I just love living in Hawaii, but especially in the winter when I don't have to deal with the snow – and where I can actually remember the season's greetings in Hawaiian!  Besides that, there are flowers everywhere, which is something I did not experience in January when I lived on the mainland.  While I'll share my New Year's card with you in a moment, I just have to share a photo of this flower, which is blooming right now where I can see it from my kitchen window.

     This lovely Bird of Paradise will be around for many days to come!

     Also around for many days to come is the year 2012.  I am ALWAYS needing a calendar.  Figuring out that many of my friends and customers could also use a calendar, I decided to make them a New Year's card with a calendar built in.  As I was running out of time for hand-crafted projects in 2011, I remembered that Stampin' Up!'s My Digital Studio now has a trifold card design that would be perfect for me to include a calendar!  So back I came to my computer and this is the card that I ended up making! 

     I sent quite a few of these out this morning, and I actually had time to make a "real" bow out of the Sale-A-Bration ribbon set that inspired the design of this card.  So this card is just a little bit hybrid – mostly digital, and a touch of "real."  The flower stamps and the papers, as well as the beautifully thin ribbon, are all going to be part of the 2012 Sale-A-Bration catalog – and you can get them all for free with qualifying orders during the Sale-A-Bration sales period!

     But back to the card.  I found a digital image of the 2012 calendar and put that in the middle section of the card.  I left a blank white space in the third section of the card for me to write a note when I send it out.  I just love the colors – and the Stampin' Up! printing service does a gorgeous job matching Stampin' Up!'s colors!

     Here is the back of the card.  If you want, you can print just as much on the back as on the front.  Fellow Stampin' Up! demonstrator, Patty Bennett, used this format to include lots of pictures of her and her family along with journaling about their 2011 activities.  Each panel is 3-1/2" high by 5" long, so plenty of space for that. I just wanted to show off the pretty papers that are going to be available!

     So here we are in 2012!  I hope that it's all that you want it to be – and that you'll have lots of time to have fun with paper crafting!

     Those of you who read my blog posts regularly know that most of what I share with you are greeting cards made exclusively with Stampin' Up! products – stamp sets, inks, papers, embellishments – everything in the current Stampin' Up! catalogs!

     But today you might not recognize at least one of the items on the card as being in a catalog.  But it is!  Can you guess what I'm talking about?

     Of course it's the skeleton!  If you look at the Holiday Mini Catalog, you'll see that the skeleton on my card is a lot smaller than it appears in the Piece of Poison stamp set AND it's facing the other direction!  No, I didn't shrink the stamp and work some fancy magic to get it this way.  I used My Digital Studio and the Piece of Poison Digital Download found on page 8 of the mini catalog.  That is one of the thousands of fantastic things that you can do with My Digital Studio.  I made my card look exactly as I wanted without being tied down to the stamp in the catalog!  So my card – with Stampin' Up! stamps, ink, papers and embellishments (love that ribbon and those brads!) is a hybrid – a mix of digital and 3-dimensional products!

It's a Create With Connie and Mary Challenge – with PRIZES!

     I made this card for the Create With Connie and Mary Weekly Challenge this week.  This week's challenge and those for the next 5 weeks are special because they're a part of the Create With Connie and Mary Holiday Edition subscription – BUT we get to share them with everyone, not just those who've purchased the subscription.  Fun for me since a lot of projects on which I've been working this month are limited to subscribers.  I know a lot of you have already subscribed (because you've told me!) and I hope some more of you will think about it, too!  The projects this week have been so much fun (when I have time I'm making at least one of them from another designer for sure).

     The Create with Connie and Mary challenge this week is a sketch challenge, and you are invited to submit your very own project, too, by commenting on the Create with Connie and Mary Blog.  If you are a subscriber to Create With Connie and Mary – Holiday Edition, you'll also have a chance to win a prize!  Here's the sketch.  I would be SO happy to have one of you win that prize at the end of the Holiday Edition!

