I've started using My Plate at Live Strong to track my eating and I LOVE it. It makes it so easy to keep track of everything, especially since there's an app for it so I can use my iPod to record what I eat when I'm not at my computer. :)
Surprise Sunday: Tic-Tac-Toe Love
While I was planning my freebies I completely forgot to schedule in this cute little tic-tac-toe stamp before Valentine’s Day! So I’m sneaking it in now. It would be totally cute on a card, wouldn’t it?
Click the image to download!
~ Ellie
Freebie Friday: A Great Pear!
Hey guys! Wow, I can’t believe it’s Friday already. This week really flew by for me! My kids are home from school today since they only have a four-day school week, so we are going to do some chores this morning and then get out and have some fun. But before we do, I have a freebie for you. I’ve included both the plain doodle and the colored one in the download. Just click the image to get it!
Thanks for stopping by! Have an awesome weekend!
Weight Loss Wednesday: What’s Your Most Challenging Meal?
I’m really curious to know about everyone else – what is the hardest meal for you? For me, it used to be dinner. I was a serious meal skipper and almost never ate breakfast and often would forget about lunch so by the time dinner rolled around I would be SO HUNGRY and then I would just consume everything in sight. Then I would just keep snacking until bedtime. Awful, I know. Back in January I started forcing myself to eat breakfast, simple stuff, usually a bowl of oatmeal and a scrambled egg or a bowl of oatmeal with a scoop of vanilla protein powder. I’m VERY lazy about eating in the morning, but at least now I get it done. Eating breakfast always leads me to eat lunch, but I keep it pretty light since my hunger doesn’t truly kick in until late afternoon, so I have a half of a turkey sandwich or a bowl of soup. Then I have dinner at my mom and dad’s house, which is good for me in several ways… 1. my mom usually cooks healthy and 2. I know my dad will notice if I overeat. LOL He doesn’t nag, he doesn’t even SAY anything, but I KNOW he’ll notice and that keeps me on track. (I am notorious for trying to justify that second helping and it helps to know that I’ll be held accountable for it!)
So, how has all of that worked out for me? Well, I lost 8 pounds in January, so I think that eating breakfast and lunch is helping a lot! I am disappointed that I didn’t lose more, but I didn’t do so wonderfully with exercising last month, so I can only blame myself for that. I’m doing better this month!
I wanted to share some of my favorite meals in case anyone out there needs some ideas. I sure hope you’ll leave me a comment and let me know what some of your favorite healthy meals are, too! (Especially if they’re cheap and easy, as well!) I tend to eat a lot of the same things over and over just because it’s easier for me (and spending less on groceries helps, too).
I must say that I wouldn’t have lost any weight at all in January if it weren’t for popcorn. In between meals and late at night, when I ALWAYS get snacky, I pop some popcorn and snack on that. I know that I should eat air-popped popcorn, but I just can’t. It’s flavorless and boring and I feel like I’m eating styrofoam peanuts. And it’s not like I can add butter, either! lol So I buy Smart Pop and use Kernel Seasons on it. Have you tried Kernel Seasons??? The first time I tried them was at a movie theater and I totally fell in love with them. These are my two favorite flavors at the moment:
My husband really likes the chili lime and my kids love the kettle corn and white cheddar. Although, maybe if I buy some of this I can resort to air-popped popcorn:
It says it has zero fat and zero calories. Hmm… I am intrigued.
I’d love to hear about your snacking favorites, too!
Tutorial: Simple Doodle Coloring
Just a quick FYI: It’s fast and it’s easy, but this method won’t work for more complex doodles. It helps if you have a lot of space between the areas that need to be colored. In this tutorial I’m using the Freebie Friday doodle from February 3rd. If you don’t have the doodle, you can download it HERE. Or feel free to use your own.
I am using Photoshop CS5, but I’m pretty sure it will work in other versions of Photoshop and PSE. I’m not sure about PSP. If you use PSP and decide to give this a try, please let me know how it works out for you!
