It's a Sunshiney kind of day!

hey ... the sun is SHINING! What a bright fun day it is here today! My house renovating is coming along very nicely thanks to family and friends stepping in to give me a hand, and I am ready to start uploading some new stamp images I have been working on. There are more incredible vintage images along with some just plain FUN stuff! LOL I am anxious to see your response to the new images! Lots of new verses too~! The image you see here is one of the new stamps as well. An image of a little church in the Williams Lake BC area on the Jacobson Ranch. I just LOVE it! What do you think of this one?
Okay .. am off ... need to run more stamps ... lol ..
hugs
Alanna

HAPPY EASTER!!!

Hey! HAPPY EASTER everyone! I have to apologize ... I have just not had any time at all to post on here for weeks. And yes Nancy ... I am back! LOL I know ... you said you miss me! LOL ... Glad to hear it!
This has been so busy for me this past couple of weeks with work, renovating the house, family and all that entails Mom came out for a week and a half and per usual there were not enough hours in the days. We THOUGHT we would have time to play ... but no such luck ... it was all work! I had so many custom orders come in that I spent most of my time on the computer working, and then running stamps when I could. Poor Mom just bustled about me trying to do what she could. She is such a big help!
The renovating on the house is ongoing. This past year brought the new lino I had wanted for so many years, along with new appliances, and all new paint in the kitchen, living room and bathroom upstairs. I also painted the entryway and the downstairs hallway. This year so far we have redone the downstairs bathroom (totally gutted it and started over!), and are now working on the three upstairs bedrooms. New carpet is supposed be coming in on Thursday but I took a bad fall yesterday in the yard, and have doctors orders to stay off of my sprained left ankle. ARGGH! I have STUFF to do! I can't see it happening! LOL I still have to get the two guest rooms painted and scrubbed down for them to lay the carpet in! I have the ceilings pretty much done but the walls still need paint. Two weeks later we begin on the master bdrm and the living room!
So ... now that I am laid up ... I am hoping I can get doing something creative to post here! I REALLY miss being able to create!
Hope the day is sunny and bright for all of you, and that Easter Sunday brings you lots of family, friends and loved ones!
Big big hugs
Alanna

WHEW!! I am baaaackkk! LOL

Well ... where to begin .... ? Back from where? Well ... I have just had a very hectic couple of weeks with a TON of stuff going on and I don't feel like I have 'been here'...
First of all ... We had quite the scare in the last few weeks. I had sort of hinted at it previously but was sworn to secrecy and as such could not really get into it. Our youngest son who is 25 was diagnosed with lung cancer at Christmas time. The shock was unbelievable and I was devastated!I had a very tough time with this and had a terrible time coping. It seemed that my world was crashing in on me. Believe it or not ... after two months of diagnosis and actually prescribing Chemo ... the hospital called him to say that a terrible mistake had been made! Thank heavens he had not begun the chemo yet! It turns out that someone had put the wrong results into his file!!! I thought stuff like that only happened on tv! As relieved as we are we do feel awful for someone else as they SHOULD have been diagnosed and had not been til this came up. Such mixed feelings. Anyhow ... all that said ... it is over for us ... and we are saying a LOT of thanks right now.
Okay ... so what else? Well ... we are still renovating the house ... new carpets are coming in April and I have three bedrooms to get the walls and celings painted and ready. It means moving furniture in a BIG way ... so I am dreading this .. but it will be so wonderful to have the house all fixed up. Once that is done we can start with the new moldings on the doors etc. Yesterday brought a new furnace ... what a relief that is! We were never sure how long the old one (about fifty years old .. no lie!) was going to hold up. They will come this morning to finish this up.
And then ... last week I had a mishap with a light bulb! LOL ... I was changing a bulb and had shards of glass drop into my right eye! At first I thought I could just swish it out with water and be okay ... but it really began to hurt. Hubby had to come home from work and take me to the hospital to have it cleaned out. What a process. Two hours of sitting in the waiting room before they did ANYTHING. Then they put dye into it and took a look to see what they could find. It was FULL of glass! Oh ... and they froze it ... that felt WIERD. You should have seen my eye! LOL ... I was sporting one of my business colours ... BRIGHT ORANGE! hehehe ... too funny. I was orange to my eyebrow and half way down my cheek! Anyhow .. that goes away fairly quickly and they flushed it out and sent me on my way with promises to see them the next day again. That entailed a visit back to the doc and then to the optometrist to insure they had it all out. More flushing ... more glass. Anyhow ... the end result ... it gets tired still ... and has taken to twitching uncontrollably ... *aggravating!* ... but no more glass at this point and no permanent damage that we can tell.
Okay .. enough rambling ... am off to run stamps and try to get some artwork done today ... I bought new shelves for all my inks yesterday and am doing some clean up in the my studio ... hmmmm ... get to work Alanna! LOL
big hugs to all ...

