidence that we’ve ever really used it (which we have, hundreds of times). He takes meticulous care of everything he cherishes, including me. And, yes, the grill.

But even a charcoal purist starts to feel the pressure of growing responsibilities – and over the past year or two he had started mentioning the possibility of a gas grill in the future. Not that he’d abandon his trusty Kettle (never!) but with our work schedules the way that they are, and with my inability to figure out how the hell to cook over an open flame (or even create an open flame), grilling has become something that requires making an appointment. A gas grill would come in handy for a quick, mid-week meal.

Despite my worry over adding yet another item to our (tiny) backyard patio, I spent a few days several weeks ago researching gas grills as a birthday present for the love of my life. Nothing too fancy (he’s not much for bells and whistles) and something that fit nicely into my new determination to buy better things.

Oh – and it had to be a Weber. Which narrows the field considerably. I kept running into reviews online from people who had owned their Weber gas grills for 10-15 years so it covered me in the “better things” department. I decided on their Spirit 210 grill, which is their smallest one. I’m on a budget, after all, and we still have the mighty Kettle that we favor.

During all of my research, I also found out that you needed to buy this particular model from Home Depot – because the Home Depot sells it with cast iron grates standard – they’ll cost you $70 otherwise. There’s no Home Depot here, unfortunately, due to this being the hometown of a certain hardware store mogul and the location of  his company headquarters. (No Lowe’s either, for all the same reasons) Lucky for me they were offering free shipping on all of their grills, though, so I ordered it before we left for the wedding last weekend and it was delivered (all 70+ pounds of it) this past Wednesday.

We spent a couple of hours on  Saturday assembling the grill together – I mostly supervised. Then Tom went out in search of propane and meat – putting his hunter instinct to good use. Not too long afterward we were at the table as a family enjoying our first steaks from the new grill. The first of many, I’d imagine – since I’m much more comfortable cooking on the gas grill than I ever will be on the charcoal grill – which would make it seem as though the gift was as much for me as it was for him, but Tom would argue that the opportunity to eat anything that I cook for him still puts him in the firmly in the lead in the “gifts received” department.

Which is reason no. 1,681 that I married him.

About This Project

New52 is a cooperative project between Christine and I that invites participants to live outside the box a little bit more and try things outside their comfort zone. Just because it’s 52 things for us doesn’t mean it needs to be 52 things for you. If you participate this week, please leave a link to your blog post, scrapbook page, photograph or other recorded history of your walk on the wild side in the link list below. It isn’t about making a life-altering changes every week, it’s about keeping an open mind and embracing little changes in your life.