LEVEL: Beginner!
Step 1. Open up your doodle and either duplicate it or drag it onto a new canvas, then close the original.
Step 2. Add a new layer (Ctrl+Shift+N) under your doodle layer. This is where we’re going to add the color.
Step 3. Select your brush tool (B) and choose a round brush. I’m using a 150px round brush.
Step 4. Choose a color and start painting on your color layer. Change colors as needed. See how I’m going outside the lines? That’s okay! As long as it doesn’t go into another color’s area, it’s fine. Change your brush size as needed. I used a 70px brush for the leaves.
Step 5. Click on your doodle layer to make it active. Now select your magic wand tool (W) and make sure that “contiguous” is checked. This will make sure that all of your empty areas won’t be selected, just the part outside the doodle itself. Now click anywhere on your canvas that is outside of the doodle. You should have a marquee (marching ants) around the doodle and the edge of the canvas. (I don’t have an image of this because for some reason every time I try to do a screen capture my marquee disappears!)
Step 6. Click on your color layer to make it active, then hit the delete key. Then go to Select > Deselect (or Ctrl+D) to get rid of the marquee. You image should now look something like this:
You could leave it like that, but I’m going to add another step…
Step 7. Double click your color layer to bring up the layer styles (fx) window. I added the following inner shadow settings to mine:
And now it looks like this:
It’s a subtle difference, but I think it gives it a little extra something.
Step 8. Now just delete your background layer (if you have one – I like working with a white background so I can see better), merge your color and doodle layers (right click > merge visible), then save it as a png and you’re all done!
Here’s my final image (I added a drop shadow before I saved for the preview).
Be sure to check out my original tutorial for coloring doodles HERE, too!
Freebie Friday!
I have a little doodle for you today and it’s Valentine-y. Valentine-ish? Anyway, it has hearts! It is personal use only, please! I may make CU versions in the future, but they will be layered and under the name That Girl.
Now that we have that out of the way, just click to download!
Have a happy weekend!
Weight Loss Wednesday: The Beginning
Since I’m going to be posting about my weight loss journey occasionally, I thought it might be a good idea to start from the beginning. I was pretty much a normal sized kid until somewhere around the fourth grade. I don’t have a lot of photos from my childhood (yet – my mom is scanning them, but she’s still working on the early years right now), but there are a couple. Here’s one from when I was about 8. Pretty much normal.
(Isn’t my mom pretty???)
Here’s where I started to put on a little weight, but still not too bad. I was 11:
I had a really, really awesome home life and would never even think to blame my weight problems on my parents or the way I was raised. However, my childhood was pretty unhappy outside of the home. I LOVED school until I was about 10. Coincidentally, that’s when I started to put on weight. I grew up in Hawaii, in a neighborhood where the vast majority of people were Chinese and Filipino. I loved my Asian friends, but they were all SO MUCH smaller than me. One word you could not use to describe me was small! I got teased a lot about my size (and my color, being one of the only white kids in the entire school, but that’s a different post altogether) and was called a lot of really mean things. Looking back on it all now I realize I wasn’t actually as huge as I thought I was, but in my mind I was enormous! One day during PE in the sixth grade we had to be weighed and measured. All three classes were in the gym and they did us one by one, calling out the numbers to be recorded. When it was my turn the PE teacher yelled out, “Five-foot-seven, 164 pounds!” I swear, the entire gym burst out laughing. That has stuck with me throughout the years and I have never quite been able to shake the humiliation of the moment. My best friend was 4’11” and weighed 90 lbs, so you can imagine what we looked like together. No one in the entire school weighed as much as I did, but I never stopped to think that no one in the entire school was as tall as me either. I DREAMED of being 5 feet tall and under a hundred pounds!!!