BLOG CANDY WINNERS!!

DID YOU WIN? I had a tough tough time choosing the winner for the Blog Candy this time!! WOW !! Anyhow .. after much thought I would like Dianne Davidson to contact me to have her OH CANADA set shipped out to her! And ... because it was SOOO tough ... I am awarding a second prize of 20% off of this set to Peggy Ford if she would like this set!!! Please girls email me to claim your prizes! For the rest .. thank you for
Big hugs
Alanna

Dreaming with your eyes wide open ... ?

Well .. not much for dreaming for me last night! WOW! Talk about éyes wide open! LOL I did not get to sleep until after midnight last night and awoke to darling hubby Kent sneaking out of the bedroom at about 3:20 this morning because he could not sleep. Well .. that was it for me ... try as I might ... I was not wide awake and wheels turning. Up I got ... and he went back to bed! Shortly after ... son Shane was found prowling round the house! Had to be something in the air as they say! Kent slept til shortly after 5:00 ... while Shane and I got breakfast ready and lunches packed. Took them both to work at the mill at 5:45 and came home to see what I could accomplish today! It will be a busy day for me as I have meetings and appointments all day, along with finishing up some more orders, seeing the accountant, getting info on a 'new to us' car (the motor is done in our Intrepid which is more expensive to fix than to buy another one, hence me driving men to work in the early morning hours!), working on arranging a family reunion for hubby's family, and on and on the list goes! EEK ... and I am EXHAUSTED! Okay ... off for a bit of a nap before the first meeting!!!
Hugs
Alanna

About the Blog Candy!

WOW! you girls are gonna make this tough on me aren't you? LOL You all have such good reasons as to why you should win this, but I am glad I have some time to think on it. Now .. if I were rich I would be giving all of you one but seeing as how that isn't the case .... LOL ... only ONE set will be given for this. I am however giving another (key word being ánother') set away to someone very special who has earned this over and over again!! Diane Armstrong certainly worked hard on the Postcards for the Troops project and because of that I have offered to send her a set of these stamps. I am sure she will put them to good use! Conrats Diane on all of your hard work!!

I would also like to say a big thank you to all who have signed my guestbook and blog notes! It is always so very nice to hear your thoughts on my work. I hope you are all doing well and please stay in touch!
Hugs,
Alanna

Collage ... Princess Style

This is a collage card I did while teaching a class last year and I really love it. Not too often I am this happy with my work .. but I find this one really fulfilling. What do you think?
Hugs
Alanna

Good Evening!

Hey! What a busy busy day on my blog! I am so glad that everyone likes the new stamp set! After posting the Sale today with an offer of an ATC from Mom to go with each order I thought I should share some of her work so you can see ... I am NOT exagerating! Her work is AWESOME! This is a card she created using two of my giraffe stamps. Pretty nice hey? I love it!
Well ... this evening I will be loading up some new stamps to the website. Will get as many as I can up and then load more again as I get time over the weekend.
Hope you are all having a great evening!
big hugs
Alanna

MORE BLOG CANDY!

