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Free Castle Coloring Page


Hi Everyone!!

Recently we have been enjoying ourselves with homeschooling art projects. I have plans to post a bunch of the art projects we have been working on for homeschool like Tim Burton self portraits, Giacometti Minecraft sculptures, surreal collages a few more that we have in the works. In the meantime, here is an awesome free coloring page!

I created a super cute set of castle coloring pages for my shop but with Thanksgiving right around the corner, I thought now would be a great time to post a free coloring sheet as well!

If you are interested in the full set of Castle Coloring Pages, you can find them in my Design Bundles shop.


2021 - 2022 Academic Year at a Glance


Hey party people!!

I have a freebie for you! It's a 10 month year at a glance calendar with a space for notes. I searched the internet high and low for something like this and could not find anything so I created it my self!

You can download your free 2021-2022 1 page academic planning calendar in my google drive, which btw is filled with a few other planner goodies. :)

Here are some other names that may help you find this freebie. 

  • 2021 - 2022 Overview Calendar
  • Academic Year at a Glance
  • Yearly Planning Calendar
  • 1 page Academic Calendar
  • Yearly Calendar with Notes
  • Leave a comment down below letting me know what you would call this sort of calendar.

Want a little story time? Are you wondering why I need this calendar? Well due to our best friend COVID.... we're homeschooling this year. I never thought I'd be a homeschool parent but here we are. Of course I have grand intentions of themed lessons around holidays and planning the entire year in 1 day. I need a great starting point to make that happen and thus I needed this specific calendar. I hope this calendar is helpful for you!

And of course I have to end with a shameless plug for other cool stuff. Looking for some digital planner covers? I've got a few in my shop.

Garden Planning Series: Choosing the Best Location


For me garden planning is a chore. There are so many things to keep up with what to plant, when to plant, how to plant the seeds, where to plant each thing and the list goes on and on! Generally speaking, I'm the type of person that has to research EVERYTHING before making a decision and that leads me to having tons of ideas on how to tackle any situation but a lot wasted time. I've collected my best gardening tips and put them together in this garden planning series! Part one of this gardening series will focus on choosing the best location for a vegetable garden.

Choosing your perfect Garden Location
As I learned the hard way, this is probably the most important aspect of gardening. First, my experience and then some tips!

In 2019, I started vegetable gardening. I had 0 experience with growing food and only a small amount of experience growing perennials (and let's be honest perennials grow themselves). :) I looked around at all of my possible garden locations and landed on a small, convenient spot at the entrance to our backyard. This area tended to be sunny and seemed like the perfect location for a kitchen garden. So, I had my husband build some raised garden beds, had my family deliver some soil, and planted some veggies. In that first season we got tons of zucchini, a few squash, a small cucumber and that was about it. I was feeling pretty good about my first year gardening!


In 2020, I was determined to get enough zucchini, squash, broccoli, and tomatoes to replace my grocery purchases. Well, fast forward to the middle of the 2020 gardening season and I'm looking at my garden compared to all the YouTubers (Roots & Refuge anyone?) and things just weren't adding up. I was in the same growing zone, I started my seeds and got them outside around the same time, I had amended my soil, fertilized the plants, and yet they were no where near the size of the other gardeners. And I know, I know, we shouldn't compare ourselves to others but honestly something didn't seem right. I took some time to think and try to figure out where I went wrong. Around this same time, my husband had built me another raised bed, I needed to get some blackberry bushes in the ground and I had just discovered that my issue was lighting.

The original location for my garden only received 6 hours of sun MAX, in the middle of summer. Most vegetables will not grow in that amount of light and they definitely won’t thrive. So, here we were mid 2020 gardening season, with a full garden of mystery plants planted, and 1 raised bed near the front porch that was THRIVING. We had to move the garden. The entire garden. Plants. Cedar raised beds. Soil and all. I used my sun tracking tips to determine where on my property I could maximize the sun exposure and grow a lush green garden. Well, that landed us in the front yard. I thought about what the neighbors would say, what this might do for resale value (even though we have ZERO intentions of moving), how much effort it would take, if my plants would survive the move, and if I should even bother. Ultimately, I wasn't ready to give up the joy of gardening. Going out every Saturday morning soaking up the sun, harvesting (once or twice, lol) and spending time with my daughter. So, with my husband's help (aka he did most of the work). We did it! We moved 3 raised beds, plants soil and all to the front yard. It was the BEST decision ever! Special thanks to Brian, because it wasn't easy and he doesn't care to much for the garden.


6 Tips for Choosing the Perfect Garden Location
1. This one might seem obvious and if you're reading this article you probably already considered this but, think before you plant. Take everything into consideration and choose a good spot upfront, your back will thank you later. It may be helpful to use google maps and capture and overhead view of your property.

