Frick On A Stick

Let me preface this by saying that I, in NO way, have anywhere near $10K for something like this.  But I would have KILLED for something like this when I was a kid.  Can you imagine?  Geez:

[via Etsy]

Yep. It’s true. A Full Sized Hand-Crafted Wooden Space Ship For Sale!

Works as a treehouse for slumber parties or as a playset for kids or adults.

The INSIDE is ENORMOUS!

It’s the size of a full-sized car with a professional finish and full paint job.

Will fit into most garages.

It is is Large enough to comfortably sleep 4 full sized adults inside the main hull, with a (detachable) bubble sun roof for stargazing, and windows for a cool breeze.

Every object on the inside of the cockpit is moveable, removable, and adjustable.

Well, who am I kidding? I’d take it even as an adult.  Sleeps 4 full sized adults?  SCORE! Who’s coming over?!

It’s that time of the week again!

A couple of weeks ago I sat down on a Saturday afternoon to draw a little robot head for some journaling tags I wanted to do. Once I started drawing him I just couldn’t stop – even though I had no idea what direction I was headed. I kept spinning my laptop around on the couch to ask Tom if he looked “roboty” or not. When he was done I had this total Geppetto moment where I wanted him to come to life, because he just looked so stinkin’ cute. From that, I created Innovative, and it’s available now in the One Little Bird store, 20% off until Sunday at midnight EST:

And for those of you who just like alphas – I did package up the alpha from Innovative individually.  It’s included in the kit, so don’t buy both (unless that fills some deep seated need for you). I had so much fun creating it that I figured I’d offer it a la carte, too.

Thanks for checking in with me again!  Have a great weekend!

I’ve got a lot going on this week, and had I been on top of my game I would have had separate posts for each of these every day this week. But instead there’s one big Wednesday update.

First: Hodge Podge Art Challenges are BACK! And I was extremely flattered to be asked to join their cast of characters this time around. Especially once I found out that the new challenge series was going to include 48 weekly prompts that will lead each participant towards completing a full album with an “All About Me” theme. Although you can change the “Me” out to anything really. Some people are doing their whole family, some are doing music, some are doing their spouses.  The world is your oyster. I’ve wanted to do an AAM album for a while because the boy is always totally intrigued when I share little tidbits about my past (like how our TVs didn’t have remote controls) but it’s pretty unnerving to come up with questions to ask myself. So I’m optimistic that this will help me achieve my goal, and I’d be over the moon if all of you would join in and do an album of your own. There are weekly gift certificates given away a winner chosen by the challenge poster – but I think the finished album is the end game, personally. Free stuff doesn’t hurt, though!

The prompts are going to alternate between letters of the alphabet (A-Z, duh!) and journaling prompts. So you can do two separate albums if that’s your bag, or pool the two together into a big compendium of information about your subject. This week we started with none other than the letter “A”, and here’s my page for the challenge:

credits:
Sweet * Tart by Leora Sanford & Paislee Press
Reasons Alpha by Creashens
Smitten Alpha by One Little Bird

All the participants of the Hodge Podge Art challenges can also post in the dedicated gallery at My Scrapbook Art so we can keep track of one another’s progress, find inspiration for our pages and generally hang out and go through the journey together.

Second:

Christine has set up shop at Little Dreamer Designs now! Her personal store is still open, but you can one-stop-shoppe her over at LDD now, too. It’s a totally thrilling move for her to a store that she loves, and I’m crazy happy for her. I did this page using one of her new templates this week, actually. I’ve had a productive scrapping week for a change!

credits:
Everyday’s An Adventure by Leora Sanford & Aja Abney
Template Set No. 8: Artsy Fartsy by Christine Newman/Listgirl Designs

Third: And this is the last one, I promise.  A sneak peek of my product releases for this coming Friday at Cat Scrap. I had an idea rattling around in my head for a product I wanted to make, and it all centered around one little character I drew on a Saturday afternoon – and you can see him in the lower lefthand corner of my sneak peek below. I just fell in love with him, and wanted to do him justice and I hope that you’ll agree that I did. If you’re a newsletter subscriber you’ll receive an exclusive early link to my new releases in tomorrow’s newsletter. Otherwise they’ll be available in my store at Cat Scrap on Friday 2/5!

Thanks for checking in! xoxo

Love is in the air this time of year, for sure, but do you know what I love best about the days leading up to Valentine’s Day?  The candy. This is the only time of year where candy makers chuck all their other flavors in favor of just the “red stuff” – cherry, strawberry, raspberry, etc.  And the “red stuff” is where it’s at. Tootsie Pop V-Day packages are JUST cherry and raspberry, which means I don’t have to pick those flavors out and leave a bag of abandoned grape, chocolate and orange ones.

