Clean & Simple Tuesday, Love You

CASTuesdaysGraphic Hey stampers. Welcome back for another Clean & Simple Tuesday. Today's card has a few layers on it so I'm pushing the boundaries just a tad, but I love the way it turned out. It's different for me and I like the color combination that I used. Imagine subbing out the Harvest Gold Topnotch Twill Tape 3/8" ribbon for Melon Mambo. I will have to try that sometime.

Before I forget, every Tuesday, Stampin' Up! has new Weekly Deals, new My Digital Studio Downloads, a Clearance Rack update and New Arrivals. The new arrivals also include the new Stampin' Up! Blendabilities! I will tell you right off the bat, order 2 of each color and I'll tell you why. They are consumable and that means no ink refills, which also keeps the price point so low and affordable. If you run out of one color, chances are the other colors will soon follow. I've always run out of the light color first as that's the color that you use the most. This also reminds me to send an email to SU Demo Support to consider selling the lightest color as an individual color. I've gone through 2 Coastal Cabana light markers with my first set of medium and dark showing no signs of fading out soon. When they give, they go fast, like instant fast, and I don't want to have 5 medium and dark Blendabilities with 1-2 light markers.

I also want to update you on a couple of Promotions too. There is an awesome Big Shot & Bundles special going on right now where all stamps with Framelits are 15% off. There's only a few more days of a new demonstrator incentive left where you can sign up to be a demonstrator for $99 and receive over $215 of product that you get to choose. There is no better time than now! If you're a customer, you can start ordering from the new Holiday Catalog on August 28. With your first order, you get 30% off rather than the usual 20% off and if you're anything like me and about a million other stampers, you're positively going to love the new products in the Holiday Catalog. I've already done several projects using new products and to find them, just do a Search on my sidebar of Holiday Catalog 2014 and they will all come up. I have an awesome Creative Stampers Group that you will really love. Not only that, I get to order new products a month in advance and get 20% off and there's a great Stampin' Up! community out there too. I will have a new card for you tomorrow with a video. I also have a couple of new classes coming up soon and one of them is going to be clean and simple WOW mass producing Christmas card class and gifts. I'm currently filming that class and it's very cool. I will also be showing you some clean and simple Halloween projects that are great for kids to exchange in class and for the little goblins who come to your door.

Back to my card now, no matter what type of vellum adhesive that I use, it shows through, so it's just best to hide your adhesive behind whatever you can. I stacked up my die-cuts for some dimension and using the Stampin' Up! Transfer Adhesive Sheets was awesome. It takes a few more minutes but it's so worth it in the end.

As you know, I have 4 kids and there's something in this card for all of them. My oldest son, Mike, asked me to do a video on heat embossing for him once. I don't know if he was serious or being a jerk. My best guess is the latter. So I made a video for him on heat embossing and there's clear heat embossing on top of the die-cut letters. The Tropical Teal reminds me of my oldest daughter, Mackenzie, bedroom as she's always liked blue. The Harvest Gold ribbon with the color of the faux pearls and gold hearts remind me of my youngest son, Scott, aka Moosey, because he always liked my hair when it was gold (blonde) and when I had gold-rimmed glasses. The Limeade Ice color of the die-cuts reminds me of my youngest daughter, Bailey, because she's always had a tendency to gravitate toward fresh and fun colors to match her personality and she also likes shimmer and sparkle, and my dry embossed panel is white shimmer card stock.

I hope you enjoy this card with it's fun summer colors. Everybody seems to be getting into fall right now as that is what the stamp companies are releasing, but as long as I can float around on my raft in the pool and get my tan on, it will be summer in my world.

Thank you so very much for stopping by to see my today. God bless you and make today and every day count. With the losses I've endured over the past few years, they've all been horrible and terribly forever life changing. I have a completely new perspective on every second and that's not to waste one precious second. You never know when it will be gone and all it takes is one second for your life to change. It really grieves me to see others holding grudges and carry around bitterness in their hearts because in the next second, you might not be able to do that anymore. It also really hurts other people and they inevitably waste seconds thinking about it. How can you not? Sometimes you succeed and sometimes you don't. You're only human. I try my hardest not to waste my time anymore at all, but sometimes I do. However, it's getting less and less. I choose not to pine away to try to get those that I love the most to change their mind about something that devastates me. I've spent a lot of seconds doing that. I don't want to do that with what's left of my life, as I do have less time ahead of me than behind me at 51. With advanced rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, I'm on a short leash. I refuse to take the medicines that will slow down the progression of these incurable autoimmune diseases that I've had since 2007 but wasn't diagnosed until 2011. The first five side effects of any medication, you are going to get. There's no way around that. You may get one or you may get them all. The first two side effects of the meds that my immunologist wants to put me on is new or worsening heart disease and leukemia. Seriously? I had to pick my evil there. My quality of life physically is nothing even close to what it used to be and that bothers me and it bothers me a lot. But to add that to it? No thanks. I think that I would die sooner rather than later. Going gluten free has helped considerably and I'm swimming again, which is something I've done since I was a teen. I was on the swimming team while in school and take to water like a fish. I really wanted to try water skiing again this summer but my knee reconstruction won't handle it. Although you know what? I haven't even tried. Maybe I will try and stop watching everybody else ski while I'm being the flag girl or driving the boat the next time I go boating with friends. I'm still rehabbing the knee in the pool and started to walk backwards last weekend and I'm still paying for that. I know how to fall so I'm not worried about the back. I did go skydiving while in Fiji but the instructor and I had to land in the water because there was absolutely no way my knee or my back could take that kind of impact. But, I did it and it scared the hell out of me. I can do the most wicked roller coaster on the face of the earth, but can't handle a Ferris wheel or that dragon boat ship thing that goes back and forth. Since the back, I haven't done any roller coasters since the back and my knee needs replaced so bad. I thought that they could start replacing body parts at 50 so I was pretty bummed to hear that they wouldn't replace mine until I'm 60-65. Apparently they have a short shelf life and my orthopod said that the knee will bother me until it's replaced, so I'm like thanks for ruining my next decade dude.

Anyhow, my personal thoughts are you have 3 main chapters in your life. I'm on Chapter 3 and it's going to be completely different than Chapter 2. You're supposed to go into Chapter 3 with your spouse, but since that is not an option for me, I have to make my own Chapter 3 and I'm working on it and I will succeed. I trust in God to make it a great Chapter 3 because I know He will. He saw Chapter 2 and what it did to me.

Don't waste a second. I woke up on November 17, 2010, and my life was changed forever. My daddy died early morning July 29, 2013. He just didn't wake up. He was gone in a second. A car accident can happen in a second. Somebody you love, should love, treat better, could be gone in a second. Each moment in time counts and something happens every second. You have the choice to make it good or make it bad. You have the choice to bless others or curse others. You have the choice and the responsibility for that choice and the consequences of that choice. What is yours going to be for the rest of your life? Will it be to turn your life around and do what's right or will it be to continue what you know in your soul to be wrong? Each moment in time matters. Don't waste another moment.