Winner Winner, Chicken Dinner!

Ever heard that before? Perhaps in the movie "21"? If you've never seen that movie, let me tell you, it's a great movie. I loved it, the way it came back to the beginning in the... oops. I don't want to ruin it for you, if you ever decide to see it. (I'm assuming that you haven't.)  But anyway, let's move on to the real reason for the blog post.

...drum roll please....


The winner to the My Memories Giveaway!!

Congratulations commenter #4! (Who also goes by the name of Grace.) You've won! I'll be emailing you shortly with the code so you can download this software for free!! Here is Mr. Number Generator after he decided the winner to the giveaway. He looks tired. (And kind of surprised.) :) I think he is surprised at the result, and is tired after having to go through his vast database to find one number...

Happy giveaway-entering and thanks for taking to the time to comment on my blog! :)

xo, Charlotte

A Fishy Adventure

I've been craving seafood chowder. (No, I'm not pregnant.) :D Actually, I've been craving it ever since I first tried it at our local restaurant, the Pier. Even though I go about once a month, I still crave it, but at $7 a bowl it's kind of expensive. (I could buy a whole yard of fabric for that! Or if I'm in the Red Tag section at JoAnn's, I could get two yards!)

So, while reading one of The Girl Who Ate Everything's blog posts, she had said that she had emailed the owner of a restaurant asking for the recipe, and he gave it to her. It's brilliant! Geez, why didn't I ever think of that?? So, I emailed the owner, and she said that I could come over any time and she'd make a copy!! I was so excited.

I'm pretty sure that the recipe isn't the true recipe that the restaurant uses, because last time I was eating there, the waiter said that only one cook new the real recipe. I guess he adds some special ingredient? Anyways, I set off (with my dad) to go get the recipe and its ingredients.

We decided to go to the closer, yet more expensive grocery store instead of Meijer. We ended up getting the supplies for about $40. The recipe makes about 1 and a half gallons. If I would have been paying attention when I was buying the seafood, I wouldn't have bought the shrimp at $5 a can. I would have gotten the frozen, bagged shimp.... And if we had gone to Meijer, we probably could have saved about $10, but as it is, we figured out that a homemade bowl of chowder cost about $3. Pretty good, right?

It tasted almost the same as the Pier's style, though it was better with a little salt. I'm not sure if I'm legally allowed to post the recipe, but if you really want it, you can email me. Not sure why I wrote that in the smaller font, it only draws people's eyes to it... Oh well. Anyway, happy blogging!

xo, Charlotte

My First Giveaway!! (MyMemories)

Wow, I am so excited to be having my first giveaway!!!

I used to do scrapbooking by hand. I'd haul out all the paper, the pictures, the double-sided tape and about 1 hour later, I'd have a scrapbook page, a huge pile of picture scraps, and a headache. 

Welcome My Memories Suite, Goodbye headache.

This nifty little program is very easy to use! I just jumped right in and figured out (through trial-and-very-little-error) just how easy digital scrapbooking can be!

Here's some pages I made with the program!

You just choose the pictures and it puts them in the slots for you. (I also did a little editing and made shadows on all of my pictures)

I also wanted to try out a calendar, so I downloaded a free calendar template from MyMemories.com. It was so easy! It downloaded in about 15 seconds, and in about 5 minutes, my calendar was made!

Sounds fun, right?

Well, MyMemories was very nice and gave me one to try, and one for one of you lucky blog-readers!!

To enter:

(do as many or as few as you like)

• Comment saying what you would use this program for if you won.
• Follow the MyMemories blog at: http://blog.mymemories.com/ and comment that you did
• Follow MyMemories on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/#!/mymemoriessuite and comment
• Like MyMemories on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/mymemoriessuite and comment back

Bonus Entry:

Visit MyMemories.com and find what your favorite pack or layout would be and then comment back here saying which one.

That's 5 chances to win! Please don't be a no-reply blogger! I want to be able to send you your prize if you win!

But, if you have terrible luck with giveaways, and you don't win, you can always buy it at MyMemories.com.

But don't forget to use the special promotional code that they gave me: STMMMS11347.

This little code with give you a $10 discount off the purchase of the My Memories Suite Scrapbook software and a $10 coupon for the MyMemories.com store - $20 value!

So, good luck and thanks for stopping by!!

This giveaway will close in one week two weeks.

(That would be September 8th 15th, 2011 at 10:00PM (EST))

xo, Charlotte

organizing...yet again Part 2

ok, yea, i know. it's been awhile. but I finally got enough motivation to post these pictures of my washed, ironed, folded, and color- coded fabric.... now that i'm finally am doing it, i'm realizing that it's not as big of a chore as i'm making it out to be. :)

The flowers were really pretty at this time, so I did an outside photo shoot to see the colors better, and to capture the flowers in bloom. :)

What I figured out after going through all my fabric:

• too many cool colors (green, blue, purple)
• too few warm colors (red, orange, yellow)
• just enough neutral (brown, tan, black, and white)

And this is what resulted from all of this oraganizing:

A great big bowl of thread and unusable scraps. Unless there's something that you can do with them (if there is please tell me) other than throwing them away, that would be nice, but I'm feeling that these poor guys are going into the garbage... :)

xo, Charlotte