     Though I don't post much here about Stampin' Up!'s My Digital Studio, I use it quite a lot – and not just for digital scrapbooking! 

     I make greeting cards!  You might think, "Hey, she has all that paper and ink and all those stamps and embellishments; why would she want to go digital?!"  A very good reason is that Stampin' Up! frequently retires a lot of those papers and stamps and so forth.  They have to in order to add new stuff to their catalogs.  But where does that leave us when something we love retires?

     Up until 2009, it left us in the lurch.  NOW, however, a ton of that "stuff" lives on in the digital world of Stampin' Up! – through My Digital Studio.

     Take today's card.  I really needed a Bon Voyage card for some friends about to go on a cruise of a lifetime.  But Travel Journey Designer Series Paper as well as the stamp set, Sentimental Journey were RETIRED!  What to do?  Go digital, of course! 

     OK, now I have a confession to make.  There are some stamp sets and papers that I just can't let go!  And I happened to have some scraps of Travel Journal paper stashed away in the craft room – right next to that wonderful scrapbooking stamp set, Sentimental Journey.  So our friends did receive a stamped and embellished card.  Of course, I could have had the digital version printed professionally and then added in the still current Pumpkin Pie Ribbon.  But I didn't have time – I had like a day's warning that a group wanted a card to sign!  And, no matter how well I calibrate my printer, ink jet is just not the same as the wonderfully printed cards made by Stampin' Up!'s printing service.  So here, carefully stashed at the bottom of this blog post, is a real honest-to-goodness card made with retired products (gasp!). 

     Hey, compare the two!  Is My Digital Studio not wonderful!  And from now on, when I want the Travel Journal paper for a project, I really am going to have to go digital – because the scraps I now have left are really, really, teensy.

     As many of you know, my husband was quite ill for most of 2010.  It really made us both focus on how precious is our time together.  For this Valentine's Day, I decided that a card was not enough.  During the past year we had many opportunities to be together in places and times where we had our pictures taken together, more than is normal for us!  So an album of some photographs of our times together in 2010 seemed to be just the thing.

     This album is a simple Accordion Album, made with one piece of Stampin' Up! Card stock, and decorated with papers from the Sweet Stitches Designer Series Paper Set, featured in the Stampin' Up! 2010 Occasions Mini Catalog.  The quote for the front of this album – the perfect quote for it! – is from the Level 3 Hostess Stamp Set, Occasional Quotes.  I punched the flowers from the same paper set and added a Sweet Stitches Fabric Brad, also from the Occasions Mini Catalog.

     Inside the album are six photos.  The two on the left were taken on a March 2010 trip to the island of Maui.  The middle two photographs were taken while Harry was in the hospital on the island of O'ahu, with the 4th picture taken the evening before his surgery in June.  His surgery was to take place on his birthday, so we celebrated a day early – the reason he's wearing a lei!  The 5th photo was taken on an October trip to visit the property in Lawrence, Kansas, where his grandparents had their dairy farm when Harry was a child.  The final photograph – and a tribute to his having made it through a very difficult year – was taken in December when we visited the island of Kaua'i.

     I wrote the notes on pieces of Whisper White card stock which I printed from images made with My Digital Studio.  The stamp set that includes these images, Notes and Details, is also available in the Occasions Mini Catalog.  These were just perfect for my hand-written journaling in this little album.

     When you're thinking of making cards and gifts, don't forget that small albums such as these are oh so quick and easy to make!  And they are often just the most perfect gift you can give someone.  Certainly the perfect gift for my husband this Valentine's day 2011!

     Have you seen the word, "Perfect," all through this blog post!  It's really a tribute to a perfect husband.

     Happy Valentine's Day!

     The last time I posted I said that I was so OVER snow.  And I just sit and read about snow, I don't live in it.  I can't imagine what you gals and guys who've been living with so much of it this winter are going through (well, yes, I've been there/done that – 50 inches the last winter we spent on the mainland).

     But when there are grandchildren involved and their mother (a photographer) takes pictures of them, I have to give in.

     Both of these scrap pages are made with Stampin' Up!'s My Digital Studio, and both feature photos of one grandchild each.  The photo layout is one of the built-in layouts provided in the software package that comes with My Digital Studio.  I modified it just a bit, added the background paper, some snowflakes from digital "stamp sets" and some journaling backgrounds made with digital "punches."  All digital!  Not a speck of paper wasted trying out different colors for the mats!  And (best of all) no added clutter in the craft room!  That's the real plus because it seems to be in a constant state of disarray as I am cleaning up after Christmas and getting the new Occasions Mini Catalog stuff set up.

     If you have any questions about My Digital Studio, I'll be glad to help you with them!  I've taken all of Stampin' Up!'s tutorials and have a lot of practice doing lots of fun pages (fun is my mantra for 2011!).   There's also an online resource for everyone who uses My Digital Studio – MyDigitalStudio.net.  Lots of great samples and discussions!  If you're not quite sure you want to buy this software, go check that website out – you'll be hooked!

     And whether you're making cards or scrapbook pages or anything else creative today, have fun with it!

     Well, I've made it to Christmas Eve!  You'd think that I've forgotten how much time it takes to decorate a house for Christmas AND how much time it takes to write notes in Christmas cards and make sure they have enough postage AND shop for Christmas dinner!  And you'd be right!!!

     OK, Christmas at the Messenheimer household is not that complicated.  No children or grandchildren visiting this year.  But we do have guests coming for Christmas Dinner, and we have a friend from New Mexico arriving the next day for a whirlwind trip.  So it just yesterday occurred to me that I couldn't just act as if this is just another weekend.  Because it isn't!

     This all brings me to why today's card is what it is -

     It's a My Digital Studio card!  You haven't seen one here at Robin's Craft Room for a very long time.  It's not that I've not been using My Digital Studio – I have!  But I forget that I can make fun greeting cards with it!  And so can you – all you have to do is buy it and I can teach you how to use it!

     But back to my card.  What you see here is paper from two different sets of Stampin' Up!'s Designer Papers – and they're DIGITAL!  Everything on this card is digital.  What fun I had making this – and how quickly I was done with it.  It had to be quick because I still have tons of stuff to do before tomorrow!  Can you believe I haven't put my husband's Christmas present together yet?  I thought putting toys together on Christmas Eve was a thing of the past when our kids grew up.  Not so!

     One activity of the day was having said husband go out into the garden and cut down a few Norfolk Island Pine trees.  They have to be cut anyway every year because they get too tall too fast.  They're pretty when they're 8 to 10 feet high.  Not so much when they get up to 40 and 50 feet!  So every year, we cut them down and put two of them on our lanai (patio).  This is one.  Not too many ornaments on it, though.  All of my good ornaments are either paper or fabric, and neither does well in the humidity of a lanai on the windward side of a Hawaiian island.  Between just plain moisture and mildew, it would be a disaster.  BUT I can use my Sizzix Big Shot to cut snowflakes out of beverage cans, and that's what you see hanging with some of the glass balls. 

     As an aside let me tell you how sturdy these glass balls are – the tree has fallen twice, and they haven't broken yet!  Amazing what all that paint on them will accomplish.

     And the last chance for the blog candy – I've got a new book that has all my 2010 card layouts plus lots more in it!  Each layout has at least one example of its use (from my blog posts) and some have more as I've used them myself over the last month.  Actually, this card used one of them, too!  So you can use the layouts for Digital cards, too!  The blog candy is that I will be giving away two copies of my layout book in advance of its publication to two people who've commented on my blog this month.  All you have to do is comment on a blog post and tell me why you'd like a copy of the book!  As soon as Christmas Dinner is over, I'll get all the comments out and I'll e-mail two of you with information about your prize.

     So don't delay – this is your last chance!

