Hi, all!

My 3-year-old and I are sitting here enjoying a snack mix of our own creation (pretzel sticks, cheese-its, peanuts & pirate's booty [which he refers to as "pirate foodie"]).  My 6-year-old is writing a book about Ultramen Tiga, Dyna and Gaia.  And my 40-year-old (that's husband, not child, although sometimes it's hard to make a distinction, LOL) is off at a Garden State Horror Writers function for the afternoon.  So, I thought, why not chew and type at the same time?

Things had been kind of quiet around here in terms of new arrivals for a few weeks until a new DVD called Dollmaking the Easy Way: Baby Fairy arrived and touched off a domino effect of deliveries.  Baby Fairy was followed quickly by the new Belle Armoire special issue Altered Couture (they only sent half of what I needed, but more are on the way!) and the new issues of Belle Armoire and Art Doll Quarterly.  That alone is a nice haul for a week, but the boxes didn't stop coming (or piling up in my family room)... The next day was a box from North Light Books with some stock I was replenishing and a couple of brand new titles - Metal Clay Jewelry, WIld Tiles, and an interesting book called Caffeine for the Creative Mind.  That last book is filled with activities that are supposed to jump-start your creativity.  It's aimed at graphic designers, but I really think that any of us who has ever stared at a lump of clay and wondered why it wasn't turning into anything appealing could benefit from a bit of brain-stretching.  I plan to pull a copy off the shelf for myself and put it on my nightstand.  (Or maybe, embarassingly enough, the bathroom, which is the ONLY place I ever get any decent reading done anymore...)  The new Holiday Issue of Jewelry Crafts also showed up this week, as well as the 4th annual Step-by-Step Clay Jewelry magazine, which is always an exciting arrival - filled with polymer, metal, and earthen clay projects.  That's probably it for the new stuff, but let me tell you it's plenty!  I finally got it all unpacked and on the shelves yesterday, and the empty boxes are still in my family room waiting to be broken down and brought outside for the recycling.

What else of note is going on in Polka Dot Creations land?  Hmmm.  Well, I'm having an Overstocks Sale: 41 items that would be happier in your hands than on my busy shelves.  I need to reduce the overcrowding conditions and make room for some new things, so the overstocks must go.  There are also some Closeout Items you might want to check out - 33 items that will never be re-ordered.

Well, the homemade snack mix is long gone, my 6-year-old is hovering over me with a stapler ready for me to bind the Ultraman book for him, my 3-year-old has moved on to playing games on the Aladdin DVD, and clarkesworld is still hanging with horror writers.  i think I'll go break down those boxes.  Or not

Lisa