Happy Thursday lemonheads!

I was so honored to be able to design a baby announcement for my brand new nephew a few months back. He is so sweet and made a very adorable subject for my design. I will always treasure being able to do this for my brother and his family. {I had to do a little blurring of some of the information to protect their identity, so please excuse it.}

Enjoy!

I hope you are all having a great week. I know I am!

I wanted to share a little something with you via Jordan at Handmade Success. She has been so gracious to share a “Holiday Marketing Planner” on her blog. It gives you lots of things to think about and places to jot notes about your advertising plan, PR plan, and everything else you need to make a great successful holiday campaign. So, just pop on over to her blog and download this very helpful planner. It will be a big help to get organized for the holiday rush!

Hey y’all! I wanted to let you know that I will be MIA this week and next week, because I am blasting through Christmas designs…Holla!

So, meet me back here on Tuesday, September 14th, K? See you then!

Hello lovelies! I am having a great day. How about you?

Today I am focusing on what I need to start doing to get Purple Lemon Designs ready for the holiday rush…I know, I know it is only August, why I am I starting to think of it so early? This is the time to fit in getting all of your materials ready, so you can get those items shipped to your lovely customers during the craziness we know as the holiday season.

So, what are those things that are essential to packaging and shipping your items to your customers? Extra bags, ribbon, business cards, item cards, thank you cards, tags, etc, etc…The list goes on and on. So, make that list now!

One item that is on my list that takes loads of time is stamping my shipping envelopes. I stamp each envelope with my address stamp as well as a thank you for your order stamp, so doing that over 500 times can be quite time consuming.

I just placed an order for extra bags for my stamps, extra info cards I slip into each stamp package, extra ribbons to pretty the packages up, extra business cards, extra thank you cards…really think through each step and each piece that goes into making your products special.

A big time consumer for me is to stamp the tags I use to brand my packages. I stick two stickers on each metal tag, one on the front and one on the back. Lots of work, but definitely worth it.

This is also a great time to work on your photographs and listings in your shop.

So what are you doing to get your shop ready for the holiday rush?

Good morning lovely lemonheads! I hope you are doing well. Do you have a garden or have you had a garden in the past? If so, you are probably faced with the opportunity I was faced with…What to do with an overabundance of veggies.

credit: Nota on stock.xchng

As a worker in a soup kitchen, I can tell you a great way to give back to your community is to give the extra produce to this organization. My church was blessed with many boxes of corn, watermelons, and other goodies from a local organic farm in my town. Everyone loved these fresh additions to our meals!

Unfortunately, I had more tomatoes than I could eat, but not enough to give to a soup kitchen. So, what’s a girl to do? Make oven dried tomatoes!

Oven Dried Goodness!

What? Basically oven dried tomatoes are like sun dried tomatoes that you make at home. It is so super easy to do. I use cherry tomatoes to do this, but I am sure regular sized tomatoes cut into chunks would work fabulously.

First I cut my tomatoes in half (or chunks) and let them drain on a paper towel for 30 minutes to an hour. This helps wick some of the juice from the tomatoes, so you don’t have to cook them in the oven for so long. Then, I put my tomatoes on a cookie sheet. I make sure they don’t touch, and I put them skin side down, so they don’t stick. Then I put them in an oven on the lowest temperature (mine is 170 degrees F) for 3 – 6 hours. I start with 3 hours and then if they aren’t completely dry, I just leave them in for longer, checking them once an hour. When your tomatoes are completely dry (but not so dry they are disintegrating in your hand), I either freeze them in a plastic freezer bag or I reconstitute them and pack them in oil.

I love to reconstitute some of the tomatoes and then pack them in oil with herbs and garlic. After a few days, this mixture makes a lovely oil to make dressing for salad or to dip bread in…Yummm!

To reconstitute your tomatoes when you are ready to use them, all you have to do is boil a little water, pour it over the tomatoes you want to use, and let it soak for 10 minutes. Then drain the water off the tomatoes and use them in a salad, on a pizza, in pasta, or anything else you might use a tomato for.

Oven dried tomatoes have such a wonderfully dense tomato flavor…They are soo rich and delicious! And they last much longer than a regular tomato left to its own devices.

So, what do you do with your garden leftovers?

Happy Thursday lovely lemonheads! Today I have a wonderful Etsy find for you. It is SimplyTempted, a bath and body shop run by the fabulous Karen. She makes the most wonderful smelling and beautiful soaps, lotions, scrubs and bath bombs you could imagine.

This Blackberry and Vanilla Bean Cream flavor is yummy!