For today I put together a mushy lovey display of UTTER LOVE, my friends.  Love love love.  And wouldn’t you know? It’s just the red stuff. And it’s available now in my CatScrap store at 20% off until Saturday @ midnight EST.

There’s an alpha in the kit, but I wanted to create a “little black dress” of an alpha as a side dish of sorts, also 20% off until Saturday night:

and a little bit of Inspiration for you from The Flock and the CatScrap Creative Team, all rolled into one big display of yumminess:

In the future I may start offering the New Release discount as a coupon code in my newsletter, just to make the newsletter all that more dramatic and awe-inspiring. If you aren’t subscribed then what are you waiting for? This week I sent out pre-release links on Thursday to my newsletter subscribers, so they got a jumpstart on the goods before they went live in the CatScrap store. You can subscribe to my newsletter by clicking on the graphic below, or the link afterwards (or the one in the sidebar of my blog)

Subscribe to The Cage Liner

I set up a fancy little Facebook fan page for my designs this week, too. If newsletters aren’t your thing, I’ll be posting new releases there also.  Although not early.

Thanks for checking in with me!
xoxo

Nutshell version of the post to follow: I Now Have A Newsletter And You Can Subscribe To It!

—————————

Now for the long version:

There are some very smart, business savvy people who get their ducks in a row BEFORE they move forward with an idea. Sometimes I delude myself into thinking I’m one of those types of people, then something comes along to remind me that I’m not so much.

When I opened my little store at CatScrap I had it in mind that I’d just put a few items up, and then take the rest as it comes.  Turns out “it” was on an express train.  I had someone contact me and say “Hey, do you have a Creative Team?” and I was all “No, who would want to be on a creative team for me?”  Then a few days later I had 11 of ‘em and I built a little forum on my website to cage ‘em in.  I call them “The Flock” because I’m kitschy like that.

Christine

Dagmar

Bryn

Rez

Renee

Julie B

Anja

Becky

Bianka

Steffi

Julie D
(my best friend since ‘92)
(who never seems to scrap anymore)
(but she’s still on my CT)

Then last night I received an inquiry about whether or not I have a newsletter, or plan on having a newsletter, or am in the process of making a newsletter. And it’s an idea I really did toss around but CatScrap sends out a newsletter each Friday, and I’m set up to peddle my goodies at My Scrapbook Art – and I’ve also posted them here on the ol’ blog.

I’m forever worried about being TOO much, does that make sense?  I come from a long line of people who … can be a little too much. As a result, both my sister and I have become the sort of people who are like “OMG, are they looking at me? Hide me! Is that person looking over here?”

Then my little peer pressurer (I’m looking at you, LeeAndra!) said: “it’s not like you’re holding that imaginary hand (literally!) gun to our heads and forcing us to sign up…” and that made a lot of sense when she put it that way. I do the majority (read: 99%) of my shopping directly from newsletters because it’s a big big world out there and I can’t possibly see it all.

So I spent a lot of time, literally into the wee hours of the night last night installing software on my site that threatened to drive me to an early grave. Then I plugged away on it AGAIN tonight after work. At one point I was talking to Christine’s husband, “The Todd”, about my problems (he installed it with a lot of headaches on her site, and he’s a programmer) and I said “The test emails I’m sending out to myself are containing increasing amounts of vulgarity” and he responded “Maybe it has a profanity filter?”  Because every time I sent a test mail, I’d get a “send failed” error.

Wasn’t the vulgarity though.  I sent myself nice messages and it still denied me. But do you ever do that? Whenever technology gets the better of me, for some reason I’m convinced I can bully it into submission. Like if I steal the Internet’s lunch money it’ll suddenly give up the goods.

I finally gave up, removed a bunch of coding changes I’d made (in preparation for the uninstalling of the beast) and sent myself ONE FINAL TEST MESSAGE because nothing says “Happy Monday!” like a cardiac event  – and it all of a sudden worked! So from this day forward, my newsletter will be brought to you by the 2% of my sanity that remains.

And you can subscribe to it here: It’s a One Little Bird Newsletter, Yo!

Don’t make me hold a gun to your head because then that would just blow LeeAndra’s theory all to hell. But I will hold products over your head and say that this week I will send out super secret hidden links to my New Releases before they go live at the CatScrap store.  I’m not at all above retail blackmail.

And if the software ever stops working some day down the road, I’ll just email you all personally. I think it would take less time.

