Archive for October, 2008
Halloween preparations are in full swing in our house. My kids are so excited that it’s almost time to wear their costumes. Lauren says that Halloween is her favorite holiday, even over Christmas. Now there’s a kid who loves candy! Logan is going to dress up as Indiana Jones, complete with fake foam whip and Lauren is dressing up as half angel, half devil (her choice, not mine!). Were you a "store-bought costume" kid or a homemade one? I was always a homemade one, but I always wanted a "store-bought" one. I miss the days when we all dressed up together as a family. I just looked back at some of our prior years pictures and they are so cute I had to share (see below).
This week, we have over 200 new items from manufacturers such as Creative Imaginations, Best Creations, Moxxie, Piggy Tales, EK Success, Scrappin’ Sports & More, Sandylion and of course, Scrap Your Trip. We’ve been getting lots of e-mails about the My Pages Talk voice recorder and we have it here this week. This is the last of the Halloween supplies we will be adding, but of course we’ll keep them year-round, so that the supplies are available whenever you need them. We have pirates and cars and trains and birthday and softball and fall and music and biking and Disney and autumn and election and pregnancy and travel…and…lots more! As Scrap Your Trip exclusive products this week, we have several customized options: a football border, a Disney lanyard, custom Vegas paper and custom school matching left and right papers. Tiffany has also designed another layout, this time for travel, called "Off We Go". All the products are available on the Shop by Layout section. Don’t feel like cutting and pasting it all together? Let us do it for you! We will send the layout completely finished, ready for your travel memories. Click here to see the new layout (pictured below)
http://www.scrapyourtrip.com/shopbylayout.html and here to see all the new items, click here:
http://www.scrapyourtrip.com/102908.html.
As always, thanks for your business!
Julie Swatek, President
Scrap Your Trip®
www.ScrapYourTrip.com
‘cuz life is a trip worth scrappin’®
Comments? Post them on the blog at http://blog.scrapyourtrip.com.
P.S. We also have a really cool and different project we’ve been working on for you that I hope you’ll be as excited as we are. There were six of us at the office last night until almost midnight trying to get it right. We’re almost there, but it’s not perfect yet and I don’t want to show it to you until it is. I usually never send e-mails out except for Wednesdays, but keep an eye out for another e-mail this week as soon as we get it perfected. It’s a great new way to show off your memories (think Christmas gifts). Stay tuned!
October 29th, 2008
I don’t know if the same thing happens to you or not, but sometimes the stress of catching up from being on vacation almost wipes out all the relaxation from the vacation! I’m an adult and I expect that there is going to be a backlog of work to catch up on when I get back, not to mention the backlog of mail and laundry. But I never thought that my kids would feel that stress too. We pulled them out of school to go to Vermont and they missed five days. We got their schoolwork from their teachers and got it all done while we were gone. But, my 8-year old daughter, Lauren, came home from school on Monday and was really upset. She felt like she missed a lot while they were gone and didn’t know how she was ever going to get caught up. They had finished their unit on reptiles while she was gone and started a new one on birds and she didn’t know any of the terms they were using. She also has 2 quizzes she has to make up. She started crying because she said it was really frustrating to feel so behind and she didn’t know how she was ever going to get caught up. I felt so bad for her! I didn’t realize that stress started so young
I told her about how I was feeling the same thing at work and how it always feels this way when you get back from vacation and you have lots of catching up to do. It was one of the first "grown-up" conversations we’ve had where I felt that we really related. She was so relieved to hear that I go through the same thing sometimes and I think it was one of the first times she has seen me as a person, not just as her Mom. I felt so good because I was able to make her feel better. It makes me feel like I’m going to be able to handle this mom thing as she gets older.
We have over 250 new items this week – it’s a scrapbooking smorgasbord! New product and themes include: Fright Night, Old Guys Fish and We’re Adopting! by Creative Imaginations, Girls Sports by Scrappin’ Sports, & More, Racing from L’il Davis, outdoor sports by SRM Press, Bella Girl by Teresa Collins and Dotted Swiss from Bazzill (including the swatch book). We also have a lot of themes in the SYT exclusive products: fall, cruise, Iceland, Mexico, zoo (wait until you see the giraffe and elephant die cuts) and military. We took a bunch of pictures in Vermont that we turned into SYT papers – perfect for scrapbooking fall and apple picking! We have two custom die cuts – one for a family road trip and one for adoption (could also be used for births). Based on the fantastic response we got last week on our custom papers, we’ve designed another look. You can either choose the paper color or the ink color. Click here to see all the items:
http://www.scrapyourtrip.com/102208.html.
