{i}NSD Sale and New Templates

I'm starting my {i}NSD sale a little early!  From now until Sunday night, you can save 40% on everything in my Listgirl Designs store! 

Coupon Code:  5V6K9K75
40% off everything in your cart.
Expires:  Sunday night 5/2, 11:59pm Pacific time

This coupon code is only good for my store Listgirl Designs.  Little Dreamer Designs will be having a storewide sale on Saturday, and I'll post the details on my blog then.  :)

If you've had your eye on some of my templates and alphas, now is the time to stock up!  I will not be having another 40% off sale until November.

I have a new set of templates in the store, Template Set #12:  Niddy Griddy.


Show off lots of papers or photos with these paper blocks within stitching grids! Use each template by itself, or use them together as a two-pager. Add embellishments to make it your own. Two 12x12 layout templates in .PSD format.

One last note:
I will be giving away random coupons (some for free stuffs even) on my Facebook fan page and Twitter on Saturday for {inter}National Scrapbooking Day, spaced out during the day. They will be limited use coupons on a first see, first grab basis, so I will give a couple of posts a few minutes beforehand to let you know the coupons are coming up. If you haven't followed me on Twitter or are not yet a fan on Facebook, be sure to do so for all the fun stuffs! (Well, that and random thoughts on any given day, LOL.)

Thank you so much, happy {i}NSD and happy scrapping!

Read More »

Little Dreamer Apprentice Round 3 Freebie

Have you been following along in the Little Dreamer Designs Apprentice Program? In Round 1 I made a mini kit called Snap!, which you can download here. In Round 2 it was all about the elements, which you can download here. In Round 3, we had to draw doodles in Illustrator. This was WAY fun and I loved it!

LDD Apprentice Round 3 Freebie: Beachy Keen Doodles    ::Download HERE::

Please leave a comment in the LDD gallery if you download. And don't forget to check out all the other amazing doodles in the Apprentice Round 3 gallery and leave comments for them!

For this round, I drew the doodles in Illustrator first.  The sun and the surfboard were colored in Illustrator and then copied into Photoshop for distressing.  The wave, palm tree, and beach ball were imported into Art Rage and hand-painted, then exported to Photoshop for distressing.  I have to say, I really love drawing!  It really brought back some childhood memories of drawing and doodling for me.  I used to draw all the time when I was younger.  The pressures of school and having to get a job made me forget about drawing, but this re-awakened that part of me again.  I'm thankful for that!  Oh and I just wanted to point out that these Beachy Keen Doodles also include B&W .png versions in clean and distressed versions, plus a set of .abr brushes for Photoshop and Photoshop Elements!

Today after work I went to my work gym for the interval training gym class. You know you haven't been to the gym in a while when the instructor emails you and says, "Where have you been? Come back to gym class!" Ha ha! So I went. It was interval training with 4 minutes of working really hard to get the heartrate up, and then three minutes of working not as hard. We did a five minute warm up, then 4/3/4/3/4/3/4/3, then hand weights and abs. I haven't sweated like that in a long while, even running 9 miles, LOL. It's good for me though, so I'll be back.

I will be having a sale for iNSD this weekend in both of my stores! I will be sending out the coupon code in my newsletter, so if you are not receiving it yet, be sure to sign up here! Also, I will be giving away random coupons (some for free stuffs even) on my Facebook fan page and Twitter on Saturday, spaced out during the day. They will be limited use coupons on a first see, first grab basis, so I will give a couple of posts a few minutes beforehand to let you know the coupons are coming up. If you haven't followed me on Twitter or are not yet a fan on Facebook, be sure to do so for all the fun stuffs! (Well, that and random thoughts on any given day, LOL.)

Read More »

Picnic on Coronado Island

We had made tentative plans to have dessert with some friends in the early afternoon today, but the plans fell through. So Todd suddenly got bright-eyed and said to me, "I have an idea! I've been wanting to do this ever since we ran on Coronado and I saw this little park." Turns out, he ran by this little park two months ago, and took a mental note to bring me back there for a picnic. :) The weather here on the weekends hadn't been very nice the last few weeks. But today was perfect for a picnic! The cutest part of this is that Todd had planned ahead because of this picnic idea, and he already had summer sausage and crackers in the pantry, precisely for this occasion. So we packed up our picnic gear, picked up some Subway sandwiches, and headed down to Coronado Island.

Parking is free on the streets on Sunday, yay! The park had a really great view of San Diego.




We ate our Subway sandwiches, and had these crackers with sausage.


A pretty cool tree in the little park.


We brought our tripod for some photos.






Todd took a pretty photo of the flowers in the foreground.


After the picnic, we went over to Orange Avenue's Moo Time ice cream, our favorite ice cream shop in San Diego/Coronado. Yummy caramel ice cream!




I was touched by Todd's thoughtfulness today. I'm really blessed to have a husband who secretly gathers picnic ingredients just so we can go and have a picnic in a little park when the opportunity strikes. He knew it was just what I needed today!

