Creating Kris ~ a young mom blogs…

Mother’s Day blinkies and more!

This is one holiday I’ve got the jump on this year!

I actually ended up creating about 42 blinkies after putting together a cute new set of bases with purple gradients… using it for Mother’s Day blinkies, wedding blinkies, graduation blinkies, boyfriend/fiance/hubby/partner blinkies, and others. It just goes to show you how far one little starting design can leap!

You can find the new Mother’s Day blinkies (along with the other ones already in that collection), on this page.

This style of blinkie can be found added to these categories of regular-sized blinkies:

“Together for x years” Blinkies
“I Love my partner/hubby/BF” Blinkies
Engagement Blinkies
Month of Marriage Blinkies

Also, my work in getting my Wedding-type blinkies more modernized has also turned my attention towards my wedding-themed stores (that I’d kind of left to fend for themselves a couple years back). For some reason, the store provider changed their graphics style and any transparent graphics were now showing up as having BLACK backgrounds! Not so nice-looking on white merchandise. I’ve revamped and re-uploaded the graphics so they all show up nicely on T-shirts, hands, and the like. My Brideswear and Coupleswear Stores are therefore back in business.

We’ll see if I manage to find the time to update all the others … but I wouldn’t count on it. I’d really like to update the YM stores, but then again I’d really like the time to do EVERYTHING that I’m super behind on… My chronic pain has been quite severe for the past few months and I’ve had to catch some extra sleep almost every day for 1-3 hours! Pathetic I know, but I just can’t seem to function well without it (if I skip my morning “nap”, I’m just totally dead after dinner and I would not usually the one cooking it on those nights). Anyways, I digress. All that to say that I do really hope to get more of my online work done someday, but I have very all-encompassing health reasons why this is not easy to do.

Thanks for reading and I hope you have a great week!

Scrapbooking Layouts: Nov & Dec 2008

Our “Family 2008″ album is now complete!

And now I can safely say that I’m caught up to a year ago as far as regular family photos go. I’m also mostly caught up on the kids’ school albums, but still needing to “fill in the blanks” as far as their birthday albums go. I’ve even recently discovered that my Family 2006 album is missing a title page (how did that happen!?), so I must go back sometime to put a little something together.

Here are pics of the two (traditionally) scrapbooked layouts:

November 2008:

December 2008:

One thing I feel like I’m really getting the hang of is doing 2-page layouts in a style such that each page could stand alone by itself, but also coordinates well with the one beside it. I definitely recommend using this technique if you have photos from, say, two separate events but are devoting a 2-page spread per month or something like that.

What’s Next?
Well, I did decide to go ahead and digitally scrapbook all of our 2009 Family photos. It not only saves me the money of buying a new scrapbook (I’m a keener on Creative Memories’ beautiful but expensive albums), it saves me sitting up at craft tables for hours and sticking by my usual laptop instead. This fits in much better with my current chronic-pain-filled life (that I’m still adjusting to…). Digital scrapbooking is one of the many activities I have managed to learn to do with one hand on the mouse, the laptop on a little table beside me, and the rest of me on the couch. And then there’s always the option of printing out the digital layouts and slipping them into 12×12 albums later down the road if I’d like to.

The only thing from 2009 that I will be scrapbooking (and have started already) is the pictures that go into my specialty albums: the kids’ birthdays and school pictures as well as Christmas. Time to get back to work on those soon (I really haven’t been scrapbooking all that much these days: even the two layouts in this post were done quite a number of weeks ago).

Happy scrapping and stay tuned to see more new hand-stamped cards and new digital layouts soon!

happy easter! new blinkies

I hope everyone is enjoying a nice Easter weekend with their families!

I’m having a quiet day today (and a quiet Easter in general) but still enjoying some happy little moments sprinkled throughout. My hubby took me shopping yesterday and I had a great trip out (and not just because my “30% off everything” coupon helped me spend only $5)! It’s not often I get out and it was the first time trying out a shopping trip bringing my electric wheelchair along, and it was just so amazingly freeing to be able to zip around and look at everything without first having to evaluate the “cost” (in pain) of trying to get to certain areas of the store. I know it was a lot of work (too much, really) for my DH and it won’t be a regular thing, but I appreciate so much that he took the time and effort to help me have such a good experience. So I would have to say that was my second-favourite highlight of the weekend, the first being my son’s expressions this morning! He was so excited to find all the eggs and was just so joyful and pure in his mood… you can’t help but feel so loving and proud as the mom of such a fantastic kid.

I didn’t get a full “batch” of new blinkies created for Easter this year as I had in 2008 and 2009, but I did create a bunch of new 150×20 blinkies to add to the few Easter blinkies already available in that size…

You can find the codes for these blinkies and lots more on this page and you can also find a good summary list of all available Spring- and Easter-themed blinkies (all sizes) in this copy of the KStarDesign newsletter.