Back to the grind....

Why is it that holidays never seem to last long enough? I don't mean the celebrations and all the food and spending all the money, I mean the downtime that you get to spend with your family and friends. This was a pretty good Christmas for spending quality time with my family. With the economic state of the world and my world.. we made a choice not to spend too much on presents this year, so I made some homemade gifts for people. I made calendars for my parents, my little sister and my dear friend Rob. My next few days will posts of the calendars I made for them.........this leads into the "binding" story......

I made 3 calendars......not printed off on the computer, but hand stamped and layered and "blinged" and the whole bit....I wrapped them all up in tissue so the edges would not get banged up and off to Staples I go to get them bound. I had them all in order so all they had to do was punch the holes and put in the binding.........I drop them off and make plans to pick them up after work......THE DAY BEFORE I NEEDED TO GIVE THEM TO PEOPLE.......I finish work and off to Staples I go.....only to find out that the "binding lady" wrecked all 3 of the calendars...........I just about cried.....one of the months she put the holes on the wrong side of the page so the part that was to flip up and have one single hole to hang on the nail now had small holes all along the top, one month she could not cut properly because of some of the bling that was on the page...but she decided to cut it anyway..so it is all crooked so when it flips up the hole no longer matches with the hole to hang on the nail...and one month the holes only got cut halfway through so the binding does not stay in...needless to say I was a little stressed.

I managed to salvage them as best I could, but it's sad when you spend alot of time to make something and then it gets spoiled.

On a positive note, everyone liked them, so that is great, but I still felt bad they were not perfect.

This is January for the calendar I made for my friend Rob. This is a picture of his cutie patootie dog Boris! I used the Martha Stewart oozy blob punch and then sparkled up them up with stickles to make them look like icicles.

This is January for the calendar I made for my Mom and Dad and the one I did for Courtney and Jay. I made the icicles the same on this one. This picture was taken a few years ago when my sister Diana and her husband Jeff and son Eric came home for a visit. We all went to the nursing home to visit Granny and we took this picture of all of us. We don't have a lot of pictures of all of us together, so it's nice to have this one.

Hope you enjoy looking at my calendar.

Chow for now,

Jacqui