2. Choose a sunny spot and I mean all day sun 8+ hours. Track the sun by taking photos every 3 hours or more if you have a lot of dappled sun everywhere like me. Watch my Tracking the Sun video for more details on the methods I tried for tracking the sun. You may also be interested in a fun technical way to track the sun and for that you can try SunCalc. I found this app after making my video and played around with it. This blog isn’t sponsored by SunCalc, I just thought it was a fun thing for the nerdier gardeners.

3. Don't stress about what others will think. I don't communicate with most of my neighbors (or anyone for that matter, I'm pretty introverted and you know COVID) but I had 3 neighbors comment on the garden. They were all amazed at how good it looked and wanted to pay me for veggies. Little did they know, I hadn't grown much that year because we moved everything and it didn't like it. Fingers crossed 🤞🏼for a massive 2021 harvest for all!

4. Think about how you will get water to the planting location. Originally, my rain barrel was set up in the backyard which worked perfect until we moved the garden to the front yard and I'm hand watering with jugs upon jugs. With one rain barrel, the rain couldn't keep up with enough water for houseplants, flower gardens, and raised beds. I had to buy a longer hose because the one we had didn't reach to the front yard.

5. How close to your house should your garden be? We have a quarter acre suburban yard so anywhere my garden was, was going to be close enough but that may not be the case for you. If you’re planning a big farm, you may want your garden near your animals so that their waste can be used for manure.

6. Consider the view from inside. When my garden was in the backyard, I could see it out of my work from home window all day long! This made it super easy to keep an eye on and not forget about watering & weeding. With the way my house is set up, I can't see the garden from inside unless I look out the bedroom window or front door. We are never near those places and we keep the window & door closed.

I hope these garden location tips helped you choose the perfect spot and saved you a ton of work! I’m sure I’m forgetting something so let me know in the comments what you considered when you chose your perfect garden location. Let me know which garden planning topic you would like covered next.




Digital Planning

Digital Planning is quickly becoming a new obsession for me! I bought my first apple product last November (iPad Pro 10.5), intending to use it for graphics design but for the most part it just sat there. I'm not sure what caused me to suddenly give it another go but in Nov of this year, I began using it all the time! I'm generally an Android girl but I have to admit the iPad did surprise me. In the past 2 months I've designed Tshirts, made some stickers for my daughter, drew a huge set of houseplant clip art, made some Tie Dye Digital Papers, launched some New Year's Digital Patterns, and today I made a digital planner cover (that unintentionally matches my digital paper set)!



Anyway, I just came here to post a freebie link to the 2021 digital planner cover. I'll be using Zoomnotes because it has a million awesome features! Leave a note down below and let me know how the digital planner cover looked in your app of choice!

Announcing my YouTube Channel!

Hi Friends!
I can't believe it's been 2 and half years since I posted something on this blog! I've done lots of things, just haven't found the time to share them! I've been posting on YouTube for a few months now and I think that will be the best and easiest way to keep up. I hope you'll stop by and become a new subscriber!

What content will I be sharing on YouTube?

Gardening!
The main thing I will be posting is Gardening! We moved into a new house about 2 years ago and now I have a good mix of sun and shade! This allows me to grow a variety of things including vegetables!! I started my raised bed gardening last year and keep adding to it this year. I'm so glad to have started this last year and gotten in some practice because I think having a garden is essential with everything going on this year.

Houseplants!
Before I started a garden, I started collecting houseplants. I plan to share a little bit about this topic. I'm not sure if I want to continue collecting houseplants or just focus on the ones I have. That photo is from last August. A few of these plants didn't make it, many of them did and one has spider mites that won't go away and it's driving me INSANE.


Crafts!
I can't help but to create things. Whether that be digital things, like Clip art and digital papers or physical crafts. In November, I purchased a Cricut and have been making all sorts of things with that (like elves, Easter baskets, and some shirts).

Gaming!
Last but certainly not least is gaming. My husband and I are still working out the details of exactly what this one will look like but he will be streaming VR Gaming Content. We play a lot of table top games together like Gloomhaven, Eldritch Horror and card games. We also play some video games together (Borderlands) but not as much as like. Once we get this all figured out it should be pretty fun.

Elf on the Shelf Calendar


While I am not ready to come back to blogging or designing, I did want to take a moment to share something I made! Here is a little planner sheet that I am going to use to keep up with all of the mischievous elf happenings around here. I hope you find it useful!

Leave a comment below with any great elf ideas you have.

Easter Egg Coloring Sheets

With Easter and Spring Break just around the corner, I know we are all looking for easy ways to entertain the kids. Be sure to check out my 2nd most popular item! Easter Egg Coloring Sheets! I think these sheets are more appropriate for elementary school students but they may work as simple adult coloring sheets too!