I haven’t had a Favorite Friday post in an age, but I thought I would give you a little Favorite Friday today by sharing my never-fail, absolutely-easy, dessert-of-choice for parties I throw. What is it? It seems ridiculous that I by-pass the best pastry shops and go straight to Costco for their chocolate cake. It’s affordable, rich, and feeds a crowd! After serving and preparing a big dinner, I always try to opt out of cooking dessert, and this is the way to do it! I served it at my Annual Chinese New Year Party this year (which I STILL haven’t gotten around to posting photos of!) and it fed 20 people (with left-overs to spare). I like to serve it with fresh strawberries. It’s such a treat and perhaps even better because I didn’t slave over a hot stove to make it !

OKay, enough Favorite Friday! I’m sure you are itching to know who the winner of MeadowLark™ is! First, thank you to everyone who made comments about MeadowLark! It was fun to read what you might use the collection for! I get a kick out of reading your comments and the more comments this blog gets, the more fun it is to post giveaways and freebies! Let people know so I can continue to do so! And the winner for this giveaway by random.org was:

Patti Hutchinson says: I just love the idea of a neutral black and white line for all of my spring and summer flower pictures. I also think it would make a great mini album for just about anything!

from random.org is Comment # 8

Rhadonda says:

Children truly are a gift and a blessing. Congrats to your sister. I will be back to buy the kit to help your sister. Hobby…..new to digital scrapbooking and loving it. I also love to sew and smock (kind of like embroidered hand stitch) little girl dresses. The new color kit looks awesome too. Thanks for the opportunity.

Congrats Rhadonda! I LOVE smocking (not doing it but looking at it:). You’ve won Color Kit #3. I’ll contact you to get you a link to download this fab kit! I know this giveaway was short notice, so thank you to everyone who participated! Be sure and check out DHD today and pick up Baby Mine or Color Kit 3 if you get a chance!

I’d like to start with the good cause because, well, it’s the most exciting for me! My little sister SuiKim (pronounced “Sweet-Kim” without the “t”) and her husband Steve found out a couple of weeks ago that they have been chosen to adopt a little baby boy! I’m especially happy for SuiKim and Steve, who are just about the nicest, kindest couple of people around. They have spent most of their marriage wanting to have a child, and haven’t been as fortunate as many of us. If you’ve gone through this process, you know how heartbreaking and difficult it is. I’m so grateful that this opportunity has come  for them and wanted to share my joy with you.

Without going into my family history, I’ll just tell you that my family as suffered a bit of heartache the last few years (a story for another time). Because of this SuiKim and Steve don’t have many financial resources. I wanted to help the best way I know how. So the digital kit above, BABY MINE, will go on sale on Thursday, April 8th, at Design House Digital with all the proceeds going to help pay for the adoption. Thank you in advance for your kindness and generosity in helping me get this new little family started. I’ll be sure to post pictures of the little one when he arrives (camera will be waiting in hand!). (BTW, the pic on the side is my sister Yanni (right), SuiKim (center holding Yanni’s son Tad), and me).

If you don’t digital scrapbook, or just want to help, I’ve included a donation box here for you to send money to them.

Thanks again for all your help in this effort! I’m excited to see this little family get their first baby!

Okay, on to the next thing! A giveway. Yes, I know you like giveaways and I do too! Due to hit Design House Digital on Thursday is a new Color Kit. I’ve been getting emails about this, and FINALLY I got to it! Want to win it? All you have to do is leave me a little message in this post about your favorite hobby—Are you scrapbooker? Quilter? Avid crafter? Obsessive organizer? I love hearing about others’ obsessive need to create! I’m right there with you.

Here’s little peek at Color Kit 3. I’ll post the winner Thursday morning, bright and early so leave me some love sometime on Wednesday.

And finally, a little freebie for you! It’s a little party card download made from the Baby Mine kit. Use it for a birthday, baby shower, baby housewarming party, or (in my case) “Baby’s Here!” party. If you aren’t a “digital person,” no worries! This card is already positioned on an 8.5″ x 11″ paper so all you have to do is download and print. You may get a download window, or the image may appear in a new screen (if this happens just right click on it and SAVE IMAGE). It’s a high quality jpg that will print beautifully for you! Enjoy!

Thank you to everyone who participated in the Color Kit 2 Giveaway! It was such short notice and I loved seeing what you all liked from the new fabric line and from DHD. I will certainly be giving away more kits in the future and some fabric once I get orders in! So check back for that!

OKay, the winner is:

Donna says:

I found you, and DHD purely by accident and had the Color Kit #1 in by Kaboodle for so long. Everytime I thought I had some spare change, I’d go back to it and contemplate buying it, but then would decide to wait and save a few more pennies. Well, I kept pulling up the page over and over again – the colors and simplicity just drew me in. I have in and purchased it and have not looked back. I’m in love with it! Now, I eagerly await every one of your editions to the Color Kit stuff. I got through 2009 365 about 75% before I ran out of steam. Here’s to 2010 – my 365 is going to rock your stuff!

