Christmas in July

So after a really awful, horrible, no good day at work today with people who just were not rational (I swear there must be a full moon lurking out there because all the lunatics called me today), I came home to find that a one-hour challenge was starting on Creating Keepsakes blog. Well, actually had started about 10 minutes before, but what the heck. The challenge was to make two Christmas cards using twine (don't have), buttons or stitching on each. Well so I knew I didn't have much to work with considering I'm a really crappy seamstress. However, I love one hour challenges, but I had a dilemma. I really had a craving for french bread, which required trip to the store. So one hour challenge or french bread? Hmmm....

So my dear, sweet husband who's very worried about my stress level hears me say that I have this craving for french bread and took off for the grocery store. He came home with flowers for me, red meat for him, and the freshest french bread I think I've had in years. Yes, a few dollar trip to the store was really, really expensive (Matt + meat counter = budget disaster), but oh so worth it.

In the meantime, I fought with the sewing machine requiring that I re-do the major part of one card, dug through my embellishments to find a star and some gift buttons, whipped together two (well, really two and three-quarters) cards in the one hour and uploaded them right at the buzzer.

What's really amazing about the whole thing is that it never would have happened if I hadn't spent the whole weekend (well the whole weekend minus raspberry picking on Saturday and a Harry Potter matinee on Sunday) to clean and re-organize my craft room. So when I started the challenge, I had a clean slate to work with, knew what I had and right where it would be. For instance, the lovely striped Christmas paper was in my scraps storage container in the "multi" drawer (the storage unit right under the desk in the bottom left corner of the picture below) and was able to use scraps for every single portion of these two cards. Of course, in the one hour I made a huge mess of my room again. Why is it that I can't craft neatly? But what I love is that my whole room went back together in less than 10 minutes. Wow, I am just loving the new organization. Oh, by the way Dad, your lottery ticket in sticking up in my carousel just behind Matt's picture. I hope it's the big winner!