Creative Homemaker

Today's batch was fairly easy to clean up. I had them in the fridge over night so mold would not grow. The first two garbage bags went much faster, but then they were mostly pictures in frames, with their own set of problems. These pictures were stacked closely together, so there were lots of pictures in a smaller space. A few things I learned that I thought would be of interest to you and good info to pass on to our customers. Please take your photos out of the developer's bags/envelopes. They almost always have dye in the paper used to make the envelope. When they get wet, the dye will run and stain the top picture. Fortunately, for Mrs. "C", most of these were double prints, so the duplicate was somewhere in the stack. In the stack I did today, I only found one CD, and while it did work and the pictures loaded ok on my computer, there was only one CD. I was hoping I would find more CDs when I started today, making my task go a bit more quickly. There ar...

I was prepared for the worst. I had water and gloves and tools to scrape the mud, garbage bags in which to put the broken picture frames, tables to lay out the photos. But I wasn't prepared for what I saw when I opened the first bag. I'm ahead of myself-- I was moved to volunteer with the cleanup, and came in contact with Kathryn at Daring Young Mom she referred me to a cleanup volunteer who had the photos. She came with 4 bags and 2 boxes, the bags were mostly pictures in frames, old 70's high school pictures, a black and white or two, and lots of snapshots. I was amazed to see that under an inch of gooey mud, they weren't in too bad of shape. Water really isn't an enemy to a picture, they are developed in liquids, and as long as they don't dry out in this condition, they can be cleaned and made right again. I started in on the first pile. I had glimpsed a black and white in the bag and thought I ought to start on the oldest ones first. They seemed to be the m...

Today after scrapbooking with the ladies at Faith, I came home and washed the jars and labeled them. I usually use a sharpy, but since I had so many to do, I decided to use my computer. I had some Avery labels and downloaded a template for printing them. How easy!! I love my computer! I had to trim them a bit, but made quick work of that with my Creative Memories Personal Trimmer. (You can get your own CM supplies by visiting my website and shopping online.) I labeled them on the lids only so when they are used I can just throw them away and not have to scrape labels off the jars. I did that once, what a pain. I had a successful scrapbooking Crop this morning, sold over $400, nearly half of that was from inventory. So that is money in my pocket, the other is for one new customer who is excited about the new Vintage Power Pallet. It is so cool, all the papers and stickers are coordinated, and very stylish. It makes for an easy album project. I'd like to be able to keep a ru...