Of course you can always visit my SPECIALS page to view current promotions as well as visit my Stampin’ Up! website, so in keeping you up to date, take a look at the Retiring Accessories Promotion.

Discounted Retiring Accessories Promotion

Dates: July 21-August 10 (or while supplies last)

Promotion Details:  Save 25% off the following retiring accessories:

Item #	Pg. #	Description	Regular Price	25% Off Price
109117	167	Pocket Notes assortment Sold Out	$9.95	$7.46
110479	168	Jersey Shore Designer Series paper	$9.95	$7.46
110699	168	East Coast Prep Designer Series paper Sold Out	$9.95	$7.46
109159	169	Flowers For You  Designer Series paper	$9.95	$7.46
110273	169	Spring Fling Designer Series paper Sold Out	$9.95	$7.46
110748	170	Notebook Designer Series paper	$9.95	$7.46
109153	170	Porcelain Prints Designer Series paper Sold Out	$9.95	$7.46
110751	171	Azure Designer Series paper	$9.95	$7.46
109164	171	River Rock Prints Designer Series paper	$9.95	$7.46
109175	171	Almost Amethyst Prints Designer Series paper Sold Out	$9.95	$7.46
109168	171	Groovy Guava Prints Designer Series paper Sold Out	$9.95	$7.46
109169	171	Close to Cocoa Prints Designer Series paper Sold Out	$9.95	$7.46
110284	182	Eastern Elegance Rub-Ons	$10.95	$8.21
110285	182	Urban West Rub-Ons	$10.95	$8.21
110281	182	Cherished Memories Rub-Ons Sold Out	$10.95	$8.21
109185	190	Jersey Ribbon Originals	$12.95	$9.71
109187	190	District Ribbon Originals	$12.95	$9.71
109189	190	Beachfront Ribbon Originals	$12.95	$9.71
110716	191	Wild Wasabi striped grosgrain ribbon	$7.95	$5.96
109062	191	River Rock double-stitched grosgrain ribbon	$8.95	$6.71

You can order any of these items until August 10, but when the new catalog arrives on August 11, they will be gone.  In fact, it’s only until supplies last.  So pick up the phone and call me or send me your order via email if you’d like any of these Designer Papers or Ribbons.

Technorati Tags: accessories, promotions, Retiring Accessories

Like many of you, I’m obsessed with papercrafts, and I spend almost all of my free time involved in it in some capacity or another.  I do for my own personal pleasure, and this year, I’ve chosen to turn a passionate hobby of mine into a business.   It’s always a goal of mine to add new skills and techniques to my repetoir, but my experiences allow me to share that knowledge with my Stampin’ Up! customers.  I ALWAYS learn something new from other people, and then I pass it on! 

Because of the internet, there is just an amazing amount of information and resources available for those that have the time to find it or use it.  I have too many resources for scrapbooking and cardmaking to mention.  Dare I try to mention even a few?  I don’t do this to brag, but I always want to share with you information I’ve learned, and will continue to pass on through my blog, or at my stamp-a-stack and scrapbook classes, or pretty much anywhere I meet a fellow stamper or scrapbooker.

I subscribe to about five or six monthly magazines regarding the Paper Crafts Industry.  I also attend several conventions per year to take classes at them (as well as shop).  I’ll be sharing my first experience at the Stampin’ Up! Convention in Utah, in just a couple of weeks.  I can’t wait to go and tell you about that, so stay tuned for that soon.  I also browse the Split Coast Stampers Gallery.  I’m a member of SUDSOL and other organizations for this art and paper crafts industry.  I watch tutorials and videos not only created by other fellow Stampin’ Up! demonstrators, but places like TV weekly, or the Craft Lounge.  I subscribe to numerous blogs, yahoo groups, and newsfeeds which are all about scrapbooking, rubberstamping, and crafts in general, like Craft Critique, Scor-Pal, CHA, etc. 