Read More »

Nine Miles and Some Sushi

I haven't been having as hard a time getting out of bed to run on Saturday mornings. I think there are two reasons for this. First, West Coast Road Runners has a separate, later start time for half marathoners now, so the start time isn't quite so early. Secondly, since it's only six weeks away from the San Diego Rock N Roll Half Marathon now, I feel like every long run is important. And since the weather's getting warmer, and the runs longer, if we don't start running early in the morning, it would get too hot later.

So all that is the long way of saying, yay, we weren't late to the run on Saturday starting at 7:30am at Solana Beach! We ran north from Fletcher Cove.







The view right north of the Solana Beach train station, heading towards the ocean.


I ran with Mary Jo, one of the coaches, all the way up to Moonlight Beach (4.5 miles, the turnaround). We chatted the whole way and ran at an easy pace. After an aid station break, I ran back by myself, faster than the first half.

We had to climb up the steep incline by Moonlight Beach on the way back. Yick!


I ate a GU at the halfway point, 4.5 miles. And gulped down a cup of Ultima at the aid station. I brought 10 oz of water and 10 oz of Ultima in my own hydration belt. The first few miles I took it pretty easy, so my average was like 11:40/mile. After the turnaround, I sped up and my last three miles averaged around 10:45/mile.

Location: Fletcher Cove to Moonlight Beach out and back.
Distance: 9.01 miles
Time: 1:41:30
Avg time/mile: 11:16
Calories: 904

Needless to say, burning 904 calories before 9:30am made me hungry! But we decided to go home and clean up first. I joined Todd for some popcorn. Then we headed down to Nozomi for some Japanese food for lunch.

Some miso soup.


My Hawaiian Roll


The significance of this?

It's the first time ever that Todd ordered a sushi roll for his meal! He finally decided that he liked sushi rolls enough to take the plunge. But still no shrimp for him. He got a spicy tuna roll.


I spent the rest of the afternoon on Saturday drawing things for Round 3 of the Little Dreamer Designs Apprentice Program. I didn't finish it until today though, but I learned a lot and had so much fun.

Read More »

Any Excuse To Get Together

I think I have blogging anxiety!  I've been having some fun times away from the computer, and haven't blogged about it.  It caused me some anxiety because I wasn't "caught up".  Plus I didn't want to have one long blog post where the subjects are totally different.  Then I realized... DUH, there isn't a rule that says you have to fit it all into one huge long blog post, just post multiple posts in one day.  Phew!  :p

On Thursday night after work, we headed up to AJ and Meera's house. Why? Well, this time our excuse to get together was the annual NFL Draft. They moved the first round of the NFL Draft to prime time. We had a tradition with AJ and Meera to get together for a "Draft Party" and eat pizza. And watch and see who our favorite teams the San Diego Chargers and the Cleveland Browns pick from college. This draft party/pizza tradition dates back to like 2003 or something crazy like that! So we picked up a couple of pizzas from Rossi's in San Marcos on the way to their house.

The pizzas were quite tasty. We were hungry, so we dug right in!









AJ's birthday was also a couple of days before that, so I made a birthday card for him.

You should definitely take note of little Andon's face here, because it shows up in almost every photo!





Todd made homemade banana oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, for AJ's birthday. The rest of us got to enjoy them too.

Some of us, ahem, got to enjoy them way too much. I ate five cookies on Thursday. :|

We had a fun time with AJ and Meera, but then again we always do.

Here is a close-up photo of the card I made AJ. I used my Silhouette digital cutter.


I also made a card for my nephew's birthday.

I glued the pieces on after the Silhouette cut them. Then I used Stickles glitter glue to draw the smoke from the train and to write over the letter. I used Bazzill Basics kraft paper for both of them. I bought some on sale and I've decided now that I want to make all my cards on kraft paper because I really like the way they look as a background. :)

Read More »

Closet Overhaul

Over the last month, I've spent a few hours here and there, going through all my clothes in my closet, drawers, shelves, and armoir, giving the clothes I no longer wear away.  And shoes.  I probably spent between 8-10 hours all together, spread out over five different days between Feb 27th and April 18th.  (Although, everything was re-organized by March 14th, except for the shoes.)  It feels so good to only have stuff that I wear in my closet and drawers now.  I even parted with high school and college sweatshirts that I couldn't bear to part with before.  They were sentimental clutter.  I ended up taking photos of them and giving them away or throwing away in some cases.

This was my closet before.


With shoes strewn about.


I don't think I took really good photos that really convey how packed everything was in my closet. All the shelves were filled. The hanging clothes were squeezed together on the rods.

I also tackled my pants armoir shelves. I had many pairs of jeans and pants that no longer fit. Rather than hoping and wishing I could fit into them again, I decided to give them away. If I lost some fat down the road, I'd probably want to buy new jeans anyways.

Before



After


The biggest work was going through all my hanging clothes. It was astounding how much I don't wear anymore. Just the hangers removed from my closet was monumental.


Big pile of clothes I gave away... these weren't even all of it.




Here are the after pics. When I compared them to the before pics, they didn't look too different, much to my disappointment. But everything hangs better now, and nothing is piled up or squeezed in.  And the shoes aren't strewn about.







