As many of you know, gardening is a passion around here . . .
and everytime I have an opportunity to go to a Smith Hawkin store, it’s a very big treat.

On a recent trip to Scottsdale, I found this wonderful garden tote bag. and since I don’t tote much in my garden, I instantly thought of art supplies. This canvas bag is so strong and so well made that it easily holds a ton of stuff in eight big pockets.
This garden tote is not only very strong, it’s large enough for sketch pads and long paint brushes.
The roomy interior is big enough to hold magazines, books, sketchpads, tins of pencils and crayons, water bottles, paints and any other things you can imagine taking along. It has the feel of real quality construction and doesn’t seem to be strained no matter how much you load into it - it can carry more than I can lift.
Best of all, this tote sells for only $29.99 and is available online at (smithhawken.com) in case you don’t have one of their stores near you.

It also comes in orange and khaki if you want bright.

OK, ok, I admit it.

In the interest of more being better, I actually bought two!
I find it interesting that my biggest ideas always come to me in parts - puzzling parts! They float around in the old brain pan until all of a sudden (usually in the shower) the “glue” shows up that joins them together - into something so exciting it causes me to shampoo way too many times as I ponder it.

Over the past six months, three puzzle pieces have been floating around that did not even seem related at first:

1. I realized that for all the new and exciting paints out there for use with stamps, there were very few designs that were big enough or “open” enough to be good images for painting. So while designing a line of such paintable images for Cre8it, I struggled with sizing issues. How big should they be? Big enough for the front of a card? That would take a lot of rubber “real estate” and require several master plates, and what if the sizes weren’t right? Wouldn't it be a good idea to have stamp images available as computer files - so you could print them whatever size you needed them to be?

2. After receiving lots of email about my Digital Diva articles, I innocently asked in one of the newsletters whether anyone would be interested in a PhotoShop CD that would be written especially for paper and multi-media artists. I got buried by an avalanche of positive responses. I was amazed by enthusiasm out there for using the computer as an art tool, and started work on a CD.

3. One of my furkids became very ill with a life threatening disease which required feeding every two hours around the clock as well as insulin shots and vitamins and medications, and constant, loving vigilance. If he was to have quality of life, those activities had to become my number one priority.

My time became so rationed that I fell far behind on all of my projects, and was working on them in a sort of sleep-deprived “fuzzy” state at best.

The funny thing is that the delays actually allowed my half-baked ideas to bake.

So what resulted from all of this?