Lastly, we have a new section for you to take a look at – Shop by Layout. Our designer, Tiffany, is a very talented scrapbooker and she designed a fantastic double-page spread using the Fright Night line from Creative Imaginations. We have it on the website, listed with all the products she used to make it. We’ve even included the pop-dots and Stickles! Here’s a link to check out the layout:
http://www.scrapyourtrip.com/shopbylayout.html.
If this is something you’d like to see more of, just let us know what you’d like to see and we’ll get to work.
As always, thanks for your business!
Julie Swatek, President
Scrap Your Trip®
‘cuz life is a trip worth scrappin’®
October 22nd, 2008
I’m not an "in the moment" kind of gal. At any given moment, I have a running list a mile long in my head. Did I remember to get everything in the kids’ backpacks that morning? What can I make for dinner? How am I ever going to get through all the emails in my Inbox? Either I’m thinking about something I should have remembered or something I should be doing. Always in the past or the future…never in the moment. Except here in Vermont. It sneaks up on me. We’ll be driving along and I’ll be looking with awe at a brilliant orange tree and how the dark brown branches look like something in a magazine photograph. Or I’ll look at my kids, hiking down a path, laughing and running and having the time of their lives. Or we’ll all be sitting by a stream, listening to the sound of the water. And all of a sudden, I’ll realize that I wasn’t thinking about anything. For a few brief moments, I wasn’t thinking about the business or the Dow or if the kids get enough fiber in their diets. I just am. Totally in the moment. And just like that, it’s gone and my brain goes into overdrive again. But for a few minutes, surrounded by so much natural beauty, there was so much peace and contentment. How do you do that in everyday life? Anyone got any ideas? Leave me a comment on the blog.
A little over a year ago, we started making custom die cuts so that we could help you personalize your scrapbook pages. Today, I am thrilled to announce that we have a new way to help you personalize them even further – custom scrapbook paper! It’s edge-to-edge 12 x 12 printed on Bazzill cardstock. We’ve started with four designs, and welcome any suggestions for additional designs.
In the face of the economic roller coaster we’ve all been on lately, Scrap Your Trip is happy to do our part to stimulate the economy with the "Scrapbookers Economic Bailout Plan"! Just enter coupon code BAILOUT at checkout for 20% off your order. It expires at 11:59 pm Eastern Time, tomorrow, Thursday, October 16th. (It is not valid on prior purchases, nor able to be combined with any other offer.) Use it to make some frightfully good scrapbook pages with our 64 new Halloween items from Scrap Your Trip, Moxxie, EK Success and Cloud 9 Designs. We also have some pink ribbon diecuts from the SYT Design Team and four pink ribbon papers from our newest designer, Rene. He has a very artsy style that I think you’ll like. Click here to see all the items:
http://www.scrapyourtrip.com/whatsnew.html
As always, thanks for your business!
Julie Swatek, President
Scrap Your Trip®
‘cuz life is a trip worth scrappin’®
October 15th, 2008
I believe there are two types of people in the world…those who like to pack for a trip ahead of time and those who pack the night before (or the day of). I’m one of the latter. I did so much traveling last year to all the CK Conventions that I got to the point where I could pack in about 20 minutes. Lauren, my 8-year old daughter, however, is one of the "ahead of time" packers. We are leaving Friday for our annual Vermont fall "leaf peeping" vacation and she has been packed for over a week. She would have started packing a month ago if I had let her!