I was frantically searching Etsy for a great Mother’s Day present for my mom and mother-in-law this year when I stumbled across SimplyTempted. I decided to give it a try! I ordered lots of luscious scrubs and lotions, and the two lovely ladies in my life adored them. Want to know the best part about it? I got to try some of the product myself because Karen includes lots of little samples for you to try.

Aren't these beautiful?

Those little samples led me to the discovery of the best body scrub…The Good Morning Grumpy Coffee Butter Sugar Scrub. It is to die for!

The best smelling scrub ever!

It starts out wonderfully grainy and turns into a foamy moisturizing delight…It makes my skin so hydrated and soft.

How pretty is this soap?

So, do yourself a favor and purchase some lovelies from Karen…I am a satisfied customer and you can be too!

SimplyTempted on Etsy: http://www.etsy.com/shop/SimplyTempted

SimplyTempted on Facebook: www.facebook.com/simplytemptedbathandbody

Hi all you lovely lemonheads! A couple of months ago, when Purple Lemon Hubby and I moved into our new house, we were blessed/cursed with high ceilings in our living room. High ceilings give a great overall look to a room (in my opinion), but you can be faced with a dilemma as to what to do with those expansive walls that go on forever. Well, I got to thinking that I would do a little DIY project. The wall over our TV is just huge and a very odd shape. A large canvas was just out of my price range, so I decided to use 9 canvases to make my creation.

Don't you just love a blank canvas?

As you can see above, I laid out my canvases in the orientation I wanted. Then I taped them together around the edges with masking tape. This let me sketch out my illustration without losing continuity among the canvases.

My canvases taped, sketched and ready to paint!

So, from here, I painted and painted and painted some more, making sure to paint the edges of my gallery wrapped canvases, so no white canvas was peeking out. So, here it is!

My vision for my project was a little dark; just what I wanted. I have had this idea in my head in my head for a while…I just haven’t had time to execute it.

Anyone can do a project like this…You could create a very abstract graphic grouping just by painting the 3 outside canvases on each side one color and the middle canvases a different color. Work in some fabulous brush strokes and voila! a fabulous piece of art for your home.

So, do you have something like this in your home? If not, are you going to try something? I would love to hear about it!

Hi lemonheads! I hope you are all doing well. I am just motoring along, through my second trimester; feeling pretty good :)

I have some dear friends that asked me to design some note cards for them that express them as well as their faith. So, after getting some information about their fav colors, Bible verses and pieces of their personalities that they wanted incorporated into their cards, I went to work!

This is what I came up with…

and this…

and this…

I really like how classic the top two cards look and how fun the bottom look is…I also like how the verses show part of Patrick and Terri’s personalities that is so very personal to them.

Happy Weekend, lemonheads!

I hope you are all doing well you lovelies. I am really excited to reveal a new feature of my website. I am really excited to announce that you can now suggest a stamp or a stationery design through my site! Eek!

I have been so fortunate to have wonderful people contact me through Facebook, twitter and email, so I decided to give them all one place to suggest some great ideas through my website. If you suggest and idea and it is a good fit for the Purple Lemon Designs shop, you will get that item customized just for you, once it is created and listed in the PLD shop…How cool is that?

So please, let’s hear your ideas! Visit the Suggestion page now!

Hi lovely lemonheads! Can you believe you are hearing from me twice in one week? I know…I feel a little amazed too :)

Today, I thought I would share some custom stamp designs I had the honor of working on for some lovely Etsy shop owners. The first is for Papery Goodness Press. Kristi makes the cutest personalized note pads in her shop. She really liked my cupcake stamp design and wanted it included in a custom business stamp she could use to personalize her Etsy packaging. Here is what I designed for her…

papery goodness press

What do you think? I thought it turned out really cute :) Kristi convoed me when she recieved her stamp to say:

To say that “I love it!” would be a huge UNDERSTATEMENT! I adore it. I want to eat it – that’s how much I love my new stamp. Thank you so much Kelly! It’s fantastic. Your packaging is fabulous. Love the tag! Love the business card! I love your attention to detail. Thank you so much for everything! ~Kristi

I also had the privilege to design a web address stamp for Shari of beachgrasscottage. She makes the most lovely home decor pieces out of beach glass.

We modified the design of my “handmade stamp” to fit her needs and this is what came out of the collaboration:

beach grass cottage

I think it turned out great too.

If you were ever thinking of getting a custom stamp for your business, now is the time! I will be pretty wrapped up with Christmas orders in a few months, so now you can get all my attention. All you have to do is email me at kelly {at} purplelemondesigns.com or convo me through my Etsy shop.

I look forward to hearing from you…Toodles!