Today. I’ll share with you one of my newsletters, called Page Maps, which just sent out their July 2008 newsletter.  Page Maps offer a collection of sketches for album pages of different sizes, as well as interesting shapes and dimensions, and traditional card making .  Think of it as a template, for when you get stuck in a rut, or simply want to save time, which is exactly why I love them.  With all of these resources, why reinvent the wheel if you don’t have to?  So PageMaps are more of a blank canvas, with gives the design layout, and you take it from there, as opposed to seeing a finished product, and trying to match colors and embellishments to somehow adapt the original artist’s work to what you have in available product.  I do this too, but for some people, it could be easier to look at a blank sketch and run with it.  For myself, I find this more true of scrapbooking sketches for 12×12 pages.  I absolutely LOVE to use Becky Higgin’s (Creating Keepsakes) sketches, and since I met her years ago, I now keep my own sketch book handy.  When my magazines come every month, I draw my favorites as a sketch, without getting cluttered with all the descriptive details and supply lists, and use them frequently.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy Page Maps, and that they help you out.  The newsletter is sent out in email form, and the page maps themselves are in PDF format for Adobe, which you can download/save to your computer. 

Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: Page Maps, templates

Short post today, but wanted to notify you readers, that my Stampin’ Up! website is temporarily disabled by the company, therefore, some of the links and tabs on the blog site will not work until the problem is fixed.

Remember my post about my PayPal escapades?  Well, not to bore you with the gory details, but they still have not been resolved, and my business account which was robbed, is still in a large deficit.  Today, my Stamin’ Up! website was disabled because the company couldn’t receive their monthly payment.     So, since this is a weekend and neither the bank nor the SU company can effect any positive changes, this will be fixed Monday.  Thanks for your patience.

Remember when I said I wanted to keep this website all business?  Well, I’m sorry, but I lied.  I have to post and vent today.  Today, I am a victim.  And I hate playing the part of the victim (there are too many people doing this on a regular basis as far as I’m concerned).  Well, today for real, I am a victim.   I returned from my vacation; remember the one without internet connectivity?  Well apparently, others decided to connect for me and use my paypal account to pay for their transactions.  Can you believe it?  Seven transactions, totalling $2188, were all processed fraudulently.  Coincedently, they all occurred while I was on vacation and all on the same day, July 6th.  Today is July 8th, and I found them in "pending" state with my Bank of America business checking account.  What is even more amazing, or suspicious, is that I only recently added my business account as a funding source to my paypal account, which I’ve had for over 4 years now.  I had been doing quite a lot of spending from my business for my business during the week prior, so I attached this account to my paypal account. 

Anyway, I immediately called my bank to stop the transactions before they were processed and the monies transferred to the thieves.  No deal, the bank doesn’t care about that for now …. all because they’re in pending state.  They won’t stop them, or remove them, even if you report them as fraudulent.  They request you to file a dispute, and document all of the questionable transactions, and regurgitate all of the same information you already provided to them via the telephone, onto your company letterhead and fax it to their corporate returns department, where it will sit for weeks, while they figure it out.

Paypal says that if you file a dispute, they will also investigate, but they investigate by contacting the people on the receiving end …. yah, the "email" addresses receiving the funds.  They have to "ask" the receiving email addresses if they received teh money fraudulently, and hope they’ll return it.  That’s their dispute process.  That’s what it’s all about….email addresses.  Somehow, someone has to retrieve your id and password, and redirect their email address to your account, and whalah!  they instantly have $2188 in funds without working like the rest of us.  Ok, can’t really say that for real, right now, but I claim that I have a job, and that at my place of work, it’s pro-bono.  I digress.

So, I’m a sitting duck.  I can’t use the funds I had in my account prior to my vacation, because they are gone, along with lots more money I didn’t have at all.  It isn’t bad enough the bank lets you overdraw your account but they let someone else do it too!    and then they charged me $25 for each overdrawn transaction to boot.

So be careful!  Change your passwords regularly, and share them with nobody.  (I have never shared my account information with anyone besides financial institutions or creditors of some kind.)  Make them harder to crack/hack with special characters and don’t link your checking accounts or credit cards to them.  I guess it’s safer to only transfer money from your account or debit card just before you purchase something, and transfer exactly the same amount into your paypal balance, and then make your purchase. 

Technorati Tags: personal