Happy Thanksgiving and a Giveaway!

First and foremost, have a wonderful Thanksgiving! With a busy life lately, full of many not-so-wonderful things going on, I find it's been so easy for me to complain and be grouchy. Really, in retrospect, I have so much to be thankful for! There's always the basics that we all list - a good house, cars, plenty of food, a wonderful family, friends...I am indeed very thankful for all those things, but I've been trying to train myself lately to notice and be thankful for all the little things - the things we sometimes take for granted as part of each day.

• The thick carpet of autumn-colored leaves on the ground
• Busy days of work between both my shops
• Wrapping orders in Christmas ribbon
• Sorting, editing and uploading pictures of more stuffed owls (post coming soon!)
• Sipping steaming cups of tea in the evenings
• Little 8 GB flash drives that hold so many pictures...

Which leads to a quick explanation why this is a picture-less post! A few weeks ago, we had a little hard drive "crash". We thought at first I'd lost everything, including five years of photos and documents. Thankfully, I've been able to retrieve everything that's over a year old. So I have most of the photos and documents again, but lost quite a few posts worth of photos I had planned for these next few weeks, including a post of new sewing projects, a cute scrapbook pager covered gift box tutorial, photos from restoring the Remington machine's new twin brother, Macey "Mack", and a photo tutorial on balancing sewing machine tension. This is in part an excuse for the silence on this blog these past few weeks. :)

However, now that I'm up and running again, I'll start over! In particular, I'm planning on sharing a multi-week series through the holiday season on how I'm doing my gift wrapping and decorating frugally! I know there's lots and lots of these posts out there, but I'll be sharing some favorite little things I've been doing for several years, and maybe someone will find them helpful! Stay tuned!

And secondly, if you're a photographer who loves fun, handmade props, I'm hosting a giveaway for a gift card to Tiny Tiptoes Boutique here on Prop Insanity! Do be sure to go check them out and enter the giveaway! We'd love to have you!

What are you thankful for this year?