In December…

{Photo collage made in Lightroom 4. Then I used Rad Lab’s “Troy” filter over the whole thing. Brought it into Photoshop and added the month and year with Pacifico font and ran Sahlin Studio’s glitter style over the font.}

Oh December, you came in like a lamb and roared out like a lion. What a busy but blessed month you were!

• Between traveling and getting sick with a sinus infection, I only ran 5 miles. Pretty pathetic! But I did end up running 385 miles in 2012, surpassing my goal of 366 miles (avg of a mile per day).
• I also walked 101 miles in 2012.
• I only spent a total of 3 hours and 6 min exercising in December. That and holiday eating made my waistline bigger. :(
• We took 824 photos. That is the 3rd highest photo month, after June and May.
• I made handmade holiday cards.
• I made DIY Elf Party t-shirts for our party guests.
• We had our 3rd Annual Elf Party.
• I blogged twice at One Little Bird. Once with printable tape, and once with printable gift tags. I told her I’m her printable/hybrid slave. She agreed to pay me with food.
• Todd cooked chicken tacos for his once-a-month homemade group lunch extravaganza at work.
• I went to a work holiday lunch on Coronado Island. I took the ferry for the first time.
• We went to Todd’s work holiday party at Anthology and it was awesome and fantastic!
• I blogged at Write.Click.Scrapbook. about making easy holiday paper ornaments.
• We went to Texas to visit my sister’s family for an early Christmas celebration.
• I was on The Digi Show, Episode #67: Quick and Dirty. We talked about quick and dirty hacks and tricks for everything from photo editing to using a Silhouette machine.
• I made a DIY shaped bokeh kit to take cute holiday shaped bokeh light photos. I blogged the process and photos at The Lilypad.
• I received some wood chips from Freckled Fawn, courtesy of my friend Lili Niclass, who designed the product! (She also designed the Clementine Edition and Baby Editions of Project Life!) I ♥ them and can’t want to use them in my layouts and Project Life.
• We drank a lot of hot chocolates. A lot.
• Todd installed Windows 8 on my laptop. He also installed a hybrid SSD drive in it, so now it’s fast and furious! :)
• We met up with my childhood friend Minnie’s family when they came to visit San Diego for the holidays.
• I gave Todd some Bowflex weights for Christmas. He gave me a Kindle Paperwhite. 
• On Christmas, we made ebelskivers for breakfast, went to China Max for lunch, and had our annual Christmas At The Beach. We also got to Facetime with Sally and Joyce.
• We got to go to Donovan’s for dinner, with a gift certificate.
• Todd made meatball in spaghetti sauce in the crockpot and it was divine! 
• We got to hang out with AJ & Meera and the kids. We ate pulled chicken sandwiches and ice cream, opened gifts, and walked around the neighborhood to see fantastic light displays coordinated with music. Love spending time with our good friends!
• Todd went to the San Diego Auto Show with Roby. They ate lunch at Point Loma Seafoods and had fun at the show.
• I received my first box of Evalicious DT goodies. I can’t wait to get creating and show you how great the new products are!
• As with tradition, we stayed home for New Year’s Eve and cooked some favorite foods: Bucatini with Mushrooms, Crispy Oven Fries, and a homemade version of Mr. Hero’s Romanburger, Todd’s childhood favorite from Akron, Ohio. For dessert, we made brown butter oatmeal chunk cookies.

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Crafting | Our 2012 Holiday Cards

I wanted to share my process of creating our handmade 2012 holiday cards with you. It probably would have been more helpful if I had shared it earlier in the holiday season. But I barely finished these on Saturday Dec. 22 to get them into the post office, so that wasn’t really an option, LOL!

After my super labor-intensive holiday cards from last year, I decided to go with a more simple design this year. No more trifold cards! I love the look of cutout windows, so I decided to cut some very simple holiday shapes with my Silhouette digital cutter. I knew I wanted my card size to be 5.5x4.25 so that I could make two cards out of a piece of 8.5x11 cardstock. I placed the shapes in the Silhouette Studio software so that they are where I want the windows to be when I cut the cardstock in half to make two cards. Then I cut them out with the Silhouette.  I used Papertrey Ink’s heavy cardstock, along with a tan woodgrain cardstock.


The woodgrain cardstock was not easy to cut in the Silhouette at all. Too thick and fibrous. I had to use my craft knife to extract the shape. I didn’t realize it at the time, but stamping on woodgrain textured cardstock will also prove to be a problem later on.


I took my supplies to my friend Cassi’s place for a crafternoon. After trimming each cardstock in half with my paper trimmer, I scored each card in half for the fold.




Next I stamped greetings onto the front of the card, below the cutout window. I forgot to take photos of the stamping though. I used some stamps from Papertrey Ink that I had purchased to make Christmas cards in 2011.

The next step was to sew some colored shimmer cardstock to fill the cutout window. I only changed the top thread color and just used white thread for the bobbin, because nobody will see the stitching on the other side. I planned to cover the other side up with stamped sentiments on white cardstock.


Once I finished sewing, I was left with the beginning and end thread tails on the front of the card.


I saw this trick somewhere on the internet, but now I forgot where. Anyways, you flip to the backside of your sewing and pull slightly on the loose tails on that side (in this case my white threads on the back). When you pull gently, the thread on the front of the card (red) will pull through!


Here’s another look at a different card using the same method. When I finished sewing the star, I had two loose tails of thread on the front.


I went to the back and pulled them through.


Now the front is clean and neat! No more loose thread tails.


Next, I stamped the back of each card with the handmade card seal stamp from Catslife Press, and signed my name.


But what about stamping the greetings onto the red cardstock and the woodgrain cardstock? The red was too dark for ink to show well. The woodgrain was too uneven to stamp on it. So… embossing to the rescue!


