Ready for Christmas

It's December 13, and I'm feeling pretty good about where we are on the ol' Christmas To Do list! It helps that my kids are older and the Santa list has shortened considerably as the price per item has risen. It also helps that I've lowered my holiday expectation and no longer try to do everything for everyone!

This year's focus was on the tree. Or, should I say trees? I concentrated my efforts on getting the living and family room trees decorated. The last two years, I've had to delegate the job to my kids. They did a fine job, but let's face it... it looked like a bunch of boys had thrown stuff in the general direction of the tree and called it a day because that's pretty much their method of decorating! Our trees were in some dire need of TLC.

For years, I've wanted to turn our Christmas tree into a FAMILY Tree. As always, it's a work in progress, but I LOVE the story that our trees are now telling!

Here's our family room tree: this one focuses on our immediate family. It holds every Christmas ornament that my kids have made over the year. It also has a nice collection of our block ornaments.

About a month ago, I stumbled upon some fabulously thin wood plates that I just knew would look great as ornaments. They measure about 5x6". They seriously took less than 10 minutes per ornament (and that's only because I decorated the backside of each ornament with some festive paper).


I think they add a nice splash of color!

The best part was the trip down memory lane as I searched our Christmas' Past for the perfect pictures.

My boys-nearly-men will never, NEVER get dressed up like this again...


And here is tree #2:


Our living room tree is a bit more formal, but it's every bit as committed to remembering family!

I found these beautiful mini-frames a year ago on a girlfriend's get-away in Boston. So glad I bought them. Just wish I would have bought a few dozen more!

Of course, no story is complete without my kids jumping in to help tell it. Dog came flying into this picture, complements of my sixteen-year-old. She looks as surprised as I was!

Help, My Prints have Expired!!

How is this possible?

If you're getting the message, "This Printout has expired" and you've just finished processing the pictures, our bet is that you've pressed the print button in the Stories by Me Photo Wizard more than once.

You should have seen a dialog box like this one pop up:


Remember, you can only have one active print job in your account at a time. (This is how we can offer this service for FREE!) We don't store your pictures. We only let you have one active print job at a time to ENCOURAGE you to save the .PDF to YOUR COMPUTER.

Have no fear, your pictures are still in the Photo Wizard, formatted just the way you saved them. You just need to go back into your project and add them to the print list.

Next time you create a print file, OPEN the email that the Photo Wizard sent you, CLICK the link and SAVE the file to your computer. That way you have it ready to print one...or one hundred copies!

Same goes if you're sending the file to your local print shop for printing. You can't just forward the email that our Photo Wizard sends you...it's password protected so only you can view the pictures. Send them the SAVED file as an attachment.

We've posted more helpful hints to using the Photo Wizard here.

It really is easy... and worth the extra steps to format your pictures for these projects.

Think of ALL the stories you have to tell!

This one ornament print sheet contains enough pictures to make 5 ornaments!

Meet us Ft. Union!

There's a party going on this Saturday and YOU are invited! We'll be at the Ft. Union Deseret Book store sharing how easy it is to make these block ornaments.

You really should stop by and check it out!

We bring the supplies and you leave with a finished ornament. All you need is about 15 minutes and $1.00 (to cover supplies!)

Not only do you go home with a beautiful ornament, but you leave with the knowledge that these little beauties are SUPER EASY to make. Before you know it, you'll be cranking them out for everyone on your 'Nice' list!


Contact the store for more details (You can also just stop by between 10:30 and noon!)

Black Friday Sale, 30% off... EVERYTHING!

We're getting on the Black Friday Sale bandwagon! Starting tonight, we will offer 30% off everything in stock. The best part is that you don't have to get up at the crack of dawn or endure freezing temperatures to take advantage of the savings.

Stop by while the bird is baking. Stop by after the company has left. Just be sure to stop by our web store and place your order by Sunday, November 28th.
Use code: THANKS2010 at checkout.

Our Memory Puzzle Kits are on back order AGAIN! How is that possible? We just replenished inventory 4 weeks ago and here we are scraping the bottom of the barrel. Another order is in the works and we hope to have a delivery date early next week. If you want a puzzle kit at the discounted rate, go ahead and place your order online. We'll follow up with the expected due date. If that date doesn't work, we'll provide a full refund.

A Sweet Deal

Just noticed that Overstock.com is running a big sale. We think this is quite meaningful given the fact that several of our projects are available there.

Even better, right now shipping is just $1.00.
Does it get any sweeter?

A Season of Thankfulness

It's mid-November! Where has the time gone? My sweet baby is two-months-old and growing way too fast. In my spare time (ha!) I gathered a few supplies and made this banner. All I needed was some burlap, twine, paint and a sewing machine. Oh, and a sleeping baby so I could put it together!!

It hangs in my kitchen where we can all see it everyday. It's a great reminder that we have much to be thankful for. And with this new season, I am trying to help my kids say THANKS for all that they have.

I used butcher paper to create a simple stencil of each letter. A quick dab of black paint with a stencil brush added the lettering to each triangle of burlap. The fabric pieces are connected with the twine, sewn in place using a zigzag stitch. The dot garland was even easier! I cut out dozens of different colored circles using a 1" and 1.5" circle punch. All that was left was stringing them together using a straight stitch on my sewing machine.

Of course, Lauri had to have one also! She made her own dot garland, with a slight twist.

Wishing you a Thankful November!

Why Does it Do That?

If you have tried to format your pictures using our Photo Wizard, you might have noticed a slight variation between what you see on your screen and the final print that our Photo Wizard sends you.

Here's the screen version. Formatting pictures for the puzzle can be tricky because you are trying to keep the 4 lines (nine sections) from dissecting important parts of the picture. I scaled the picture to 153% to fill the frame to my liking. The position of the faces look OK too. Notice how the right line falls to the left of the boy's eye and near the bottom of his chin?

The above image shows the picture as it comes back from the Photo Wizard. WHAT? The line now runs down the center of the boy's nose and near the bottom of his lip. That's no big deal, but one of the other lines (the line that you CUT!) now runs through the mom's eye. That is a much bigger deal (partially because it's MY EYE!) Seriously, we've helped more than a thousand of you create these works of art. It's no big deal to cut through an ear, forehead or cheek, but cutting through someone's eye is somewhat disturbing as it distorts the entire face.

Our programmer tells us that this is due to the fact that we are viewing the image on our screen, but the software formatting the picture actually resides on a server several states away. Because of the myriad of computer monitors, not to mention all the varieties of possible settings, our software has to make some assumptions as to what you are seeing.

Knowing that the Photo Wizard sees things slightly to the left and down from what I'm seeing, I simple pushed the picture up a little and to the right of where I wanted the final line to reside.

I now have the perfect layout for the puzzle project. This cute picture was from a family photo shoot a couple of years ago. I'm actually whispering into the ear of my son during the session, telling him to knock off whatever shenanigan he was up to. The photographer captured the moment and it's ONE of my favorite pictures!

Other projects are much easier to layout. Here's the ornament project...

Notice that a smidgen of the ear is missing. Not a big deal as I know that I'll be sanding that edge and distressing it with ink as I finish the ornament. If I wanted to, I could apply the same process of pushing the picture slightly to the right to get the entire ear in the window.

Keep in mind that you can only have ONE active print job in your account at a time. If you decide to reformat your pictures and repress the Print button, you'll get the following message:

If you think you MIGHT want to use that previous layout, save a copy of the file to YOUR COMPUTER. (Saving a copy of the email doesn't help, it only provides the link to your file!)

Now you know!