At some point, I hope to really makeover the actual closet, with either Ikea or The Container Store things. Have you redone your closet? If you have before/after pics, I'd love to take a peek! :)

Read More »

LDD Apprentice Round 2

Oh hey, the Little Dreamer Designs Apprentice Program Round 2 freebies are up in the Round 2 gallery! Congrats to all who made it past Round 2 to Round 3!

For this Round 2 assignment, we were to submit four elements: stitches, metal, glitter, and an element of our choice. I thought I would go with a beachy theme this time.


You can download and leave comments here. :)

Please make sure you check out all the participants' hard work and leave them comments if you download!  I am doing this for the learning experience and for fun, since I sell at LDD already, I won't be in the contest to win a spot in the store.  Please do cheer on the other participants who need your support to move on to the next round!

I was going to show you some "in process" screenshots of how the elements were made... but I'm too lazy to get on my desktop and take the screenshots right now (I'm on my laptop), LOL.  So I'll just go ahead and describe my process a little bit, if you're interested.

• Stitched sun - I drew the sun in Illustrator and copied the path into Photoshop.  Then I used the pen tool in PS to draw a "V" stitch.  Then I made that into a brush in PS and applied the brush around the path of the sun.  Then I created a pattern of parallel diagonal lines to overlay on top of the stitching to make it look like real thread.  Then I created another round brush to hand-brush all the tiny stitching holes onto the stitches.  This was a long process but I learned a lot!
• Metal flower button - a thrift shop purchase from years ago.  I took a close-up photo of it and extracted it with the pen tool in PS.  Then I dodged some areas to lighten the shadows to make it look better.
• Glitter wave border - I drew a single wave in Illustrator.  Then I copied it into PS and made a brush out of it.  I adjusted the brush settings and made an almost 12" border of waves.  I saved the wave border as a jpeg.  (At this point it's just black and white.)  Then I opened Art Rage and imported the jpeg as a "stencil" in Art Rage.  I adjusted the stencil size and use it to apply blue glitter.  After I was happy with the glitter, I exported it as a PNG file and opened it back up in PS to clean up some stray glitter. 
• Ribbon - I took a plain ribbon roll and cut a length off it.  Then I made the bow and attempted to curl and position the ribbon with some depth and curl.  Then I took a bunch of photos of it on top of both black and white paper, until I was happy with one.  Then I used the pen tool in PS to extract the ribbon from the background, which took a long time, LOL.  Both the shadowed and unshadowed version of the ribbon is included in the element pack.

Now there are probably other methods of creating these elements, this is just my process.  If you have other methods, I'd love to hear them so I can learn more!

This week I will continue with the beachy theme in the Round 3 assignment so that you can add it to your stash to scrap beachy themed layouts with them.  :)

Read More »

Domo Goes To Church

Todd and I went to Burger King this morning, because we saw their ad on TV for a sausage egg cheese muffin sandwich for $1. Todd got some mini cinnamon buns, four for $1. I would say, it's not worth it. Breakfast was cheap and yucky! I much prefer McDonald's sausage egg mcmuffin, even if it costs more!

For lunch today, Todd made Spicy Chicken Shawarma. I always love the chicken shawarma at our favorite Lebanese restaurant, so I was eager to try this!

The chicken, right after coming out of the iron skillet.


All put together with cucumber, tomato, and yogurt sauce.

It was really tasty and definitely a winner!

Today was a big cleaning day. Todd and I split up our chores and cleaned the bathrooms, mopped the floors, dusted, did laundry, vacuumed, and I finally organized my shoes in my closet! I'm giving away some and throwing some away. Finally my closet is fully organized! I'll have a before and after post later this week. :)

At around 5:45pm, we met our friend Monika at Point Loma Seafoods for dinner before the 7pm service at The Rock Church. Monika had never been to the freshest and best seafood place in town, so we had to remedy that situation!

Monika got an ahi sandwich, clam chowder, and ceviche.


Todd got his usual favorite halibut sandwich.




I got a scallop sandwich this time, which I'd never had before. It was delicious!


Guess who had the big Coke, the medium Coke, and the little Coke?


After our delicious dinner, we headed over a few blocks to The Rock Church for the 7pm service. I really enjoyed the service and the sermon. As did Domo.


Domo belongs to Monika and he travels with her to many places. To see Domo's trip report of Chicago, you can go here!

It was a really great dinner and church with Monika. Let's do it again soon!

So... have you heard? A little bird told me... well specifically, One Little Bird told me that she migrated over to Oscraps! Yes, Peppermint's designs have officially migrated over exclusively to Oscraps. She's having a 25% off sale to celebrate!  If you have a bunch of One Little Bird Designs in your wishlist, now is the time to clear them out!  You can find out more about the bird migration here.

She also has a new mini kit called Boardwalk, which is totally up my alley! I love it so much I wanna marry it. That is, if I weren't married already.

Boardwalk Mini Kit by One Little Bird Designs.


Here's my layout using it.

Read More »