I’m very productive when I’m lonely. Despite our day jobs, our personal lives, her booming social life and my RealityTV addiction – Christine and I are usually in some sort of contact with each other throughout the day. At one point last year I took a spin through my Instant Message logs and figured out that we had spoken to one another in some capacity for 333 of 365 days. Granted some of those days were just a quick couple of lines – but other times it was a non-stop typing extravaganza over the course of the day.  Early on in our online love affair (yes, Tom knows about it, and fully endorses it because he’s got a geek crush on Todd) I apologized to her once while I went outside to do something insane: spray polyurethane on a hybrid tag book I was making. I don’t do hybrid anymore, because I didn’t want to utter the words “Hold on, I have to go outside on my patio and spray three coats of polyurethane on a bunch of cardboard shapes” on a regular basis. Hybrid is not for me.

True story, one night I had a nightmare that I glued myself to my table doing a hybrid project.

Anyway, my whole point is that I apologized to her for disappearing for a few minutes and she said to me “Let’s just agree right now that we will never apologize for stepping away from the computer with each other, okay?”  Right then and there I knew she was not half bad. She was recognizing that hey, we obviously are adults with lives and responsibilities, so if an IM just sits there let’s have faith that it’ll receive an answer as soon as the other person has the time.

When Christine goes on vacation, however, I only hear from her sporadically. Whereas when I go on vacation I still maintain contact with her. I give more than she does to this relationship, quite frankly. There – I SAID IT. I give .. and I give … and she just jets off to Hawaii and is all “I only have a few days to enjoy THIS paradise before I go back to my EVERYDAY paradise in sunny San Diego, California.”

But I digress, the whole point of this is that when Christine is on vacation I wind up being super-productive. Which some might argue means that I should want Christine to be on vacation more often, but unfortunately I’d rather she were around and just randomly sending me an IM at 5pm on a Tuesday to say something like “the todd wants to know if you’re excited about free wifi at Mcdonalds starting in Jan”.  That’s an actual IM.

While she was in Hawaii in December I worked on a kit called Paradise Found, and you can pick it up for 20% off from today until Sunday @ midnight in my CatScrap store:

I had a lot of fun making something like this in the dead of winter here in Wisconsin. Let’s just say it gave me hope! It’s not just for vacation photos, of course, it’s great for anyone who has the luxury of enjoying a warm climate year-round, or for scrapping your summer photos. A nice little break from reality for those of us who won’t see sunshine or flowers for another 5 months.  This time around I made a little pack of quick pages, too (also 20% off):

And some word arts to coordinate (they’re just $1):

Also this week I had a request from Julie/mrs2a50 to make a pack of papers in warm olive/rust/brown tones for the pages she does of her dog, Roxy. And since I adore Roxy (and Julie is … okay .. I guess… Haha) I whipped these up for her. A pack of solid papers in warm, cozy earthtones (on sale too!):

I won’t prolong this post even further (I can really go on, can’t I?) by adding example layouts to it. You can view them all in the detailed images on the store pages, anyway, and they’re bigger and better!

Oh, and Christine is giving away a coupon to my store on her blog today, so if you get a chance you should pop in there and enter her giveaway and win!

Artichoke and Parmesan Dip from StoneMill Kitchens.  If you can find this at your local grocer (and you dig parmesan and artichokes) then I urge you to try this out.  We buy sourdough bread from a local bakery and I spread this “dip” on a slice and then I die a thousand little deaths.

They have other varieties, we’ve personally had the Three Cheese Peperoncini and the Cajun Seafood – all delicious. The artichoke and parmesan is the forerunner for me, though.

Like all things that I love I fully expect our grocery store to stop carrying it soon.

I have some new products ready to release on Friday at CatScrap   I’ll post a sneak peek tomorrow if I actually get one made.  LOL

Wha? I totally opened up a store at CatScrap today! It’s crazy, right? That’s what I do best, though. I really enjoyed making my little freebie for Christine’s store opening back in November. It totally weirded me out to see people make pages with things I created, I’m not going to lie, but it was a fulfilling way to be creative when I have no page ideas of my own – for sure. So when Catrine extended an invitation to me to join CatScrap, I got all “no no no … I may never have another idea again” and she let the offer lay there on the table for a while so I could poke it with a stick for a few weeks and talk myself into and back out of it. Because that’s how I operate, folks.

In the end, though, I did have a couple more ideas – whether or not they were GOOD ones is debatable – and when I returned to the table and cried to Catrine “Can I still do it?!? Is the offer still good?!??!” she had no where to run, frankly. I mean, I was right there. I’m really hard to avoid.

So that brings us to today – the grand opening of my own little store – One Little Bird. Let the adventure begin!

and some inspiration from my partners in crime over on the CatScrap Creative Team:

Using In The Moment:

Using Unstoppable: