My kids bug me everyday with this question:

"Mom! How many more days until Halloween?"

You know, kids, that's just way too much math. But yes, my kids look forward to Halloween almost as much as they look forward to Christmas. Maybe even more. And we have a Christmas advent calendar, so ....

I decided to make them a Halloween one, based on a Christmas advent calendar tutorial I found on Pinterest. I know, so much for that whole "crafting my library" thing. I'm thinking of changing my tagline to "crafting my pins, 10 minutes at a time ..."

I spent literally a couple of hours on this calendar, and I think it turned out really cute:

What I love most about it is that it uses dollar store supplies. The cookie sheet came from The Dollar Store and so did the flat-backed glass marbles. Then all I had to buy was some Halloween scrapbooking paper and magnets. I already had some Mod Podge.

The steps are simple:

1. Cut the numbers out of your scrapbook paper and paste each one onto a black square. Tack the numbers to the cookie sheet (I used two Halloween designs on either end of the calendar to make the numbers even out).
2. Mod Podge over the whole thing. I used two coats.
3. Meanwhile, cut little Halloween characters/phrases/scenes out of the scrapbook paper. For this part you'd obviously want to choose paper that has pictures on it about the size of the glass marbles. 
4. Mod Podge the cutouts to the back of the marbles, then let dry.
5. Glue the magnets to the back of the marbles. I just used Tacky Glue for this.
6. Drill holes at the top of the cookie sheet so you can hang it up. Done!

Now my kids don't have to ask me half a million times a day to figure out how many days there are until Candy Overload. They can just go count. And no, I don't ever remember what the answer was from the day before, so it's not like it's just a matter of simple subtraction. :P

Warning: Rant.

Many years ago, before kids, I scrapbooked. My MO was like this: I would go down to the scrapbooking store and spend hours leafing through all the different papers and embellishments and stickers and I would spend a bunch of money and then go home and spend three or four hours making one two-page spread. How I got anything done at all is beyond me. I guess you have a lot of extra time when you don't have kids.

I used post-bound albums, which I hated. They were fiddly and the pages always buckled instead of lying flat. I considered D-ring albums, but two-page spreads looked awful in those albums because of the huge gap between them. I figured I was just stuck with post-bound.

Anyway then I moved here to Rough and Ready and learned that one of my neighbors was a Creative Memories consultant. And she hosted weekly crops! Which was awesome for me because it meant new friends and some me-time and that I would always have one morning carved out every week for scrapbooking.

At first, I didn't love Creative Memories. I liked the fancy papers and Creative Memories had no fancy papers. You just stuck your pictures right on the page, maybe after rounding the corners or something, and then you put a few stickers on and a fancy border. I thought the pages were kind of boring. But I really liked the strap-hinge albums. They always lay flat and there was no gap between the pages. And I really liked getting together with friends and neighbors to crop.

Then Creative Memories did come out with the fancy papers, and all the stickers and ribbon and paper flowers to go with it. And the best part about it: all the stuff matched. No more scouring the scrapbooking store in search of papers, or spending hours trying to decide how to make a page look nice. It was all right there in that one package.

Now I didn't just love the albums, I loved everything about Creative Memories. I became a consultant, though I rarely ever sold any of the Creative Memories products. I just bought the stuff for myself. After that I almost never went to one of those scrapbooking stores. I was happy on my little Creative Memories cloud.

Now if you are also a Creative Memories fan, you know where I'm going with this. A few weeks ago, my beloved Creative Memories stabbed me in the heart, with the same very long knife they used to stab all their fans in the heart. Creative Memories will no longer be making albums, pages, page protectors or really anything good. Instead they will be focusing on their digital line, which I have little or no interest in (on the rare occasions that I do make photo books I use Snapfish or Shutterfly and then only during one of their very discounted promotions). They will also still be making their "Fast to Fabulous" albums, which I also have no interest in. I don't want my book dictating how many photos I get to put in my album, or how many per page or what orientation they should be, and I also really don't want my books to look exactly like everyone else's books.

