Treat Yourself!

A few items of note - great response to my morningstar farms info!! So many of you already loved their products - my sister in law said their corndogs are amazing, my mom loves the Okara patties and I can't wait to try the other things you posted. I'm super impressed. Might be all I eat from now on - no one has ever heard of Mad Vegetable disease, right?? :)

Second, I don't know how many of you are on Gmail, but if you're not, let me tell you - it's a great email service because it comes with so many other useful features. Today's feature of the day is the Google Calendar. It's great for a billion reasons (you can share it with people you choose, it's wirelessly synced with my cell phone, so if I add an appointment on my phone it shows up on my desktop, and vice versa. As far as I know no one else besides a Blackberry Enterprise server for Outlook does that and that's only for business - either way, it's fabby since I can't remember anything!)

BUT - the best thing is, that you can have as many calendars as you want - so for example, there is my main calendar, with all my appointments on it. I set this to share with my sister/producer so that we could sync our events. THEN, we have an Understand Blue Calendar with just our production and editing deadlines. Now, here's the beauty of it all - with a click you can select multiple calendars and all the appointments show up on your calendar!! And you can color code each calendar - so all UB events are blue, mine are green, etc. So if I really want to see my events, the UB schedule events AND my sister's calendar all at once so I don't overschedule, I can do that! Then for my normal daily view, I just un-check the UB and sis calendars and go on about my day. I bet for people with kids this would be a great tool - all those sports calendars in one place!! PS - Google Sync can sync all, none or some with your phone.

Now HERE's the best part. I am old and senile as you know, and one of the things that I've never found a good system for is keeping track of who I need to send cards to and who I already sent cards to. So if any of you have ever gotten two birthday cards from me, that's why. Sometimes I write them on my calendar or on my stamping mat or somewhere where I'm sure never to see it again. No worky. So today I realized, I should set up a CARD calendar in Gmail - so I can just quickly add an event when I've sent a card and what it's for and just click over to that calendar to see what I still need to do - LOVE IT. Can't wait to get it going. So I better send some cards!!!

Anyway, on to stamping. I saw this adorable chocolate holder on SCS - Stampin' Library Girl has a wonderful sample here that I will be making for a Marmalade Skies class next week. The lovely and talented Rochelle has instructions here - this is exactly what I used for my project.

The base of mine is Chocolate Chip. The DSP is from Martha Stewart, and this gorgeous owl, Ezner, is one of the very first Doodle Factory sets I got - Doodle Factory Animals.

I colored him with Copics, punched him first with my 1 1/4" circle punch and then punched the border with my 1 3/8" circle punch.

The Treat Yourself greeting is from the new Starving Artistamps Sentiments, and I punched it with my word window punch and added a self adhesive rhinestone.

To top it off - a self adhesive pre-tied ribbon from Martha!

On the inside, the bottom is folded up and the chocolate is actually tucked inside a word window opening - you have to punch a little extra on each side to accomodate the chocolate - just line up your punch with the centered word window and scooch it a tad to the left, punch, do the same thing on the right.

Secure the inside flap with sticky strip or glue dots (that's what I used) and just for extra insurance, put a glue dot on the back of the chocolate as well.

Put your dsp on the front of the flap, and keep the treat closed with a velcro dot, a magnet or adhesive.

So cute and compact and quick!! Hope you're having a great weekend. I gotta work all weekend, starting in a few hours.

OH - PS - backup was successful!!! Next week is a re-run of the first UB episode that there was a sound problem on, then the week after that starts my patriotic episode with my sassy new graphics.

Hope you can tune in and watch!