That was the point where I decided something had to be done and I embarked on what would be the first of MANY fad diets. Through my teen years I fluctuated between 150 and 180 lbs. My height topped off around 5’11” so my weight was almost normal for most of those years, but my mind was so messed up when it came to my weight that I couldn’t see that. All I could see was that I was so much heavier than all of my friends and therefore I was fat and ugly.
When I started college I was 170 lbs, but by the end of my freshman year I had gained 30 more. I went up and down through my 20’s and after I met my husband (Chris) I put on even more weight. Chris was the first person outside of my family who I really and truly felt accepted me the way I was. He has NEVER cared what I weighed and has always told me that I was beautiful no matter what. So I got lazy. And I ate. And I got even heavier. But I was stilled loved… except by me.
I won’t discuss numbers anymore, since they got so high that I can’t think about it without shuddering, but after I had my twins in 2006 I was at my highest weight so far and I was miserable! But you know what having a baby is like, right? And having twins was harder than I had expected. I was tired all the time, a complete zombie until they were about 9 months old. When they were about a year old I started trying to lose weight again. I’d lose 5 pounds, gain 10 pounds. Lose 10 pounds, gain 15 pounds, and I was getting unhealthier and unhealthier by the day! I don’t have any pictures of myself during this time (except that one above from 2007) because I wouldn’t let anyone take my picture, I was just too embarrassed!
Here I am last year, at my absolute heaviest.
I cannot look at that picture without wanting to cry. That was the picture that caused me to break, to really take a look at my life and try to make changes. Since then (Nov 2011) I’ve lost 18 pounds, which isn’t much considering what I need to lose, but the holidays really slowed my losses down. January got me back on track and my goal is to back at 170 pounds by June 2013. It’s a long time, but the time is going to pass one way or another, I may as well put it to good use! lol
So now I’m basically following Bill Phillip’s Eating-for-Life and it’s going good. I feel a lot more balanced than I have in a long time and am finally starting to get some energy back. I’ve been walking on the treadmill for exercise and want to add some weight training soon. Chris has been supportive, as always, but it’s been my parents who have really helped me along with this. My dad is a health nut (and will probably outlive me by decades), and he’s been great about checking in with me every week, letting me talk about my progress and my failures. My mom has been awesome, too! My husband goes to school in the evenings, so the boys and I always go to my parents’ for dinner and my mom is just amazing about cooking healthy and making sure there are appropriate things for me to eat. I really feel like I can’t fail this time!
I’m hoping that in a few months I’ll be able to take some comparison pictures to post here to help motivate me, but for now I have this stuck on my bathroom mirror and I read it every morning before I start the day:
I’m looking forward to sharing my progress with you and I hope that you’ll share your thoughts with me, too – on this and anything else!
Blog Changes For 2012
It feels like ages since I last posted and I guess it HAS been a month! It’s not that I don’t want to post; I do! I sit here at my computer several times a week, trying to write, but not being able to think of anything to say. Most of the problem is that I’m used to this being a business blog, but since I’m no longer selling scrapbook kits I don’t really have anything to say about that. Plus, I am a very private person and it’s hard for me to share any part of my “real” life. I WANT to, but any time I write anything about myself I think, Well, who would want to know about that? lol What do you blog about on your own blog? Is it hard for you to post, or does sharing things just come naturally for you?
I finally decided that I need to just make this a personal blog and talk about the things that interest me (and hope that they interest a few other people as well). I still plan on having the occasional freebie, because I really do love to design but don’t want to have to bother with selling anywhere besides Sugar Hill Co. I’m lazy like that. lol So I wrote out a schedule and am planning on blogging at least four times a week. I want to have a freebie day and it will probably mostly be personal use doodles, just because I’m kind of into card making right now and love doodles and stamps. I think I’ll also do a scrap day where I post a layout or feature a kit I love. Of course I’ll have to have a day to talk about weight loss, since that’s what my life seems to revolve around these days. And maybe a random photo day, just to show what’s going on around here?
