Catching Up & A New Magazine

Somehow the few days I had intended to stay off the computer during the Easter holiday have turned into nearly 2 weeks! The days are flying by me at great speed but we had a wonderful holiday baking cookies, making and sharing in big family dinners, chasing down clues hidden all over our property for our easter hunt and getting ready for the new members of our family to arrive :)

No we're not having another baby although I really really want one *grin*, but we're adopting two new baby calves just barely a week old that we're going to bottle feed and raise. I think I may be more excited than the kids!! I just melt over their little doe eyes LOL. So we've been cleaning the cow barn and doing some repairs to it that were needed and as soon as hubby gets home from work we're going to load up the trailer and pick them up. Yay :)

I had wanted to share some pictures with you tonight as well but for some reason Flickr's new photo program Aviary and I are just not getting along and it wouldn't work for me :( I'm crossing my fingers that it's just some sort of glitch and I can get back to business soon but in the meantime I wanted to share with you this really great homesteading e-magazine I found.

The Homestead Community Post is a brand new online magazine published by the Harrison family over at Homestead Drying Racks and right now they are offering it as a free preview for anyone and totally worth checking out!

It's 40 pages long and looks just like a professionally laid out magazine unlike some of the newsletter type mags I've seen and it is full of stories, helpful tips and tricks, recipes and more. You can click on the link below to go directly to PDF of the magazine or save it to your computer or ipad to read at your leisure and check out their website as they are having a fun giveaway to kick of their magazine to :)

Homestead Community Post ~ Spring 2012

Hugs,
Rosina

Happy Sunday

Hello everyone :)
I hope you are all having a fantastic weekend! Hubby took the kids and I on a day trip down island yesterday and we had a chance to hit Costco. Hooray for the big city *grin*. I picked up some great deals on kids clothing and groceries and I've finally got a new snow suit for each of the children. I've been buying a little at a time for quite a few months now so that I wouldn't be bombarded with a giant bill for winter wear when the snow starts :)

I wanted to share with you a neat freebie that I learned about today! Picaboo is a website that lets you create your own photo books to have printed and I have been dying to try making one since most of my photos these days just end up on my computer hard drive. I seriously love the digital age but for some reason it has got in the way of actually getting printed photos into my hands :(

So when I learned they were letting new members create a 20 page photo book for FREE I was all over it! When you go to their website you have to download a program called BookGenie and it compiles all of your photos categorically by date which is fantastic. 8000 photos later I have just got it up and running and there are a couple of choices that you have when creating your book. You can either have the BookGenie compile a book for you by date, season, holiday etc. or you can opt to make your own which was what I'm doing. I have a lot of blog photos on my hard drive which are of craft projects and my children with no faces *grin* so when the BookGenie compiled a book for me it had a lot of those photos which really don't work so well for a family photo book. But when you choose to create your own it lets you go through your photo files and pick and choose the photos you like and then it loads it like in the photo I shared above with the book layout and all of your photos at the bottom so that you can just drop and drag them into the pages.

So far I am loving how easy this is! There are tons of page layouts, you can layer photos on top of photos, flip them if they aren't oriented the right way, zoom, twist them off kilter, add captions and so on. I've been having a blast adding captions and little poems to each page. It's like scrapbooking without all of the supplies!!

You have until midnight tomorrow night to create an 8.5 x 11 book with 20 pages of photos for free. I know it's not much time but if I had known earlier I definitely would have told you :) So head over to the Picaboo Fall Book Promo and get started. I can't wait to see what it all looks like printed!!!

Hugs,
Rosina

New 2010 Mibo Calendar

I am so excited, the new Mibo 2010 calendar is available!!

When I downloaded a complimentary copy of Mibo's calendar last year I'll admit I just needed a calendar that would get me through another year of appointments & dates but the fun illustrations totally rocked! So naturally I just had to get a copy of the new one and I'm loving it even more than the last one.

It's really reasonably priced to at only $4.00 for a PDF file that is sent directly to you and then you just print it out onto some nice matte paper :) They have a second 'year at a glance' version of the calendar available as well this year and it is completely free to download. I think I'm going to take that one and make myself a nice little mini calendar for inside my purse :) So fun!

~ Rosina

Mother's Day Card

Mother's day is just a couple of sleeps away and it has sort of snuck up on me this year! My kids are not old enough to go out and shop alone for a sure to be loved no matter what it is gift *grin* and with daddy away for work they're definitely going to be coming up with something truly unique! LOL.

Well if you are like me this year and a little behind in the card making or perhaps the hunt for the perfect card, then this super cute squirrel card by A Cagey Bee is just perfect :) I just recently met this wonderful gal through Etsy and she happens to be not to far from me on the mainland of BC. She is offering a free download of her Mother's Day card for anyone who would like to use it and she has a really great blog to if you have time to check it out!

Thanks for sharing it with us :)

~ Rosina