Five on Friday #4 (Blog Loving!)

The other day I had a sweet comment from Ang over at Mad For Paper to say she was naming me for a Liebster Blog Award as she liked it here at Just-Jimjams.  Thanks Ang!

I'd never heard of the award, so I Googled ... and came up with over 2 million hits, but no real origin because pretty well ALL the posts I checked were from recipients like me, puzzling over the origin, but accepting it gratefully and passing it forward to five of their favourite blogs!  A sort of blog chain-letter I suppose.  In fact doing the maths ... if one person awarded it on January 1st to five others, who took a month to award it to five others, who took a month to award it to five others ... then we'd have a mind boggling 244,140,625 recipients by the end of the year (and many billions more if people were quicker to re-award the award).

Now chain-letters that appear in my in-box get deleted immediately, but this is more about spreading the love and telling smaller bloggers (with fewer than 200 followers) that someone, somewhere, not only reads their blog but likes it enough to recommend it to their own readers.  I'm very, very happy to be on Ang's List of Five (and one of the 244 million + bloggers to receive the award in 2012 too), so I put on my thinking cap and tried to come up with five blogs I'd like to recommend further:

Alexa over at Trimming The Sails because her blog is calm and serene, thoughtful and inspiring; she has a wonderful way with words, photos, paper and pixels and, having been lucky enough to meet her at a retreat last year, I know that the humour and sunny smile that shines through in her blog posts is there in real life!

Ann, a mad scientist from Coventry, whose musings are always interesting and filled with lots and lots of scrappy goodness.  She's got 3 kids (like me), wears glasses (like me), gave a class at Pink Booby 5 (like me), has taught at the, now defunct, Exhall crop (like me) and is a very hard-working Primary School teacher (unlike me, but that's another story).

Lisa from Recklinghausen Musings, is a fellow Master Forger from the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog.  I am in awe of the quantity of quality items that Lisa makes.  She takes part in frequent LOAD challenges, makes huge numbers of Christmas cards, helps run a challenge blog of her own and is always enthusiastic and supportive.  All this means that I completely forgive her predilection for pink!
 
I love all the things that Lizzie made, especially her wonderful hand bound books.  She's another blogger I have had the privilege of meeting in real life at the aforementioned retreat (which Lizzie organised)!

And last alphabetically, but by no means least,  there is Tracie of Doodledays who scraps and journals beautifully about her large and complicated extended family.  You can't pigeon-hole Tracie's "style" because she is always coming up with new ways to showcase her photos with clever hand-cutting, doodling and page design; she's a constant source of scrappy inspiration.

That just leaves me one more thing to do according to the Liebster Blog Award rules:
1. Thank the person who gave the award √
2. Link back to their blog √
3. Post the award onto your own blog √
4. Choose 5 new recipients with fewer than 200 followers √
5. Let each of them know about the award

P.S. There's still time to enter my {Inter-}National Scrapbooking Day Challenge here ... the odds of winning a random prize are still good ;o}

P.P.S. Just found a Liebster post from December 19th 2010 but the recipient couldn't remember where she got it from, so I guess there are now a gazillion recipients out there :o}