A New Year! and a "Clean Start"

It has been a very busy time since I last put something new in the store... there has been a lot of sorting and cleaning and re-organizing going on in our house as my husband makes changes in the basement.  And changes upstairs, LOL.  All of this has necessitated so much "Clean Sweep-ing" that my brain is tired, and the sad thing is that I could do twice as much again and still not have everything as well organized as it should/could be.  As a naturally messy person (gosh, that looks awful in print, maybe we could gloss it over a bit and say "Not a naturally tidy person!"), I find this to be very wearing, even though the results are so positive.  And since I couldn't seem to get past the mental malaise to design something pretty, I decided to embrace the reality - and "Clean It Up!" is the result.  After all, I'm sure everyone has a cleaning project at some time, so it's a useful thing, right? There are lots of organic textures in this one as well as a lot of "cleaning" objects and a few word art bits to add the final touch:

 And some great examples from my team:

 Layout by Sondra

 Layout by Lori

 Layout by Kim

 Layout by Jennifer - she claims she took on a cleaning project just for this layout - now THAT is a dedicated team member :)

 Layout by Jan Hosford, a fellow designer at the DigiChick :)

Layout by Heather B., a member of the DigiChick team :)

This is a two-pager that I did, hoping to exorcise the cleaning mania, LOL.  I love making 2 pagers but they sure are hard to showcase!

And since we're in cleaning mode, I'm going to be making some changes to my newsletter situation - I've been using Feedburner to deliver blog posts, but I think it would be better to have an actual newsletter - I hate to bug people too much and sometimes I'd like to blather on in my blog more than once a week, so I'm going to give having them separate a whirl.  The only trouble is that I feel uncomfortable adding the Feedburner addy's to the new newsletter without permission, so I'm asking you to sign up for the new one.  Kind of a pain, but better than cluttering email without leave :)  The new link is over there ---> in the side column.  Or you can click HERE.

I also made a little freebie to go with Clean It Up! - I was enjoying the grungy cardboard I used on the oval frame so I made a few more pieces:

You can download it HERE.
Happy Cleaning (and scrapping!)