Matchbook Calendar Giveaway Winners!

Thanks to everyone who entered to receive a 2010 Matchbook Calendar. I appreciate all the kind comments, and am pleased to announce that the winners are:

#14 - Deb's Artful Journey
#6 - Marna
#17 - uglygirl

Please contact me with your name, mailing address, and which color you would like (red, blue or green), and I will mail them out in a jiffy!

I'm Finished With Next Year.

(Next year's calendars, that is!)

One of my vivid holiday memories from childhood is our extended family gathering at my grandparents' print shop to help make hundreds of calendars for the following year to give to customers. We'd all squeeze in to the shop on a Saturday, and spend the entire day working together.

My grandpa would print the pages for each month the week before, and then we'd all work in a line, collating them. Once we had a big stack of collated calendars, we'd tidy it perfectly straight, weigh it down, and paint one side with red padding compound. After a bit, the compound would be dry, and I'd use a knife to cut apart the stack one calendar a time. Grandpa cleverly cut December just a tad longer than the other months, so I could pull apart each calendar by feel. Then we'd staple the year's pages to a piece of cardstock that the customer could hang from their wall during the coming year.

Anyway, collating these new matchbook-style calendars reminded me of those days gone by. These calendars aren't the wall kind, though, and I only made sixty, not hundreds. Instead, they're pocket-sized, with each month on a perforated page inside. They're available in three bright colors, and would make perfect stocking stuffers or gifts for co-workers or teachers. Help yourself, right here.

You know what? I think it's time for another giveaway. I'm offering three calendars to three people (one calendar each). To enter, please leave a comment below before 9:00 am CST on Thursday, December 10, 2009. I'll use the trusty random number generator to pick the winners that morning. Please be sure to check back then so I can get the necessary info from you if you're a winner. I'll allow one week for the winners to contact me before I choose any alternate winners. Thanks for entering!

What I've Been Up To...

I've been working feverishly on a few new things for the holiday season, and one of the things I'm very excited about is this handmade paper that I've been making with my daughter this week. It was once a pile of cotton paper scraps I'd trimmed from other projects. Now it's a stack of light, soft, feathery paper we recycled ourselves. This afternoon, it's being transformed into something else, which I will share over the weekend. But before I do that, I had to try to capture its beauty in a photograph. Until the weekend...

Update: the result of the handmade paper is here.

Mum Recipe Cards Are Back

Another quick note this morning... the Personalized Mum Recipe Cards have been out-of-stock for a while, but this week I was able to print more. Now there are six more sets of each color available in the shop, just itching to have names printed on them. Just so you know.

Giveaway Winner

Thanks, everyone, for entering for the seed packet giveaway, and for all the kind comments. The winner is number 23, Lili. Congratulations! I'm so glad you all stopped by to visit this week, and hope you'll come back again soon.

Seed Packets (+ Giveaway!)

As I've said before, I often create something with a particular person in mind. These are for Glenn. Glenn was connected to me even before I was born, but it wasn't until after I became a mother myself that I really met him. His wife, Eleanor, was childhood friends with my grandmother. Then my parents happened to move to Wyoming, where Glenn and Eleanor lived, when I was a toddler. We didn't live there long, but Glenn and Eleanor stayed in touch with my parents and grandparents through the years.

My grandfather passed away shortly after my daughter arrived, and when family and friends gathered for the funeral, Glenn and I were reintroduced. He discovered my amateur interest in gardening, and I learned he was a Master Gardener. The following autumn, a package arrived on my doorstep from him. Inside were rolled-up paper bags, folded envelopes, and old prescription bottles full of seeds that he had gathered from his magnificent garden to share with me. Carrots, dill, larkspur, columbine and so many others – a wonderful gift from a terrific man.

Glenn passed away a couple of years ago, but I think he would have liked the idea of these little seed packets. I think he would have found them a handy way to pass along the bounty and knowledge from his garden to a burgeoning gardener like me.

I said awhile back that I'd do another giveaway, so here we go. I'm offering up a set of Personalized Seed Packets to a random winner – for yourself, or for you to give as a gift to someone special. I'll use a random number generator to pick the winner on Friday morning, September 25, 2009 at 9:00 am CST. Please leave a comment below to enter, and be sure to check back then so I can get the necessary info from you. Thanks for entering.

Come on in...

The new shop is now OPEN!

Moving Woes

I'd hoped to have the new site open for business this morning, but it looks like it will be later this evening. Oh, the joys of DNS addresses. Thanks for your patience, and please come back to visit tonight or tomorrow morning...