More Miles Than Money

New baby cousin!

Portland public schools sometimes have more days off than on, so for a recent 5-day break I grabbed the boys and flew down to sunny Santa Barbara to hang out with family and a new baby cousin.

We're lucky in that we get to travel quite a bit, often for free.

For a long time I didn't see a collaboration between being crafty and saving money, then I stumbled upon a graduation speech by Chuck Close that made the connection:

"I’d like to say something to the parents of the art majors. This is probably not what you had in mind, you know? You hoped maybe—I don’t know, maybe medical school, maybe a degree in law, but I want to tell you that a life in art can be a wonderful life. Artists live better at near-poverty level income than yuppie bond traders do at much larger income."

For me it's fun to come up with creative ways to do amazing things for free. For example, for the Santa Barbara trip I grabbed two Alaska Airlines credit cards. They each come with a 25,000 mile sign-up bonus, and if you use this special trick they'll even PAY YOU $100 to use them (which covers the $75 annual fee). So we ended up with three free airplane tickets and $20 in my pocket after taxes.

In fact, we've received around a million points/miles over the last several years with similar programs. If anyone is curious, I might write up a longer description of how exactly to go about traveling for free. Or here's a couple of good places to start:

The Points Guy Beginner's Guide
Make Your Dream Trip a Reality (or his free website here)

It mostly works if you have 4-8 hours per month to coordinate different trips and cards, love excel spreadsheets, and can pay your monthly bills off each month. It's definitely not for everyone. Or even most people. But for those with some creativity and a "why not" attitude, traveling and staying at places like this for free is pretty awesome.

Park Hyatt Maldives, where you can stay for free with your Hyatt certificate (photo from The Points Guy).

Announcing Large-Sized Vintage Piddix Designs (& a free floral frame download)

For the past seven years, despite frequent requests, piddix images have been available to the public only in smaller sizes on digital collage sheets (normally 2-inches or less). So I am very, very excited to announce that the very first collections of full-sized piddix scans debuted this week at Creative Market. It's been really great there so far and I'm having a lot of fun creating new designs.

The new collections include all you'd expect from piddix: great resolution and quality, rare, authentic images, and thoroughly researched copyright.

Plus, for the first two weeks only, you can download every single image in my entire Creative Market shop (a value of $326), along with several thousand more images from other designers (worth over $700), and all including an amazing, extended license (which allows you to do almost anything you want with the images), for just $28 at Design Cuts. Click here to see all the details.

As a thank you and a "grand opening" celebration, I've included two images below that you can use for free in both personal and commercial projects without attribution. These frames are originally from 100-year-old French engravings and compliment my new Gardening Set.

Thanks everyone!

-Corinna

 To download your freebie sample images:
click here for the top, sepia-colored frame;
and here to download the frame with a white background*

*Use blue links above for downloading your free images.

Help Me Pick Colors and Win 20+ Collage Sheets

I've been having a blast coming up with new color combinations for my digital collage sheets, but some are definitely better than others. If you help me out by sharing your advice on which color combos you like best, you'll be entered to win every single one of my new collage sheets in my "birds and swirls " and "zen birds" lines (a value of more than $60).

Here's how it works:
1. Sign up for my occasional newsletter here. I'll then send you a link to a sample collage sheet with 10 different color combinations and instructions on how to pick your favorites.
2. One winner will be randomly selected and notified by May 31, 2009.
3. Plus, every person who enters will receive one free high-resolution download of the sample sheet as well.

Thanks for your help!

Share the Wealth: Free French Download

I must admit that this is not one of my images, but it still looks pretty fun. It's from Stampington and Company, which has an Angel Policy. Click here for the link to the full sized image.