It was over a long and yummy dinner at The Melting Pot  with my husband, the weekend before last, that I brought up the subject of closing my template shop.  At that time it was just an occasional thought, and not something I had thought that I’d set my mind on, but the next day I sent in my resignation to the After Five store owner. I immediately felt a sense of relief, and knew it was the right decision for me at this time. Ever since we moved to TN, our days have been much busier than they used to be, and it seems that we’re hardly ever at home. I had been finding it increasingly difficult to work on new products or do any additional advertising, let alone remain caught up on my personal scrapping. I’d been finding myself more and more distracted and scattered feeling throughout the day, using every spare moment I had to hop on the computer and try to work on something, checking my email/sites more frequently throughout the day from my phone, not taking as many pictures as I used to – and realized that it was beginning to interfere with my time with my children. I don’t want them to have a mother that is always rushing through activities to hopefully have more time to work on her store. I want to be fully engaged and present in their lives and finally accepted that while they’re this young, I won’t ever be able to “do it all”. Digi will always be here, but my children will never be this young again, and I don’t want to miss out on those memories that are the reason that I got into digiscrapping to begin with.

I’m fortunate to be able to be a stay at home mom and not have to work at this point in their lives and plan on taking better advantage of that. Instead of watching my boys play and working on the laptop, I need to put the computer away and play with them again. It’s hard to have memories to scrap about if I’m not involved in them, right?

I want to thank all of you for making this such an enjoyable year, and to every customer that has ever used any of my products – THANK YOU! I’ve really enjoyed making After Five Designs my home, and will greatly miss being a part of their wonderfully creative and supportive team. I’m still planning on staying on the team at The Daily Digi, and getting back to really scrapping about what’s most important to me, and not just trying to make layouts that I hope will best showcase my own products.

Please don’t hesitate to take advantage of the 50% off sale in my shop ($2 shots excluded) that will run through the end of this month. After that time, my products will no longer be available anywhere. At that price, the bundles are like getting 3 template sets for barely more than the original cost of just one! I’ll be removing my facebook page and twitter account at that time, too, but will keep my website and update it periodically. I plan on still being able to complete logo design requests as time permits, so please contact me if you’re interested in that service as well.

Hope to see you around digi land and happy scrapping!