Major Blog Candy Going on Now!

Enfys of Going Buggy has a full set of 148 Letraset ProMarkers to give away this week.  She is also doing a series of videos about how to use the markers, so scadoodle on over there and learn all about the Promarkers and enter to win!  Link to contest here.

Blog Candy

I have no delusions that large numbers of people read me blog.  I may be the only one that reads it.  Just in case there is some one out there that visits from time to time, I am offering a little freebie.  All you have to do to claim this little goody is be the first to leave a comment with your email. I'll contact you to get your mailing address.   I will mail to the lower 48 US states only, sorry Alaska and Hawaii.

This offer expires 12:01 am November 30, 2010.

Back from our trip to Texas

Our daughter and her life partner recently moved into their new home in Pearland, Texas.  We had visited her once before when they lived in an apartment in Houston but we flew down that time.  This trip we decided to drive.  Yep, we are talking road trip.  I guess we baby boomers never get that out of our systems.  We loaded up our 2010 version of a hippy van - a Honda CR-V - dog and all, and hit the road.  The 8 track tape deck has been replaced by XM radio, the highs come from caffeine and sugar, and the devil may care attitude has been overtaken by Map Quest, GPS, and reservations at the La Quinta (dog friendly).

The romanticism of the road trip is not gone, but a healthy dose of reality tempers it for me now.  Spending three days in a car driving close to 500 miles a day becomes an endurance test in which my knees and back complain and my legs swell.  Thank goodness my husband and I can always find something interesting to talk about. 

I saw a lot of notables on this trip. The many swamps abundant with life and dusty, lifeless crop fields.  Single oil well pumps and huge oil refineries. Up scale Texas living and state after state of  houses where cardboard and plastic were used as roofing.  The sudden emergence of Lookout Mt. in TN and the utter flatness of TX.  Too many crosses on the side of the road signifying a life lost. 

I had never driven through MS or LA and I'm glad I did.  LA really is America's wetland and MS is prettier than I expected.  Looking at the world through the windshield at 70 mph - it is amazing what you can see.

Please visit my husband's blog for some nice bird photos.  http://birdsnsky.blogspot.com/ 

More Card Samples for Operation Write Home

Here are some more card samples I made with my Cricut Imagine that I am shipping to the OWH reshipper.  I feel a real sense of accomplishment that I was able to reach my personal goal of 100 cards for this shipment.

Cricut Imagine and Operation Write Home

When I first became aware of Operation Write Home, I was a handcrafted card maker. Nothing was automated, although I did use a Cuttlebug to help with dry embossing.  I thought long and hard about how I wanted to proceed with OWH and knew that I would never be able to make a great number of cards with how I was set up.  My cards were  no works of art, certainly not compared to what I had seen in magazines.  So my mind started to work on this issue of limited numbers and mostly handmade vs machine assisted and the ability to increase my card production by quite a bit.  As my past posts indicate, I decided to purchase a Cricut Imagine and I believe it is one of the best crafting investments I have ever made.  It has revolutionized my card making similar to how the Cuttlebug enhanced my use of dry embossing.  As long as I have white paper, I have access to libraries of printed and solid cardstock.  In the past 3 days, I have made over 100 A2 sized cards to send to our troops overseas.  This will be my first shipment, but I wanted that shipment to be over 100 cards and the Imagine helped me reach my goal.    I  LOVE  my Imagine. Here are a couple of examples.  Nothing fancy, but I hope you and the troops like them!