Handmade Gifts

Don't you just love giving people handmade gifts at Christmas.

Well, I have 2 great ones to choose from: 12 Birthday Cards with envelopes and a 12-month Event Calendar. Both would make excellent gifts and allow you some time to be creative during the holiday season.

I used the November Stamp of the Month (Cherish The Day) to stamp the months on each card or calendar page. Be sure to get yours, available only during this month. By simply placing a $50 order you can get yours for just $5. That's a savings of $12.95.

Cost of each project is just $17 or you can create both for only $30.

You can join me on Tuesday, December 6 from 6:30-8:30 for this workshop. You must register by Monday, November 21st to attend this workshop.

Can't attend? Simply purchase the kit and I'll include cutting instructions and a picture so you can make them on your own time.

Support Breast Cancer and honor Becky Smith

Please help support these efforts. I have pasted this post from another consultants blog. Let's reach out and support each other.

Becky Smith is a Close To My Heart Consultant in
Brownfield, Texas. She was recruited by
Paige Lindsey and is in the All Keyed Up Consultants Team. Becky and Paige have been dear friends for
years and they team teach workshops and
classes together. Becky has been
struggling with cancer for several months.

On Saturday, the All Keyed Up Consultants Team met and
made these beautiful Pink Ribbon card sets to auction off . The proceeds of this auction will be donated
to the Susan Komen Foundation in Becky’s
honor.
We will be taking bids from now through Friday, October
28 at Midnight. To place a bid, simply
leave a bid and your email address (for notification purposes) in the comment
box of THIS POST (on the below website). Please make your
bid at least $1.00 more that the last bid in the comments section.
There
are 4 sets of cards that are being auctioned off and you can bid on both blog
sites: http://aaronsbooth32.blogspot.com/
and http://stampingaudrey.blogspot.com/. A PayPal invoice will be sent to the winning
bidders on Saturday, October 29 (we will ship them to the winners). Happy Bidding!

ALOHA!!!

Well, it is official. I have earned the Close To My Heart 2012 Incentive Cruise. Where will we be cruisin' you might ask - the Hawaiian Islands. I can't believe it. The points to earn the cruise were so much higher than last year, but hard work and dedication came through.

You see I wasn't striving for it until May when CTMH sent out an email that had my name in a list of people that could earn the cruise if they worked a little bit harder. I actually said to myself, "what, you have to be kidding." So I went to the website to see how close I was, did some math, and figured out that I COULD actually do it.

Well, 4 months, 3 recruits, and thousands of $ in sales later - it is earned. I can't wait. This is my first ever CTMH cruise and I am so excited.

Next year we will be cruisin' in the Caribbean and you could join us. See the page about the Monthly Special to take advantage of this incredible special and become a CTMH consultant today.

This is Why!

This is why I haven't posted anything in over 2 months. This is our detached 4 car garage that we have been building since last fall.

The upstairs is where I will now host all of my workshops, classes, crops, retreats, and music lessons. We have been working like crazy to finish it. There is still a lot of painting and fine touches that need to be finished.

Our goal was to have it functional for my 3rd Semi-Annual Slumber Party Retreat August 20-21 and functional it was.

The ladies showed up Saturday morning to a beautifully painted room complete with their own 5' hard wood table and rolling task chair to scrap the weekend away on. I promise I'll post more photos of the weekend soon.

In the meantime, we are up and running and I'm having my next event this Saturday, September 3 from 9a-9p. Come to an All-Day Crop for only $35; lunch and dinner included as well as a project and prizes. Email me before Thursday if you are interested.

Great American Scrapbook Convention in Chantilly, VA

I attended the Great American Scrapbook Convention in Chantilly, VA this past weekend, June 24 & 25, 2010. I was able to attend as a customer on Friday and a vendor on Saturday. This was my first time attending and I was quite impressed. There were vendors from all over with tons of scrapbooking products, ideas, make & takes, and great samples on display. Unfortunately, I don't have any photos to share with you right now. I had to go out of town suddenly due to a death in the family and I left the camera at home.

