Stampin' Up! Beauty of the Season and Holiday Parade 2014 Online Card Class

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Hey crafters! I have a new online card class coming up! It's my Holiday Parade 2014 and you are going to love it! This will be the first of several Christmas classes covering a variety of everything you do for Christmas of gifts, decorating, tags, bags, gift wrapping and all of the fun Christmas projects that we love to make and/or give to one another. I hope you will join me for this class. My recent stroke has taken me off of the craft map for a little while, but I want and need some normalcy back in my life and this is one of the things that I love doing the most is teaching. My developers are getting the site ready where I hold my classes at Cindy B Designs Card Classes and signups will start no later than Monday, August 11. Be sure to grab your blog badge on my sidebar! You can get a Participant blog badge when you upload your projects to the gallery for the daily challenges. I also go on Prize Patrol to blogs to see if you have your blog badge up and throw your name into a hat for a drawing of a separate prize outside of the challenge prizes. Just right click to copy the badge, save it to your computer, then upload it to your blog. It's that easy! We will be doing a lot of coloring and just having some plain old-fashioned fun with daily challenges and prizes, a message board and a gallery for you to upload what you make. You will have lifetime access to any class that you sign up for. This is a fee-based class at $12.99 and I do talk a little about it in the video that I have for you today. The class runs from August 25 to September 4. The class is 5 days in total running on Monday, Wednesday and Friday for the first week and Tuesday and Thursday for the second week with a Bonus Day thrown in. I have a few techniques up my sleeve to show you. I always discover new techniques while making a colossal mistake that goes into the garbage, but I learned something new. I have some very cool guest designers lined up whose cards I will post on the off days that I do not have a class video for you making it 11 days of awesome inspiration for you! I will see you in class!

I have a new stamp set to share with you today from Stampin' Up! named Beauty of the Season and you can purchase it right now from my online store! Here is a picture of this lovely stamp set.

Stamp Set

There's another stamp set too that I will show you in the video named Christmas Bliss. Since this is a photopolymer stamp set, a picture was hard to grab. I will show you my card now and add the video later as I still need to edit it. I also found the 3 lost videos from my June Summer Camp and since it's still summer, I will get those up too later this weekend.

Here is my card and I hope you enjoy it. As a demonstrator, I just got my Christmas products and I'm so thrilled and can't wait to break open some of them for you and make some very fun stuff. I have to tell you that I just LOVE this catalog. There are a lot of items in there that will surprise you. Stampin' Up! is an industry trend-setter again and I'm very happy about that since I've been with them off and on for 7 years. They got ahead of themselves with a few hot trends right now. One thing I have noticed and talked to the home office about is they are retiring products that are viral trend right now, like the watercoloring and the watercolor stamp set, designer series paper and a pre-made package from Sale-A-Bration. That should have been carried over to the annual Idea Book & Catalog because the watercoloring trend will not be going anywhere soon. Thankfully, there are a couple of sets with a few watercolor images and one stamp set dedicated to watercoloring, BUT, remember that gorgeous watercolor paper and premade cards in Sale-A-Bration too? Oh how I wish those were back again. It's not wise for me from a business perspective for me to demo to you products you can no longer get; however, if I love something enough, I keep it around and use it. It's still an investment – well, not really, as these are Sale-A-Bration items and they are free. You purchase $50 and can choose your product of a regularly priced $15.95 punch or a $12.95 12 x 12 package of designer series paper. You can't beat that. There was another 12 x 12 package of designer series paper that I LOVED and still use. I know a lot of my customers do the same thing so too many of you don't mind if I use retired designer series paper or stamps, but overall, I try not to as a habit. Since I do have a lot of Sale-A-Bration products left over, I also use them as prizes, so keep that in mind too when I have blog candy or for my monthly challenge, which is the first Saturday of every month. Since I missed last Saturday, I will be holding it this Saturday, so be sure to participate and I just might have a nice prize of some Stampin' Up! Sale-A-Bration 2014 items for you.

Also, I've had this blog and domain of cindybdesigns.com for 7 years. It's not going anywhere, but I am going to start posting my Stampin' Up! only work on a new blog associated with my Stampin' Up! Online Store that the company provides for me. I will not be moving any of my Stampin' Up! blog posts over there as it would take eternity to do that. I do recommend checking here first and searching for what you need and then go over to my Stampin' Up! Blog. I will post my projects here that are not Stampin' Up! and also continue to provide you with Stampin' Up! information too. I'm an equal opportunity stamper and I've always said that and I'm sure that if I was Stampin' Up! only, I would have a longer list of clients as it does show dedication to being a career demonstrator and products. Who knows what the future brings. I may just get fed up with trying to stay on top of it all and go Stampin' Up! only. It would certainly solve my space issue right now. I would just have my catalog and not get bombarded by releases every single month that leave you no real time to play with since it's not the newest. It really does take a lot of energy to keep up, but some stuff is just so dang awesome! I will have a graphic in my rotating banner to where you can just click on it and it will take you to the new blog and there will also be a sidebar badge that will do the same. Please visit my Cindy B Designs Stampin' Up! Blog and take a look around. Since the blog is associated with my online store, you can shop too!