Congrats Donna! I’ll be emailing you a link today for your downloading pleasure!

Thanks again to everyone who participated and I’m going to post pics a little later of my project with my Valentine’s Glitter Book Love Nest!

I haven’t had a giveaway for a while so here’s one that only lasts a day! It starts NOW and ends Thursday morning at 9am Mountain Standard Time. It’s from my popular Design 365 Color Kit Series (yum, yum!) and is normally $9.99 in the store (but will be 30% off this Thursday only). I’m giving away Design 365 Color Kit #2 (see to the right) to someone who makes a comment on this post on their favorite fabric from my Coquette fabric line, which is will hit quilting stores this June OR their favorite digital kit of mine from Design House Digital.

I just started making layouts from this kit tonight and I’m pretty happy with how versatile it is. Here’s a layout made with only products from this kit I made of my daughter Flissa.

So just make a comment in this thread and I’ll do a happy random dance to tell you all the winner on Thursday morning.

Happy Scrapping! XOXOXO

As a fun gift to everyone who joins the chat, Jen and I have put together this darling little freebie! You will need to post in the chat tonight and we’ll send you a peamail with the link which will only be downloadable during the chat. Be sure and drop by and get it! Visit us in the CHA Summer Forum at 10pm CST.

I’ve been meaning to post this link for some time now, but have managed to forget with all the craziness (and loveliness) in my life! The winner of the PhotoCuts Giveaway on my blog posted some layouts using the Overlays on her blog called http://paperscissorsandglue.blogspot.com. You can check out she uses the overlays there:). The whole blog is very scrap-a-rific with tons of digital and paper layouts.

This will very likely be my last post of the week. I’m getting my 2peas submissions in today and getting ready for a lovely weekend in Park City with my husband. It’s been a long time since it was just the two of us and I’m pretty excited about the break. I know I’ll have tons of things to post next week. I have big announcement to make, pictures from the weekend, and an awesome post I’ve been working on that you won’t want to miss!

Doing my early morning announcement of the winner via Random.org. And the winner is… COMMENT NUMBER 11.

Gennifer says:

Since I said Midnight Blooms on 2Peas, I’ll go with Cards here.

Seriously, though, love them all!

Congrats Gennifer! Just email me at carina@diginirvana.com and we will get you hooked up with those cards!

Thanks to everyone who played and be sure to check out the new collection at 2peas today!

It’s here! Another collection and another giveaway! On Tuesday, the Garden Vingettes collection will premier at 2peas. There are 4 paper packs and 5 accessories. I wanted this to be a super-digi-scrap-friendly collection so you’ll find that I’ve made multiples of the accessories like the buttons (even in grayscale so you can recolor for other layouts), easy to use brushes (like the alpha, which makes life SO much easier! Plus there are .abr upload instructions!), and fun cards in both color and black and white. The papers are very distressed and absolutely delicious! There are 10 unique papers in each of the sets.

So how do you enter the giveaway? Easy-peasy! Just comment on this thread the “item” that you want. Winner will be announced Tuesday morning as the products hit 2peas! You can also go and enter the 2peas digi blog giveaway for a second try at this giveaway!Go here to enter it:

2peas Digi Blog

Hooray! It’s Tuesday morning and as promised I have the giveaway winner along with some other news. I do this the old fashion way so I was up this morning cutting out the paper and writing out names. lol. And the winner of the blog giveaway for photocuts is:

Just email me at carina@diginirvana.com and I will try to get a hold of you as well and we’ll arrange for you getting your free product! You can find all the new PhotoCuts Collection digi kits at twopeas here. Here’s a layout I did using a mask from the new collection and a paper from a collection that hasn’t been released yet called Garden Vignettes! Look for it in a few weeks. Here’s a peek:

More business to attend to! I am finally opening up a new creative team call for a collections team! Yes, this is big news as I haven’t done a call for a long time. My wonderful publications team has been amazing (you guys rock!) and I’ve decided that I need a second team to take care more of the layouts for this blog and for new collections. You’ll love my darling CT Manager Theresa and you’ll get a collections team blinkie to boot:). What does it involve? Read this:

So how does it work? You will receive 1-2 kits per collection along with some started kits to give you some “goods” to get going. The collection team will know about collections that will be released and will have a week or so to put together a layout to be posted at 2peas, etc. It will be no more than 4 layouts a month with the average being about 2-3 layouts a month. We are a friendly group at the studio:).

Oh, and speaking of blinkies, grab this one for your everyday wear:

and keep an eye out for the publications team and the collections team wear:

Here’s the html for the fan blinkie for you to copy:

<a href=”http://www.twopeasinabucket.com/shop/digital-kits/carina-gardner/” target=”_blank”><img class=”alignleft” style=”margin-left: 5px; margin-right: 5px;” src=”http://i231.photobucket.com/albums/ee297/diginirvana/fan_carinagardner.gif” alt=”" width=”150″ height=”50″ /></a>