The Witching Hour And How It Improves Your Weekend

Many years ago at Convention, I saw Belinda Ellsworth speak about the Power Hour. Basically, it's just a good time management system where you divide an hour into quarters and you go all out in each 15 minute segment on various activities. It makes the activities less intimidating if there's a start and end time.

Well I've adapted that for weekends where I need to get a lot of stuff done and I don't know where to start. I call it the Witching Hour.

Sunday I had ten projects that really needed to get done so I busted out the Witching Hour. I set a timer on my Iphone for an hour, and then I do one thing and one thing only - I did one hour of email/computer time, one hour of office cleaning, one hour of cutting 12x12 cardstock down to 6x6 and grouping it by color, etc. You can get ten giant projects done in a Sunday if you do it this way. The key is committing to that one thing for the full hour and not letting yourself do anything else in that hour unless you finish early.

One of the things I really needed to do, but is kind of boring and so I never do it, is labeling stamp sets. My current SU sets sit in a bookcase to the left of my desk and the bookcase is a dark cherry. On the clear boxes with black type for the labels, I can't see the names of anything. So a while ago, when I got a new set, I started sticking the label onto an Avery 8366 sized label before putting it on the box. MAN does that make it easier to see. The problem is I had tons of sets I got before I came up with this idea, so it was always a "someday" task.

You can see that the unlabeled set in the upper left hand corner may as well be wearing an invisibility cloak!

Well the Witching Hour knocked out this task and so now I can actually see my stamp sets.

I also made a discovery when I went to go get more labels a few weeks ago. LABELS ARE SUDDENLY OUTRAGEOUSLY EXPENSIVE. It's $24 for a box of 750 of these labels. The Office Depot generic version is $20 for 750.That's about $1 a sheet. So we're paying $1 for a sheet of paper, in essence.

I was grumbling in the label aisle about this and I noticed these little smaller packages of labels near the price tags. Oddly enough, they were $2.79 for 252 of them. Hmmm. So instead of .03 PER LABEL these (by the same company - Avery) are .01 per label.

What's up with that? I bought them, but I was not happy that there is a nonsensical price difference depending on where in the store the label is.

Maybe I should send my little witchie over there to straighten them out!

Stamps: Out on a Limb, It's a Wrap Holidays, Spooky Bingo Bits, Grateful Greetings Ink: Basic Black, Lucky Limeade, Pool Party Paper: Whisper White, Lucky Limeade, Pool Party Accessories: Circle and Scallop Circle Dies, Big Shot, Brads, Pool Party Ruffled Ribbon, Blender Pen, ShinHan Touch Markers

Well, she's not actually very scary. But I think she could shake some things up with her cuteness!

This fun telescoping card was one I made for VSN. This is such a simple fun way to make a super interesting motion card. There are telescoping card instructions in our Try a New Technique challenge.  Good old Joan - always making me think outside the box!

Here are some random things from the Blue List that I've been enjoying lately.

• I love this shampoo.
• This is a cool way to do nekkid stamping. 
• I made these Caramel Apple cookies and they were awesome. (I used dark brown sugar)
• My mother in law tipped me off to these crackers.
• I'm really enjoying this cooking show and the first episode of this comedy was great.
• After what seems like forever, this is on its way to me and I have one day to watch it before Season 3! HA! Need coffee!

Hope you have a great week!