And then to add insult to injury, we'll only be able to buy pages and protectors until the end of this month. Why does this suck? Because every time Creative Memories came out with a coverset I liked, I would by it, but I wouldn't buy the pages and protectors to go along with it. Because the coversets were always "while supplies last," but the pages and protectors were forever.

Or so I thought.

I have 14 empty Creative Memories albums on my shelf. I like to put about 35 pages in each book, which is about two packs and 1/3. That's about 33 packs of pages and 33 packs of protectors. I'm going to have to max out a credit card to afford to complete all those albums. But if I don't, all those albums become useless. I could sell them on eBay, but I love the strap hinge format and selling those albums means that's one more post-bound album I have to buy instead. I really want to use all my CM albums because I love them.

What could Creative Memories have done differently? I don't know. Some people think they never should have started making the fancy papers, because that's what did them in. But though I would have still used their albums I doubt I would have become so devoted to them if they didn't have those papers. Maybe I'm unusual though.

And I don't know what the courts are making them do--because this is all bankruptcy related--but I think giving us three or four months to order those pages instead of less than a month would have been a kindness. Personally, I can't afford Creative Memories' bankruptcy. :(

Now I know that this is about the collapse of a company and not really about those of us who were once devoted to that company. But Creative Memories needs to give us a parting gesture of thanks from the deck of their sinking ship. Because we all loved them, supported them, told all our friends about them, and spent probably too much money on their products. The least they could do is sell their patent on those albums to some other company. Because I've been searching the web for a comparable, widely available (in many colors) strap-hinge album and I'm not finding much. And I really don't want to go back to post-bound.

Yes, it's birthday party season, as you can tell because about three quarters of my posts are party invite related.

Just like I did with Dylan's invite, I kept Natalie's simple. She wanted a unicorn party so I threw this picture together in Photoshop, then I got some RSVP cards and just cut and pasted (in a literal sense). They came out pretty cute, but I think I prefer doing these invites with characters (like Harry Potter, Speed Racer, Captain Jack) because for some reason it makes me laugh to see my kids' faces pasted on famous people. :)

But you know, you give the birthday girl what she wants!

Still slogging away on that dinosaur quilt and hope to have some pictures to post in a couple of weeks.

Dylan is on a Harry Potter kick, so for his eighth birthday party we're doing a Harry Potter theme. Which means of course that I had to come up with a Harry Potter party invitation. Hello, Photoshop.

I love doing these, they always make me laugh.

For this invite I chose a poster from the Deathly Hallows, featuring the devastatingly handsome Neville Longbottom:

In case you aren't with me on the whole "devastatingly handsome" thing, you have seen him recently, right?

Yes, that's right. I thought so.

Anyway I got Dylan to pose for me, looking as Neville-Longbottomish as he could, and then I Photoshopped him into the poster:

And then I laughed for about 20 minutes.

Sans-blood, of course (this is second grade after all).

After I was done laughing, I changed the date from 7.15 to the date of the party, and on the inside I put "(Being a 7-year-old, I mean)" You know, as in "It all ends: being a 7-year-old." Which I thought was marginally funny though I'm not sure anyone else will get it.

Cute, though. Can't wait to send them out!

I don't like the first half of the year. I mean, I love it, but it's stressful. All four kids have birthdays in the first half of the year, starting with Henry. And I plan every birthday a month in advance, and I hand make all the invitations, and I stress until all the kids finally arrive on the big day.

Henry's birthday is this Sunday, so right now I'm in stress mode.

I do like making the invites, but they are work. This year I decided not to put too much creativity into Henry's invites, so I just found a cute template online and duplicated it, with a couple of tweaks. I thought I was saving myself time, because I only had 15 invites to make. Of course, that translated into 45 angry birds, each one with individually cut eyebrows and beaks. To give you an idea of how many angry birds we're talking about:

Yep, that's alotta angry birds.

They came out cute though:

But next year, I'm just doing them all in Photoshop. Those look cute, too, without all the cutting.