Well ... I struggled with this tonight ... What should I give for Blog Candy? I thought about a stamp ... from DPD of course ... and then I considered some cardstock packages that I have, but they are very heavy to ship ... so I then decided I would give away a package of a new stamp set I designed recently. When I designed this set I was thinking in terms of supporting our Canadian troups overseas. I will send the lucky recipient this set of stamps! To enter please go to my guestbook and tell me what YOU would do with them! Would you use them for cards? scrap pages? Give me some idea of what you think these would be good for and I will make a decision by Feb 28th to announce WHO will be the lucky winner! You can view this stamp set on my website at this address: www.digitalprincessdesigns.ca. Scroll down on the front page to see it listed at the top of the new products section! BE SURE TO CHECK BACK TO MY BLOG OFTEN TO SEE IF YOU WIN!
Big hugs
Alanna

Card Mapping

This is something I started recently on my yahoo group. People have lots of different names for them ... but they all basically do the same thing. The idea is to give you a starting to point to help inspire you to create! With mine I just want to see what YOUR take is on the outline I have given. Nothing more. If you deter from the original ... that is okay too. At least it gets you CREATING! I know for myself, when I put up a new one each week it gets ME creating! *smile* So ... I have put up week one on the bottom right panel here and will change it weekly. If anyone knows how I can set it up as a folder where I can upload the files continually and leave them there for future use, that would be awesome! I cannot for the life of me figure out how to accomplish that! LOL
Anyhow ... check it out ... and feel free to use it .. but please give credit to Digital Princess Designs for the 'map'.
Big hugs
Alanna

I TRIED IT! ....

.... digital scrapbooking!!! I have been rather intrigued by it and today I could not resist and attempt at it. Okay ... so maybe I am not the greatest and i did use elements I found online at a website called Digital Scrapbook Place. Very kewl ... neat stuff there ... and lots of freebies for those of us who are beginners. The artist is Pamela Clark and the set is called Girly Girl. Thanks so much to Pam for sharing with us!
I am not totally taken with this method of scrapbooking yet. I can foresee some 'issues' with it, at least in my opinion. First of all I LOVE real texture and dimension on all of my work, and although it LOOKS like it has all of that .. it does not. The other is with printing it. This layout is an 8.5 x 11, but I really 12 x 12 pages more. To print them is impossible baring buying a new high end printer, and I am not ready to do that at this point. Even to print the smaller format will not be cheap considering the cost of inks. So ... I have yet to be convinced although I do love anything graphically oriented. As I said ... I TRIED! LOL
hugs for today ...
Alanna

Creative Block ...

You know ... this is something i can usually fight through ... but right now i just seem to be struggling with a complete creative block. I have heard others talk about their "muse" ... hmmmm ... I am not Á- Mused! Okay ... stupid joke! Anyhow ... As much as i wanted to do some creative work in the line of cards and scrapbooking this weekend, so far I have achieved nothing. I know I am not the only person who struggles with this ... so tell me ... how do YOU get past it? Post here to let me know ... any help is appreciated! Do you find that when 'other' things are stressful in your life you create more? or less? For me it seems I create less when I am stressed out. I do have a TON of magazines and will pull them out for inspiration, and I have videos and DVD's ... and sometimes watch them ... but right now it is just not working. I started creating Card Maps as I call them for my yahoo group and I do find that helps somewhat. It challenges me to create something because of course ... if I expect my girls to use it ... I had best do it first right? LOL Okay ... so share with me ... what do YOU do to get past a block?
Hugs
Alanna

Happy Valentine's Day!!!

Hey ... Happy Valentine's Day everyone! I hope that you can spend this day with someone YOU love! I am very fortunate in that I have my darling hubby and my youngest son here for supper tonight. Think I might just go out and buy some steaks and prawns! It is supposed to warm up here bigtime today (going from -18 this morning to +8 this afternoon!). It sure would be nice. Can't imagine doing the steak on the BBQ at -17! LOL

Anyhow ... I am off to run some custom stamp orders and then while they are running I am going to make some Valentine's and Bday cards. I am so far behind on my cards ... kinda like the mechanic with a broken down car! LOL

I will post once I get some done!
Hugs
Alanna

Sometimes the heart sees what is invisible to the eye.
H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

Flying Proud

This is a scrapbook page I created awhile back. I was really pleased with how it turned out and am anxious to get to doing alot more scrapping. The photos were taking on a sunday afternoon cruise up to a place called Miette Hot Springs in Jasper National Park. The park gates are only about ten minutes from here and this is about a forty minute drive. I could not resist taking some shots of our gorgeous Canadian flag flying so high and proud against the Rocky Mountains.