     Have a wonderful Christmas Eve and Christmas Day!

     Today I've been getting ready for a Stamp-A-Stack class that I'll be holding in the Craft Room this weekend.  The quickest way I know to find easy and well-documented layouts is to go to my new book!  Hooray that I'm done with it!  Well, I'll be adding these photos to it as we go along this month so that it will be even more chock full of samples when it goes on sale after the first of the year.

     This uses the pattern that I shared with you on my July 7, 2010, blog post – but with a twist!  The twist is that I twisted it sideways.  You see, you don't have to use a layout in the orientation in which you initially see it!  If you like the layout, but are not quite sure how it would work with you project, turn it around – sideways or upside down.  Most layouts work in a variety of ways.  You'll see that in tomorrow's post, too!

     The pink and blue for this card are Blushing Bride (pink) and Baja Breeze (blue).  Both are colors featured in one of the paper sets in Stampin' Up!'s 2010 Holiday Mini Catalog – unfortunately, a paper set that has been sold out!  But here's a plug for an entirely different product!  You can still get this paper in My Digital Studio!  In fact, I've been using it a lot this week as part of an online project on which I'm working.  Fabulous!

     This is a really busy time of the year, so I needed something simple and this was it.  Now I have to dash out the door to a Christmas Potluck dinner – oops, hope my casserole isn't burned!!

      Whatever you're doing this holiday season, I'm hope you're having as much fun with it as I am!

As I said last week, we have a new garden cat, whose name is Honu, who has made our indoor cat, Cholla (from New Mexico, thus the name of the cactus that is ubiquitous where we lived) just a teensy bit jealous.  In fact, we have to keep some windows closed as the cats have taken to trying to claw each other through the screens!  Not so bad this time of the year when it’s not really very hot at all.  Hopefully they’ll get over it before spring arrives and starts to warm things up a bit!

I managed to catch both cats in something of a Christmas pose, so just had to make a quick scrapbook page with Stampin’ Up!’s My Digital Studio. 

This digital papercrafting program is just so neat – and things ship quickly, too!  I’m going to start on some Valentine’s cards for my Stampin’ Up! friends before long.  If you’d like to be on the list to receive one of the cards, just add a comment below and then I’ll e-mail you to get your address!  I’ll need the information by January 23rd so I can get my order in and still have time to mail them before Valentine’s Day.  I’ll certainly remind everyone about this a few times between now and then.

As I said last week, we have a new garden cat, whose name is Honu, who has made our indoor cat, Cholla (from New Mexico, thus the name of the cactus that is ubiquitous where we lived) just a teensy bit jealous.  In fact, we have to keep some windows closed as the cats have taken to trying to claw each other through the screens!  Not so bad this time of the year when it’s not really very hot at all.  Hopefully they’ll get over it before spring arrives and starts to warm things up a bit!

I managed to catch both cats in something of a Christmas pose, so just had to make a quick scrapbook page with Stampin’ Up!’s My Digital Studio. 

This digital papercrafting program is just so neat – and things ship quickly, too!  I’m going to start on some Valentine’s cards for my Stampin’ Up! friends before long.  If you’d like to be on the list to receive one of the cards, just add a comment below and then I’ll e-mail you to get your address!  I’ll need the information by January 23rd so I can get my order in and still have time to mail them before Valentine’s Day.  I’ll certainly remind everyone about this a few times between now and then.

I finally made a calendar using My Digital Studio from Stampin’ Up!  I am so pleased with the result, and have sent it off to be printed by Stampin’ Up!’s printing service.  I love that I can put a photograph behind the grid page, and change the font styles and colors wherever I want.  I especially liked that I could use the color picker and pick up a color from the flower that is the main picture on the calendar and make that the color for the text for the Month and Year.

Here’s a short (less than a minute) video that shows all the pages.  I can hardly wait to get the printed version.  (And I sincerely hope that I didn’t make any serious mistakes calendarwise!)