First I wiped the front of the card with dryer sheet to prevent embossing powder from sticking to where it shouldn’t be.


Then I stamped the sentiments onto the card using Versamark Ink. The image looks like a watermark at this point.


Then I sprinkled the embossing powder onto the card to cover the area where I stamped with Versamark Ink.


This is what it looked like after I shook the excess embossing powder off.


Then I heated the embossed sentiment with a heat gun for about 20-30 seconds. The powder melted into solid raised shiny sentiment!


I did the same thing on this one, but with white embossing powder.


Then I did it four times with the gold embossing powder.


I cut each one into a banner shape and adhered it to the woodgrain cardstock cards.


For the inside sentiments on the left(the back of the cutout windows), I cut 8.5x11 white cardstock into quarters and stamped the sentiments on them.


On the inside right, I trimmed my 4x6 photo I designed with graphics in Photoshop and had printed at Costco. Since the photo was 6” height, I had to cut 1/2 inch off in order to fit into the 5.5” height card.


Once I adhered the sentiment on the left and the photo on the right, this is what the inside of the cards looked like.


I had a hard time sewing the ornament shape because of the curves. So I decided to draw the stitching on the other one, LOL.


All the different cards lined up. I also drew the stitching on the snowflakes. No way I was going to try to sew that shape!


Here are my cards all done and ready to go into their envelopes.


I only made 26 handmade cards this year. I just could not handle doing more with what time I had. I had all the recipients’ addresses in an Excel spreadsheet. I used the Avery address label template in Word and mail merged with my Excel addresses to print out labels. It was very fast and easy. Then I stamped our addresses on the back with some silver ink (on red envelopes) and red ink (on white envelopes). I used pigment ink and they took very long to dry on these shiny envelopes, so I had to heat-set them with the heat gun.

Todd made it to the post office just in time on Saturday night 12/22!  Hope you enjoyed a look at the making of our holiday cards. I didn’t have time to link up to my supplies, but if you have any questions I’ll be happy to answer them in the comments. :)

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10 Years Ago Today

We were at the Fiesta Bowl BCS National Championship Game in Tempe, Arizona, watching the Ohio State Buckeyes make history by beating the Miami Hurricanes and winning the National Championship in double overtime. One of the best nights of our lives. (Even though we paid $500 for each ticket and they were in the nosebleed section high up.) We left the stadium way past midnight, with hoarse voices from cheering so hard. But oh so happy. What a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see it live in person!



And even though these film photos were grainy and somewhat out of focus, they are still such a treasure. They are part of our favorite memories ever.


During the whole day, we only took about 10 photos. It makes me marvel at the amount of memories we are able to capture now with awesome digital DSLR cameras, point-and-shoot cameras, and our phones. Technology has come a long way in just 10 years.

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Write.Click.Scrapbook. | Remember This

The January Write.Click.Scrapbook. gallery is now live! The theme this month is “Note To Self”. What an awesome theme to begin the new year. Here is my page called “Remember This”. I decided to do a digital page this time.


12 x 12 | materials "Happy Gram" digital kit (One Little Bird) + "Note To Self" digital kit (Echo Park) + fonts (Bebas, Lobster 2.0, Covered By Your Grace) + phone app (Incredibooth)

Click on over to see the page at WCS and read my note and my January Fun Fact.

You can see the whole January Gallery at Write.Click.Scrapbook. here.

You can see the January gallery launch post here.

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Hello 2013

{Click on photo to see larger.}

Hello 2013. I must admit that this new year rushed in when I wasn’t fully prepared to turn a new leaf. I had felt harried, rushed, overcommitted, and unprepared. But I love the clean slate of a new year. I love that it’s full of possibilities. I love making new goals.

I’m not sure that I want to commit to any full-year goals for projects this year. In 2009 I completed Project 365, in which I took at least one photo per day AND blogged it. (Yes, if you go to the 2009 section in my blog archives on the left, there are 365 blog posts, for real.) In 2011 I created a project called “New 52”, in which I did at least one NEW thing each week and blogged about it. You can read about the intent of the project here, and see a wrap-up post that links to all 52 of my posts here. I loved both of these year-long projects, but they were major commitments that took up a lot of my time and efforts.

In 2013, I think I want to have monthly goals instead of year-long goals. It would allow me to explore more and change course if necessary. One over-reaching goal that I do have though, is to do one thing per day that’s good for me on some level.

These can be:

Physical: eating well, exercising, sleeping, etc
Mental: reading, learning, creating
Emotional: connecting with family & friends
Spiritual: church, Bible-reading, small group Bible study, daily devotions

I think this approach will allow me to have a good balance in my life. The nitty-gritty of implementing it will be the hard part. I have a feeling that a Google calendar will help me with it.

Creatively, I’ll have my hands full with scrapbooking and blogging for The Lilypad, One Little Bird, Write.Click.Scrapbook., and Evalicious. And of course continuing to write and share here at Listgirl.com. I’ve already started a new Google calendar for the editorial content of all the places I blog and do projects for. I hope it will help keep me organized and not over-extended.

One more thing I’ll be doing creatively is start up with Project Life again. I’ve missed it and am excited to get back to it again.

I’m really looking forward to this new year and all that it brings! Wishing you a new year full of possibilities and change! :)


PS – I created the above graphics by placing all my items on a white foam board and taking a photo straight down. Then I used Photoshop to clone the screens on my Kindle and iPad so that it is completely blank. Then I used fonts that I created with my own handwriting to create my “board”. The outline font is called Listgirl Outline.


{Click on sample to see larger.}

If you would like to use this font I made, you can download it here. :)

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