I used my Blossom Alphabet set to create the 'Oh Canada' up the right side, several of my Real Flowers stamps were used to create the floral 'garden' across the bottom on the vellum, and my "Perfect Canadian" stamp on the left hand side. If you can't read it ... it says "I am not perfect, but I am Canadian and that's enough!". *smile*
I also stamped my "Home Defined" on the large photo and it says "Home ~ where the heart belongs".
Hugs
Alanna

Happy Birthday Mom!

Okay ... so I went exploring ... thinking about your birthday today ... and here is what I found ... "Happy Birthday" in several languages! LOL ... so here goes:
Dutch: Hartelijk gefeliciteerd! or Van harte gefeliciteerd met je verjaardag!
French: Bonne Fete!
Japanese: Otanjou-bi Omedetou Gozaimasu!
Okay ... that's just a couple! LOL If you want to explore it further here is the link to the site I found: www.shabbir.com/romance/bday.html
So .. in my exploring I also found another site of interest. As some of you know we lovingly call my mother the "Digital Queen Mom", of course in reference to being the mother of the Digital Princess! LOL So ... I found this interesting site about Queen Elizabeth and celebrating her 80th birthday. It looks quite interesting and so I thought I would share it with all of you ... www.royal.gov.uk
Not sure why .. but my links don't seem to want to work this morning .. anyhow .. addresses are there.
Okay ... off to work I go ... *smile*
Alanna

... and so the day begins ..

Yes ... it does ... already almost 7 a.m. and I have well started my day. 5:20 a.m. ~ up, get the coffee on and breaky for hubby, pack his lunch, get him ready to go to work, boil the kettle for my tea, get dressed and by 6 a.m. out the door to take him to work. Yes ... I do all of that first thing in the morning ... if I want my truck anyhow. The motor in Kent's car went in November so if I feel I might need to go anywhere I have to take him to work.
Now ... the day really begins! I will get stamps packaged for a customer coming over this morning for the new alphabet sets I did up for her, and then finish off some custom stamp orders and ship them all out today. Hmmmm ... what else? I have to run some of my new stamps again ... oh and I have to update the quantities on the website as son Shane and I counted the stock room last night. That will take most of the day just to update the numbers.
I picked up the mail this morning on my way back from taking Kent to the mill and found a package Mom sent with her Recipe Card Swaps in it. TOO KEWL, Mom! Love them love them love them!
Now, speaking of Mom ... today is her birthday!! HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MOM!!! You know ... I have the most awesome Mom in the whole world! I know ... you are thinking I might be a little biased ... and you are likely right ... but that is okay. *smile* She is one of my very best friends in the whole world! I wish I could be there with her today to spoil her. She certainly deserves it! So I hope she has a good day ... and that only good things happen for her today and always!
Well .. on with the day ... must get some work done ...
Hugs to all
Alanna

Some samples of my past works ...

I found this ...

I found this on the "My Heritage" site while exploring this morning. Cup of tea in hand and I thought it was too cute not to share. It made me smile to start my day, and something can make you smile at 5:30 a.m. after only going to sleep at 2:30 a.m. ... it is a GOOD THING! LOL .. good grief ...starting to sound like Martha! LOL

Do they look like ME??

I found this very kewl site online and just had to have some fun with it! LOL Pretty kewl hey? LOL Hey ... I have to do SOMETHING wierd once in awhile! LOL You can check it out yourself at www. my heritage.com .
Hugs
Alanna

Two more recent cards

The main image on the "Peace" card is a stamp I created of my great grandmother! My ancestry on my mother's side of the family is both English and Dutch, and I just love the images I have been able to create using old family photos! I used my Wing Set to add wings to her, and they were stamped onto a background created with alcohol inks. Of course I also used the fly all over word stamps from that set. Mom just informed me that there is an incredible story in regards to this lady about befriending a soldier when she was a young woman. This man looked her up many years later and an article was written in one of the largest Vancouver newspapers about them, and how much it meant to him that she had taken time for him while he was overseas. Once Mom finds that article I will try to update on this. It's kind of an interesting story.

The "JOY" card here is one created with another new stamp I recently designed. I just love her and she stamps so nicely! It was a simple layout done based on a 'card map' I did up for my yahoo group.