Every year when we think about this trip, we wonder if we should spend the money and this year is certainly no exception. With the doom-and-gloom blaring at us from every TV and newspaper, we wondered if we should cancel. But I used the 10-10-10 rule in making my decision and as usual, it helped make the right choice. What is the 10-10-10 rule? It’s based on an article by Suzy Welch I read a few years ago. Basically, when you have a decision to make, ask yourself what are the consequences in 10 minutes, 10 months and 10 years. So, what are the 10 minute consequences? We’d save money but all be disappointed. What are the 10 month consequences? Next year, we’d all be talking about how we didn’t go. What are the 10 year consequences? Lauren and Logan are at the age when they will remember this. Ten years from now, this time in history will be able to be summed up in 3 seconds, but my kids would always remember the year we cancelled our trip. Fall in New England is good for our souls and it’s always a time of tremendous bonding and memory making in our family. As I sit here at my desk at home writing this, there are pictures on my desk and wall from the last two years worth of trips. I’m not willing to give up these times with my kids (while they still want to go on vacation with their parents), so we’re going. We’re going to come back a few days earlier than we had originally planned, but the 10 year consequence of having my children remember their fall vacations in Vermont as some of the best times of their childhoods, I’m not willing to give up.
We have over 200 new items this week, including the new Granola and Urban Prairie collections from Basic Grey. We also just got the rest of the embellishments from the Ambrosia, Eva and Offbeat collections. We only ordered a limited quantity, so when they’re gone, they’re gone! We have some great Halloween stuff this week. We have the Whimsy collection from K&Co, and as usual, it’s some of my favorite. They made some awesome paper crafting kits: a Haunted Tree, favor bags, a Trick or Treat garland kit, a skeleton kit and pumpkin lantern kits. It’s a great way to do something quick and crafty – they did most of the work. We got lots of supplies to help you scrapbook all your trick-or-treaters in costume (Spiderman, Batman, Disney Princesses, Buzz and Woody, Hannah Montana, High School Musical, Superman/Supergirl, and more). We have the Thankful breast cancer collection from Melissa Frances (who is battling it herself), the new Sweet collection from Die Cuts with a View, military, road trip, UK, Germany, autumn (you’re going to love Tiffany’s scarecrow die cut!) and sports, including a customized football helmet and pennant. Click here to see all the new items: http://www.scrapyourtrip.com/whatsnew.html.
As always, thanks for your business!
Julie Swatek, President
Scrap Your Trip®
www.ScrapYourTrip.com
‘cuz life is a trip worth scrappin’®
October 8th, 2008
We’re about to have a big change in the Swatek household. My kids have always gone to after-school care. Even before they started school, they were in daycare until closing time. There was always a group of moms and dads that came screeching in the parking lot at 6:30…late again! We’d nervously joke with each other "I get the Mother of the Year award today!" "Not fair – you had it yesterday!" It’s the only life they’ve ever known, but they haven’t done a lot of the things other kids their age do. Lauren recently went to a friend’s for a play date and they were amazed that she had never been on a scooter. Getting to go outside and play after school is the exception for them, rather than the rule. So…we’re in the process of hiring a baby-sitter to pick them up from school and bring them home. She’s going to help them with their homework, so when we get home from work, we’ll be able to spend some enjoyable time with them instead of the "dreaded homework fight". It’s going to be a big change for them, because they are used to having lots of playmates in after-school care and now they’ll just have each other. I hope we’re doing the right thing.
It’s clearance time! We’ve marked down over 800 items on 25% clearance. As usual, I’m sad to see products go. I know it sounds silly, but we get kind of attached to them. First we saw it at a show or catalog, we decided to order it, we keyed the info into our system, scanned the image, added it to the website and got to see it every time we processed an order. But, no room for new stuff if we have too much old, so out it goes! There is actually a "mini" tradeshow this weekend in Orlando and lots of our vendors are releasing their fall collections. I just love to go see brand new scrapbooking product! I managed a sneak peek at Creative Imaginations and they have two new licenses, Ripley’s Believe It or Not (World’s Most Talented Athlete, etc. and Sea World’s Discovery Cove). It’s great that the show is so close, but I don’t get to go to a city where there is a Portillo’s. Yum…chocolate cake
Click here to see all the items at 25% off: http://www.scrapyourtrip.com/clearance.html
As always, thanks for your business!
Julie Swatek, President
Scrap Your Trip®
www.ScrapYourTrip.com
‘cuz life is a trip worth scrappin’®
October 1st, 2008
