Black Friday Comes Earlier Every Year!

Used to be the stores opened at 6am on Black Friday. Then it was 5am. Then 4am. Then Midnight. And this year, I think I heard that Walmart is opening at 10pm tonight (in less than 15 minutes), except the electronics won't go on sale till midnight (?).


Michael's opened at 4pm today with 30% off everything, including sale-priced items. I had only a few things on my shopping list but couldn't find any of them.

Rosehips or some sort of red berry

 A tag punch (size and shape negotiable)

Parchment paper to print on

One strike, two strike, three strikes, you're out!


But since I was there, and since I did have a coupon for 30% off everything, I took a look around the store ...

A pad of Tim Holtz Kraft paper was the first thing to jump into my shopping basket!

This is called "Kraft Resist" ... but who can resist kraft paper

(especially when it's printed with Tim Holtz designs!)???

This was quickly followed by ...

A booklet of "Salvage Stickers" ("Crowded Attic" collection) ...

Reinforcers ...

A sunflower stamp (Inkadinkadoo) ...

and just for fun ... 

A package of red & white polkadot cupcake liners!

Total damage was $26 after the 30% discount, and that's about what the kraft paper pad and the stamp would have cost at regular price!

Then I came home and was going through some mail and found a Joann's flyer for their Black Friday sale. Oh my ... I know where I'll be in less than 9 hours! :-)

Let's see, a few boxes of poly stuffing (on sale at 40% off and with a 25% coupon on top of that, I'll get as many boxes as I can get into my truck!). Their Fiskars punches are 60% off (unheard of -- and the 25% off coupon is good for that too!); sure hope they have a tag punch (or two). And I'll probably have to take a peek at the fabric while I'm there, though it will have to be something I really "need" to stand in line very long.

And after that, I may just drive to Modesto to see what Jamison's looks like on opening day!

Harvest Festival - Sacramento

I have a feeling y'all are probably anxious to see what I bought with my Harvest Bucks ... right? I walked the whole show, making mental notes as I went about booths I wanted to go back to. I ended up buying from two almost local artists, one lady is from Modesto and the other is from Red Bluff.

The crow pottery was made by Charlotte Certain whose business name is "Crooked Finger Pottery." I couldn't find her on Facebook, Etsy, or Google! She lives in Red Bluff, if you're trying to track her down. I love the crows! The berry bowl (there's a separate saucer underneath it) is for a friend's birthday/holiday gift, so if you're reading this, Jennifer, you'll get it in a couple of weeks! :-)


The "California" bracelet is from Grouse And Badger; they do have a shop on Etsy, but readily admitted they don't list everything they make there. The bracelet is made from a vintage California license plate!


And I still have $15 in Harvest Bucks left, so I'll be going back to the Harvest Festival on Sunday!

Etsy Treasury - Happy Homespun Holidays

I just put together an Etsy Treasury for the holidays. Hope you'll take a moment and give it some love. Log in to your Etsy account and click on some (or all) of the 16 items and leave a comment. The link is below the image of the Treasury. Thanks, and Happy Homespun Holidays!

http://www.etsy.com/treasury/NzI0NzZ8MTA2OTMzMDA1Mw/happy-homespun-holidays

Blogger Finally Got It (mostly) Right!!!

I don't know when Blogger made this change, but I've just discovered the ability to port all of my blogs to a new email address! In the past, it only seemed like I was able to port a few abilities, i.e. writing new posts but not changing the template, for example, but now I've got ALL of my blogs associated with the email account I use on a daily basis. So now I won't have to log out of that Gmail account, log in to another Gmail account to work on the blogs, log out of that Gmail account, and log back into my regular day-to-day Gmail account. YIPPEE!!!

Maybe this will even tempt me to post more often! :-)

Now ... if they'd put space back between paragraphs, make sure the easy edit option (the pencil icon) is available when it's supposed to be (it seems to only show in Firefox at the moment), and fix the image adder thingy so images get inserted where they're supposed to go, rather than at the top of the post, where I then have to drag them to where I want them. Oh, and make their site work better with IE. I go back and forth between IE and Firefox, and lately it's been IE, but publishing posts has been next to impossible in IE, as well as saving in draft format.

So Blogger got something right, but it looks like other things may have gotten broke in the process. Sigh.