I do find Stampin' Up! demonstrators among the most talented crafters out there because they do have limited product and use what they have to come up with what everybody else is coming out with monthly or just stay try to themselves and their style. Mary Fish, whom I just adore, has an online clientele only. She doesn't hold classes or workshops. Her clients are online and her title is like Manager or even higher. She has thousands of clients and a downline that's in the hundreds. And her craft studio? OMG, so swoon worthy. You must visit her too. She's an amazing stamper who makes such classy and elegant projects that are yet clean and simple. She's just amazing. I want a craft studio like Mary's and am using what I have to make one. I am using my spare bedroom that I wanted to leave open for the kids, but it has sat 100% empty for the past year now. My Daddy had built me a beautiful studio in his living room that was extremely expensive and it looks like a library rather than stamping place and I am perfectly happy with it. He put it in the living room for 2 reasons as I asked him to have it installed in the living room. When Pete and I retired, our plan was to live here and Pete could watch his TV while I was crafting and we were in the same room. We wanted to leave the 2nd bedroom open for the kids when they visited us. I'm not going to have my Chapter 3 with Pete and the kids are not going to visit so I'm going to make the place work for me. This living room is huge but I can't fit all of my furniture in with this beast. I found some friends who are going to take it down and move it into the spare bedroom and I am really looking forward to that and then the organizing starts. The organizing never, ever stops, ever. I sure do hope that God has other plans for me because spending the rest of my life alone is absolutely not an option. I already did that in Chapter 2 being a married single person. So God can either put my shattered family back together with a husband who loves me or bring me a man that will love me. There was 9 or so months in a 26-year marriage where I could have not custom ordered a better husband. I don't know what happened. The kids and him supported me through a hysterectomy and then an immediate cross country move leaving behind my church, son, friends and everything I've known for the past 15 years. The kids and I had a ton of plans to say goodbye to everybody, dinners planned, the whole 9 yards and all I could think of was getting to Pete. It was a 14-hour drive and one day I told the kids we're going to Kentucky and left Mike in charge of the movers as he was staying in the house. I didn't even cancel my plans. I just left. That's how perfect this man was. The kids noticed how my husband treated me and they immediately fell into place and were so much more relaxed because the drama stopped and they were happy, even leaving behind everything they've known all of their lives. One time I got wicked heartburn and got sent to the ER by work. Pete had mentioned to me that he had a really important meeting that day and so I didn't interrupt him. It was only heartburn. The hospital called him and he hightailed it over to the hospital and stood by my side and was upset in a very gentle way that I didn't call him. He even had tears in his eyes. Wow! I told him about the meeting I was worried about and he told me that, "You come first." I had the perfect husband for 9 months. Then I saw him slowly but surely go back to what I call "default" and it was gone, gone, just like that. I begged him and told him what I saw coming on because I lived it, and it all went to hell again. The longer abuse goes on, the worse it gets. Thanksgiving 2009 was the catalyst and the beginning of the end. Getting sick didn't help either. I just couldn't pull his weight anymore or mine for that matter and the inevitable train wreck careened This should have really gone on the first post of the day, but stuff happens. Okay, it was me talking about the bedroom. We have a grandson now and that did not go expected as how it was always dreamed of in my mind. Nothing went right but those 9 months. I got a small taste of what I always wanted and how it was supposed to be so I was happy in my life for 9 months out of 26 years. I had literally forgotten, but believe God made beauty from ashes, all of the terrible stuff that had happened before which in comparison, is nothing compared to what has happened when those 9 months ended and continues to this very day. I'm not just a distant memory to my husband, and I spent over half of my life with him, I'm forgotten like I didn't exist and erased, except when I can be blamed for something, which is generally everything. I'm confident that I would not have these incurable autoimmune diseases that I will have to live with for the rest of my life, and I won't make it to an "old" age either, and I'm sure I would not have had the stroke triggered by the divorce stress. The only lupus flares I have ever had have also been triggered by a family member. Before I got diagnosed, I walked around in one for almost 2 years. It's just mean-spirited cruelty and it's intentional and I've been punished enough.

So, do you want to see my card now? Here it is and I hope that you enjoyed it. I will get the video up later. It's after 3 pm here and I'm really itching to go through the new Christmas toys.

Thank you for stopping by today to visit me and God bless you!