Well, it’s a start, right?
Win A Font {Closed}
Thanks to all who left a comment! I’ve sent both fonts to all of you, so check your email!
Happy New Year!
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I’ve just released a couple of new fonts over at Sugar Hill Co and have decided to do a giveaway. If you want one of them leave me a comment below letting me know which one and I’ll choose a couple of winners on New Year’s Day.
Hope you’re having a great week!
Another Year Gone
I can’t believe Christmas has come and gone already. I say this to myself every year, but it’s so true. I LOVE the holidays, but there’s always so much to do that by the time they have come and gone I’m always left thinking that I wish I could have slowed down and enjoyed them more. I did have a wonderful time with my family, though, and I hope you did, too! I haven’t scrapped any photos yet, but I did put together a little collage of photos from Christmas morning on Picnik.
We had to finally wake the boys up at 10am to open presents, if you can believe it. Granted, Luke wasn’t feeling well, he’d had a fever the day before and was still not quite himself. They eventually rolled out of bed and opened presents, but afterward Luke decided he’d rather play with my iPod than any of his toys and Adam took some of his new cars and hid away to play. One of our family gifts was Just Dance 3 for the Wii and Chris and I spent 2 hours playing that morning. It was so fun, I don’t think I’d ever laughed so hard as I did when he danced to Britney Spears’ Baby One More Time! I wish I had gotten that on video. lol We’ve been playing every day since and can I just mention what a workout that game is?! Now I’m hoping to get Wii Fit Plus for my birthday. (Anyone have that? How do you like it?)
So now I’m thinking about the new year and changes that are coming and other changes that I want to make. My husband will finish his classes in a few months and already has a job lined up for the end of April. We finally got Lukey a diagnosis of autism and he will be starting his new therapies this coming year, which we’re very excited about. Now we need to get Adam an official diagnosis and we can start getting him the help he needs, too. I think 2012 is going to be a much better year than 2011, although I can’t complain too much. 2011 was a rough year, but it was successful in a lot of ways, too. And I can’t complain about a year where I had so much time with my husband and kids, that part was excellent!
My biggest goal this year will (of course, as usual) be my health and weight. I did pretty good through the holidays, though! I managed to lose 11 pounds, despite the amazing food and treats I was surrounded by. I figure if I can lose weight through the holidays I can pretty much do anything. lol Food is my kryptonite, after all.
What are your plans for the new year? Anything exciting happening for you?
Oh, one more thing! Are there any tutorials you’d like to see? I’ve been thinking about adding some to my blog (and also to my CU blog), but I don’t know what people are interested in learning. Any ideas?
Thanks for stopping by! Have a safe and Happy New Year!
Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, guys! Wow, it’s been a really long time since I posted last. Like everyone else I’ve been busy with family and the holidays and it’s been wonderful! My brothers (all except one of them and he lives in New Zealand, so he’s excused, lol) and their families all came down here to Arizona to visit for Thanksgiving. My parents live right down the road from me, so it was really nice to have so much of the family here with us. It’s the first time my boys got to meet any of their cousins! Here’s a layout I did of them all together. (Those are my two on the far left. Yes, the crying one is mine. Of course. lol)
I used Flergs and Eva Kipler’s Leaf It to Me. It’s one of my favorite autumn kits!
My husband is starting school again in January and we had to run some paperwork over today. Fortunately, my parents had agreed to take the boys for the morning, so we didn’t have to drag them all over town with us (because there’s nothing five year olds love more than being stuck in a car all morning)! When we went back to pick them up my mom had made gingerbread men and she said the boys helped! Adam helped cut them out and Lukey frosted them, and there was a whole plate waiting for us! Have I mentioned how much I love gingerbread? Especially the kind made with so much love?! Haha!
Anyway, I wanted to wish you all a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! I hope it’s wonderful and you get to spend lots of warm and happy time with your loved ones! Be safe and have a great weekend!