The one thing I was on the hunt for was a t-shirt and I found 2. One says "friends don't let friends crop alone" (purchased from Scrap Happy - www.scraphappyohio.com) and the other "Scrapbook Girl" (purchased from www.ticklemepinkdesigns.com). I purchased 2 of each of them for myself and my sister. She and I try to get together once a month for a scrapbook weekend. Since she lives in NC and I live in VA we alternate houses. We spend most of the weekend in our pj's, take very few showers, and watch "chick-flicks" while we scrap all weekend long. It's great! We know we won't be able to do this forever, so we are making it a priority now.

The 2nd day I was there I was helping my upline, Kathy Aardema-Zunk, at her Close To My Heart booth. She has been a vendor at this show for (I believe) 7 or 8 years now. We had a great time and I really enjoyed sharing CTMH and demo-ing some of our best products. I also learned alot by watching her interact with others (she has been a consultant for 14 years now). I also got to see some of my current customers and workshop attendees. I even made some new friends and can't wait to see them at a workshop of mine soon.

That's just another reason I love being a consultant. You get to meet great people and make lasting friendships too. You should join my team - I only wish I had joined CTMH sooner.

My first blog post

Well, there is no time like the present is there. I've been trying to start a blog for well over 6 months now and something always seemed to get in the way. Well, here it is - finally!

I am so excited to begin sharing my love of scrapbooking and music with all of you. I plan to post artwork, ideas, kits, specials, and much more so be sure to check back often to see all of the latest and greatest.

To give you a little more background information about me, we'll start after college. I graduated from Meredith College in Raleigh, NC in 1998 with a degree in Music Education, Concentration in Voice. I didn't want to be a teacher right away so I moved to Florida to work for Walt Disney World. It was a great experience and I'm so glad I stepped out on faith to do it. After 3 years, numerous characters, and being home sick I decided to move back to NC and began teaching chorus and dance at North Johnston High School in Kenly, NC. It was challenging at first, but I had some great moments as well. I would travel to and from school 2 hours each day so when I received a call that a school 20 minutes from home was hiring I jumped on the opportunity.

I then began teaching at Fuquay-Varina High School in Fuquay-Varina, NC in January of 2004. My first semester was probably one of the hardest things I had done in my life up to that point. I shed tears almost daily because of the way that the students treated me. I managed to get through it and when I left I was shedding tears for a much different reason. I had established a very special relationship with my students and was sad to be leaving, but it was time to start a new stage of my life.

On September 30, 2006 I married my soulmate. We met on eHarmony, spoke on the phone for 3 weeks before meeting, dated for 2 months before going ring shopping, got engaged after only 4 months, and were married 8 months later.

Oh, I forgot to mention that I lived in North Carolina while he lived in Virginia. So dating for a year long distance was really hard. Looking back now I wish I would have kept track of how many times we traveled back and forth. (He used to know the exact mileage that he had traveled during that year.) So this is what brought me to Virginia. We decided to live in Virginia for various reasons, but I think overall this is where God had planned for us to begin our marriage. It's been necessary for us to be here for the past 4 1/2 years.

So I decided not to go back in to the public schools to teach, but rather to teach private lessons from home. Well, that took a while to get off the ground so I pursued other employment. I ended up working in the back office of a scrapbooking store, Memories Galore in Midlothian, VA, and the addiction was born. I had only been scrapbooking for over a year when I started working at Memories Galore and during my 2 years the addiction just grew and grew. On March 16, 2009 I went to work on a Monday morning only to be driving back home 30 minutes later after being told "my job was being eliminated". So after a few hours of tears, the realization that I could begin a home based business was born and here I am.

By the end of that week, I was a Close To My Heart Consultant and haven't looked back since. I've always been a firm believer in "everything happens for a reason" and this was just another one of those moments. So here I am 2 years later, a Manager with Close To My Heart, a private piano and voice teacher, and I get to do it all from home.