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Printable valentine's fish bowls are available in my etsy shop. These are instant downloads and come with your choice of 2 pdfs. . . one with all four Valentine's sayings and one that just has the popular "glad we're in the same school" saying. In a different listing, you can also ask me to customize them with a name or make custom fish bowl party invitations, end of school cards, and party favor bags that are similar. Check my shop . *Links updated in 2026*

Some fun Valentine's printables I've been designing. . . For Make and Takes : 14 Acts of Love printed on hearts: For Today's Mama , a one-of-a-kind printable gift card that you can customize for whoever needs a little love: ** Note: Thank you, Lost Type Co-op , for some fun new fonts to work with on these. Habana and Mensch . **

Hey, Lucy! I have a surprise for you! I'd like to introduce you to "chores." Some of you out there are thinking, she doesn't make her kid do chores? And I reply, yes, of course, I do. . . just without any sort of consistency or tracking. Now it's just on paper and will hopefully be a little more rewarding to a little four year old who has a hard time keeping track of days. This chore chart is available to everyone and downloadable for free! I designed it for the good peeps at TodaysMama and made it customizable/editable so you can add your kids' names and your own list of chores. Also, if anyone is wondering what "Rusty & Rosy" is on the chore chart above, it is the pre-K readiness program Lucy has been doing on the computer this year also called Utah Upstart . It's fantastic and we've loved being a part of it. . . if you live in Utah, they're pre-registering kids who will enter Kindergarten in fall 2013 now. It is also FREE but has...

I've always thought it would be fun to give 12 small gifts on the days leading up to Christmas. . . needless to say, I'm a little too last minute for that. My true love might get gifts the 12 HOURS leading up to Christmas. But if you have your act together and you just can't keep those gifts hidden a minute longer, you can print these gift tags for the 12 Days of Christmas ! I designed them for Today's Mama who is making them available to download and print for free. On the First Day of Christmas my true love gets Gift Tags.

Here is a little something to help you count down to Christmas! An advent calendar designed by yours truly and available at makeandtakes.com . Print one or a dozen. . . why not? They're free so feel free to share! Merry Christmas.

The kids are out trick-or-treating and I have twenty minutes before I have to leave to teach a class (I'm teaching design again at a local college). I figured I'd do a quick Halloween catch-up post before the month is over. I've been creating printables every week for Today's Mama and you can still go download them if you missed them! It started with a witchy wallpaper for your smartphone or computer desktop. . . Then there was a Bat Mobile Oh, and the Halloween Treat Phantom got a make-over. . . And a spooky memory game for the kiddos. We even had time to add a few new Halloween decorations this year inspired by those in Sweet Paul magazine's fall issue . You might get costume pics tomorrow. That's a whole other post. . . enjoy your Halloween night!

Two more installments in the Seriously Official Back-to-School set of printables I did for TodaysMama.com . . . Bookplates and a customizable Certificate of Awesomeness .

I designed these little lunchbox memos for todaysmama.com . You can download them from there and print them for free!

Summer is full of family get-togethers and family reunions. At each one, Lucy gets excited about playing with cousins. And after each one, we spend a lot of time explaining how those cousins are related to us. I thought it would be fun to put it all together in a visual way, something to point at as we explain and talk about families. It turned into this wonky, wacky family tree with hubby and I at the center and branching out from there. Then it turned into a solar system, it just happened. And THEN it turned into something that would look great hanging on a wall. Shameless etsy plug, I've now made it available in my etsy shop ! I will make a custom chart just for you and your fam. Check it out here .

Can you spot my little bears? They're the second one from the top right corner! I'm a semi-finalist! Woot woot! This has been a fun challenge to work on. There were 968 final entries and those were narrowed down to 75 semi-finalists. Thanks for all your input, friends. I really love the spacey robot one, too, but I just didn't think it was quite ready. I want to keep playing with it a little. So I went with my gut and entered the bears against the blue/gray background. If you'd like to vote (please, please, pretty please!?!) go to the Spoonflower website contest tab and vote for any and all the ones you like. . . click on them and they turn green. The submit vote button is on the 5th page. You have till April 6 to vote, but why wait? Do it today!

I'm entering a fabric design contest on Spoonflower , Project Selvage , where the winner would get to design a line of baby boy fabric for Michael Miller Fabrics ! But I can only enter one design. Help! Which one should I enter?

For the most part, we're ready. The Christmas tree is up. Lucy helped with some of the ornaments. Little gingerbread village has survived the snackers. Stockings are hung by the fireplace with care. (This was a project three years in the making! I've had the fabric forever.) Christmas cards are in the mail. (Photography by Katherine Wallin , design from minted.com , love their skinny labels !) Neighbor gifts have been delivered. ( Recipe for peppermint bark from allrecipes.com ) Teacher gifts have been given. ( Marble magnets "how-to" on not martha .) The one thing left on my list is to finish Emmie's quilt. This is how it looked in October. This is how it looked in November. This is how it looked yesterday. It is not a hard quilt. It has just taken the back burner, but no longer! I intend to give it to my baby daughter on Christmas and it SHALL be finished. That will be my greatest accomplishment this month. Merry Christmas to all, especially to all you out there...

Here's a design principle. . . repetition adds significance to images. Another design tip. . . odd numbers are pleasing to the eye, so arrange things in 3 or 5, etc.

That would be the headline if I were writing about Marc Johns for a magazine or artsy newspaper. . . or for my silly little blog, I guess. His drawings make me giggle. . . . and more than a little jealous that I didn't think of it first. . . And I swear if I could I would buy everyone on my Christmas List one of his sticky note drawings . But they sell within minutes of being posted. . . This is definitely the one I would buy for Hubby. . . And I think I would absolutely die if I saw this in a restaurant bathroom . . .

Spoonflower is hosting a Christmas Fabric of the Week contest . . . the winner's fabric is available for a limited time to purchase on Etsy. Fun, huh! Now I need to think of a design for the Halloween challenge. . .

My first batch of Spoonflower fabric arrived this week (Spoonflower lets you print your own fabric!) and I had a little party when I opened the package. . . it's gorgeous. I'm thrilled with it! I wrote and illustrated this little soft book for my first project and have more in the works. This print-your-own fabric thing really has my motor running, possibilities are endless, seriously. I put the first book together as soon as hubby was at the gym and baby was asleep, I could hardly wait. . . posted today on etsy, but Lucy gets to keep this first edition. Eeek! Giddy like a kid about to eat a super sweet, sloppy totally awesome sandwich. . .

I started teaching a Flash class today at one of our local colleges and because I'm such a blog nerd, I had to create a blog for the class. Some of you design and animation geeks out there might like to follow along as I link to cool sites, find tips and tricks, and post student projects there. Here's the link to eagats!