Thirty Minute Thank Yous

Edit: For my pocket Christmas cards, I simply folded a half sheet of cardstock in half, trimmed a little off the top of one side and sewed around 3 sides to make a pocket. I trimmed an insert to fit inside and added a computer generated holiday sentiment and a small family photo. Embellishments are from Papertrey Ink.

Edit: Alicia asked if I would recommend using the Canon Selphy home printer to print out all my photos for scrapbooking. Let me first say that I love the quality of the photos and have gotten lots of questions about how did I get 4 to a page, and that the quality looks great. For me personally, the answer is no to printing out all the photos though. It really depends on how you scrapbook. If you only scrapbook 1 photo to a page, maybe this would be for you. But when I scrapbook, I usually do (2) 12" x 12" layouts and have 5-8 photos for each layout. And I take a LOT of photos. So I'm going to save my biggest print jobs for Shutterfly or my local photo shop. I definitely have been using my Selfy for my Daily December pages and will continue to use it for mini albums, etc. I love, love, love it and highly recommend it. And the folk at Canon are THE BEST for customer service.....they are in the USA, I can understand them and they are sooo helpful!

Hi everyone, what's on your list today? I was chatting with some friends about how the countdown is on. One week til Christmas and I want to enjoy the Christmas break with my family. I want to have everything wrapped up and ready to go so that I can enjoy the true meaning of Christmas and just *be*. Nothing else but reading a good book, playing games and drinking hot cocoa, watching movies, etc. The stuff that childhoods are made of.

But to accomplish that goal, I've had to keep busy to get everything checked off my list. I issued myself and my friends, and now you, the Thirty Minute Challenge. Make your list, keep it handy, and allow yourself 20-30 minutes tops to work on one selected task. This helps you to not spend all day piddling around on the computer, etc.

Yesterday I took the time to make one last batch of cookies for holiday trays. While I had the timer set for 35 minutes, I printed off my family Christmas photo for this year and addressed all the envelopes. I got them all done by the time the buzzer went off on the stove. If you recall, I had all of my Christmas cards finished back in the fall when Nichole issued the design team a challenge. Thank goodness I took the time to make those 25 cards back when I had time!


I tweaked my card design but here's the simplified version of my Christmas cards this year. I cannot stress enough how much I looooove my Canon Selphy printer. It was an early Christmas gift and it's probably one of the best gifts/tools I've gotten. I didn't have time to get online and finish up my photos and I didn't want to stand in line at Wal Mart. So I just put 4 photos to a page and printed them off at home. Easy peasy!
Here's another 30 minute task I did...little Christmas thank yous for the girls to write out. Yes, we DO still write thank yous. I insist. No, a phone call won't do. I grabbed some precut SU! scallop notecards because I wanted quick and easy. I cut some K and Company patterned paper to put on the front of the cards and used scraps to put strips on the small envelopes.

I used Just Rite's thank you center and border from the Designer Borders and Centers set. I stamped the images with Java Versamagic ink, let them dry a little bit and then punched them out with a SU! scallop punch. Again, easy peasy and quick! I edged all the scallops on the sentiment part and cards with white ink. I grabbed some velvet ribbon from my May Arts collection (available from Cindy at Star Lit Studio) and glued it on, then added a few staples to secure the edges.

I got seven little thank you notes done in that 30 minute time frame and even had time to put away my supplies. Thank you notes, CHECK!! Now I'm going to move on to some laundry and picking up the house. You can do it girls, these 30 minutes tasks make a world of difference!