WOW — where did the last 2 weeks go?  I had no intention of being gone for so long, but the days have taken on a life of their own, dictating how my time was spent, so getting back here just never happened.  We had a wonderful Christmas with all of our boys and their girls home, plus our two grand-dogs — LOL!  There was a lot of activity, a lot of eating, and a lot of game playing.  Bananagrams was my favorite.  Have you played it?  SO fun — it’s like Scrabble but much faster paced with each player building their own maze of words so there is absolutely NO down time.  Totally FUN!  I highly recommend it if you enjoy word games.  It’s great fun for adults but would make a fabulous learning game for younger children as well.

And, the winner from our last Ribbon Inspiration challenge was never posted — my apologies.  The winner was selected from my blog back on Tuesday 12/20,  and random.org chose comment #6 who is:

Loydene

And here’s what Loydene had to say:

I LOVE each and every one of these cards …. and totally plan to CASE all of them AND the idea for packaging!

Well, I had to chuckle when 12 days later Loydene commented on the same post again — of course, I KNEW she was the winner, yet unannounced.  Here’s her follow-up comment:

Thank you AGAIN!!!  I’m sitting here with my lovely pile of notes — CASED directly from your post!  I really appreciated this idea — so quick, so easy, so CUTE and (really) pretty reasonably priced!  Thank you, thank you, thank you!  I, for one, would love to see more quick projects like this!

Thank you, Loydene, for that follow-up comment.  It’s always encouraging to know when someone is inspired.

And since it was a mystery blog candy , it still will be — LOL!  I’ll put together a nice package of supplies for you to create some more quick and simple cards and they will be mailed out to you on Tuesday when mail service resumes, so PLEASE CONTACT ME at [email protected] with your mailing address so I can get these out to you.

And thanks to EVERYONE who plays along with our regular Saturday feature — Ribbon Inspiration/Stamp Simply Style.  Each Saturday some of the design team girls create projects based on a challenge to either showcase certain product or to follow a certain theme.  There’s a blog candy offering each week, usually to go along with the challenge presented.  It’s fun for us and I hope it is for you, too!  We will resume the Ribbon Inspiration challenges on Saturday, January 7.  Hope you can join  us!

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Here’s a little snippet of a fun card Deb did earlier this week — very Vintage Vogue!  She used products from the Vintage Vogue Collection by Pink Paislee.  You can see her full post here on her blog.

Thanks for sharing this, Deb! It makes me want to dig into some chipboard right NOW!

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At year’s end I always enjoy doing a Year in Review post.  This year I decided to do 2 of them.  The first will feature cards/projects that are a little more highly embellished and/or take a little more time.  The second will feature cards that are much more clean, simple and quicker to make.   The first of those posts will pop up as soon as I get it done — maybe later today or tomorrow — and the second will then follow one day later.

Thanks for stopping in — have a HAPPY NEW YEAR — and don’t celebrate too hard!

See you real soon!

Editing to Add:

The store has been experiencing some intermittent problems with sluggishness for the last many weeks - sometimes worse than others.  I think it depends on how much traffic there is — not sure, but my  hunch.  It will be switched to a new server real soon, but  I just have to wait for the web guys to do it — so until then, we must bear with it.  At times it works perfectly, but if it happens to be sluggish or non-responsive when you try, just wait and try again a few minutes later — I’m so sorry.  It’s driving me nuts, too!  Truly, an exercise in patience at times!

Thank you for bearing with us through this time of sluggishness — but this will get better soon — I’ll keep you posted!