Happy Fifth Birthday!

Charly's birthday party was on the 28th and it went really well. 3 boys came, 2 from church and one from school. One of the church kids and the one from school didn't get along well at times, but kept away from each other for the most part. At one point the school kid punched the church kid because he took Charly's toy. Starting fights already, I know! Other than that, it was a nice party. The cake was good, the company was good, and the party was about 2 hours. I made a slideshow so you can see most of the pics. I let the kids run around with Charly's camera, and they took some photos, but Nate has the card for that camera with him and he's not here at the moment. So I will get those pics up soon. :) Here's the slideshow:



I've entered a design contest at Inspiration Lane. The winner gets to sell in their store, which is a pretty popular store. We will have to complete 4 challenges, and along the way we'll be given tips and tricks to help us grow in our craft. I thought my challenge one entry was really good, but of course there were things for me to work on, namely staying within the assigned color palette. To my eye I did that, so now I have to figure out why what the contest judge saw doesn't match what I'm seeing. In case you're curious, here's my kit: Springtime, Kiddo!



I made a Photoshop brush that makes it look like I've sponge painted on the paper. So I let Charly make her own ladybug :)



She chose the colors and colored it in herself, though I did select the image and make sure she couldn't color too far outside the lines.

The challenge was due by 11:59 pm this past Saturday, and I wasn't able to really start working on it until Friday. Then no matter what I was doing my computer would freeze. I couldn't do anything in Photoshop, I couldn't do anything online, I couldn't even edit an Excel spreadsheet. Praise the Lord we still had our tax money in our account so that I could go to Best Buy and pick up a new computer. We're so blessed! You can find it HERE if you're interested. So then I got PS loaded onto it and was able to make the kit Saturday. Even though I was trying to learn a new operating system, and set up, and keyboard and all that, lol. This is my first Vista computer, and I hate to admit it, but so far I don't mind Vista. It's not so bad. :) And so far the computer has been able to handle all that I've thrown at it, which is awesome!! But we'll see how long that lasts. *-)

So that's about it for now. I'll update more later. After this post, I will be updating the Project 365 blog with pics from the 2nd half of Feb and the beginning of March. Yay!

-S