I love this chick.

It's my job to come up with marketing programs at work. I made up an idea on Friday about a reader photo contest and I wanted to call it "Capture the Moment." Sometimes I double-check my program titles on Google just to make sure that they're legit (if the title has a bunch of hits, I know it's fine. If there are none, it's often that my title makes no sense or is grammatically incorrect--which happens sometimes). Anyway, I did the google check and found a blog called Capture the Moment which is all about creating cool homemade stationary with stamps.

I am not a crafty person, but I am fascinated by this stuff. Drop me in a Michael's or a Kate's Paperie, and I am like a kid in the candy store. I love looking at all the paper and stamps and paint and projects and I think about how I would love to do all of them. (Believe it or not, I used to be very artsy as a child, sketching in notebooks all the time, but that sort of disappeared into adulthood). Every time I leave the store empty-handed. I just convince myself that it's not neccesary at this time to make a card or create a scrapbook or make a counting cross stitch of a cat.

So this blog completely sucked me in stirring up that crafty artsy fartsy ambition inside of me. Yes, I need to be making some stationary. Then I started clicking on her inspiration blog where I found my new role-model Alicia Paulson.

Alicia is one of these crafty types that I really admire. She's like one of those people who actually lives out the life you read in Martha Stewart Living--but even cooler. She cooks really beautiful food. (It appears she bakes some kind of awesome sweet every other week). She creates crafty projects like crocheted sweaters and funky dish towels and painted dolls and whatever else she feels like working on. She used to have a store, but now she just works out of her studio which looks like the most inspirational and sunny place to work and sells her stuff on the internet. Her photographs are amazing, and she is a book writer and her blog has a crazy following. Hello, 100 comments on a post?

Suffice to say, in a matter of 24 hours, I became Alicia's biggest fan, finding myself in the craft section of Barnes & Noble today, devouring books on knitting and stationary until Dan told me it was time to leave. Grrr...

It's quite possible that all of this excitement and inspiration will all fade as quickly as it came. But all I know is that this year, I gotta be making my own Christmas cards and making gingerbread houses and making my own clothes and doing some serious cooking and baking. (after March Madness, of course.)