We Have a Winner and Link to 68 Raffle Prizes!

Oh my Goodness, we had 451 entries for the free draw for our Halloween Stamp Set and 4 New Image & Journal Note Booklets! Congratulations to the winner: HappyHappyJoyJoy
who said... Wow! All these things are so gorgeous! Love them! I am from the great state of Texas and the city of Plano.

Thanks so much to all of you that left such NICE comments! You have no idea how much that means to all of us! I certainly can't take all the credit. We are a small but powerful team and Cindy van Koll our head graphic designer is the one responsible for putting together all of our fabulous vintage products! I do come up with the product ideas and then raid my enourmous inventory (it's seriously taking over our house) or I go buy more old stuff and then get Cindy to change all sorts of things to make it all perfect and heartwarming! If they are not smiling, she cuts their heads off and adds happy faces! There is a tremdous amount of brainstorming and love that goes into every product, so it's sooo nice to know it is appreciated! I also have Nicole our wonderful office manager looking after all our paperwork and such a great team of designers and help from my family!

Darn, I wish everyone could win! But I can tell you about more goodies you can enter to win and also support a great cause at the same time. Jeanne Turner has coordinated a fund raising raffle with Jenn Balcer over at Splitcoast to donate money to the Red Cross to help out families that have suffered from the devastating recent flooding in the Midwest, including parts of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, and Wisconsin. There are 68 fantastic prizes you can win that have been donated by companies and just people that care and want to do something to help. You can either donate $5.00 for a single ticket, or $25.00 will get you 6 tickets! Here is the link to get all the details. Here is a link to the Gallery of Prizes! I LOVE this adorable little calendar that Pam Hooten from our design team donated along with 4 of our Image & Journal Note Booklets! She made it using one of our Sweetchips Little Girl Outfits!

I donated this ladies-girlfriends theme package

to the raffle with our new Support the Girls Stamp set, our Girl Time Cotton Scraps, Wonderful Women Cardstock Stickers and our new Girlfriends Image & Journal Notes Booklet! I saw so many cool things I bought the 6 ticket bundle but I hope I don’t win back my donations.

I’m also going to donate a Halloween package with every Halloween item we have! I just need to send them the photo, but it will also be one of the raffle prizes. Companies have been so generous!!! There are LOTS of stamps and stamp sets, gift certificates, stationery sets, Tim Holtz Grungeboard, 100 packages of ribbon, Spellbinder dies, I even saw one of our Artsy Alphabet Stamp Sets! They will draw all the winning tickets on August 6, 2008. Here is the info link again.

I adore all the new samples that have been posted

in our online Gallery HERE and I can hardly wait

until our new stamp sets arrive, so our design team can create more inspiring samples because I really see so many creative possibilities in our new stamp sets! Michelle Wooderson from our design team was demonstrating using Copic Markers and their little airbrush at the CHA show and I gave her one of our two proof sets of our new Birthday Kids stamp set. Look at these adorable birthday cards she created! I love that you can stamp the 4 different kids on this set holding different things. Michelle stamped the little girl holding the ice cream cone and the boy holding the balloon. She used a Spellbinders die to mat her colored stamped images on. The numbers will also fit in the balloon and I think the birthday invitation stamps included will make this a fun versatile set! Here is a link to the Copic Blog with super helpful tips from Marianne!

Marisa our July Guest Designer has been busy posting a new sample almost everyday! I love this invitation she created using our Wine Lover Stamp Set. You can get all the details HERE on her blog. It's the layers and little details she includes that always make me say wow! The way she stamps and colors things like the cheese and part of the wine glasses and cuts them out to create layers adds such depth.

Ooops - I almost forgot, you have to go see this adorable card HERE that Vicki Chrisman from our design team created for a challange she is involved with Taylored Expressions! She has lots of great links to see the other samples.

I also wanted to post a couple of fabulous cards
I spotted on the Splitcoast Gallery. There are so many now that it's easy for samples to get buried. I adore the way that Beverly (colelady) used the large silverware set

and other stamps from our Kitchen Classics to create these 2 cards (in the pink and the black polkadot paper).

Then she inspired Darlene (akronstamperdpk) who made this lovely place setting you can see below in yellow!

Then I remembered there are more cool samples in our gallery so I typed in ‘kitchen’ in our search box and I came up with LOTS MORE

fabulous samples you can see if you click HERE!

Talking about cooking and food... I was almost ready to post this when my youngest daughter Chelsea called from work and asked my husband and I go meet her for lunch at her fav Vietnamese soup place The Noodle House. We all love spicy soup and I’ve learned not to turn down an invite from my kids as we are all so busy, it may be awhile before I get another one! So we went and ate huge bowls of Pho noodle soup – so spicy it made our noses run. It was wonderful! Chelsea has 3 years to go for her masters in therapeutic recreation. She works at an old folks home, so toady she was doing exercise classes with them and crossword puzzles. It sounds like more fun than work to me!

PS – In case you are wondering what Pho Noodle

Soup is, I found a photo. Chelsea and I had spicy

vegtable and Scott had the curried chicken soup.

PS #2

I have some exciting news to share later this week and a cool free download!