Just Jimjams

Spot The Difference

2012-03-04T00:01:00.004Z

Today, the first Sunday in March, is a time for tales ... told in words or pictures or both. I was browsing my photos to prompt a story and found these two ...

One baby is a girl, the other a boy; they were both photographed in a foreign country where Dutch was/is spoken. Both were pudgy babies who grew into stick thin children. One is still skinny and trying to gain weight, the other ...

I had never noticed before how very similar they were as babies ... no wonder they clash occasionally now that they are both adults!
{ And no wonder No.2 Son reckons No.1 Son is turning into his Mother Mark II }

Pop over to Siân's place for more Sunday stories.

29 Days Later

2012-02-29T10:00:00.029Z

During January I went public with my goals for 2012 and it's only fair that I come clean with how well (or badly) I am doing:

Click here to read more
Februaries (!) in numbers

I've managed more pages for my BOM, all of which are in the album (although not organised in chronological order - that's something for 2013 perhaps?)! I've de-cluttered our under stairs pantry after tipping over a bottle of wine, which smashed on the tiled floor, emptying its 70cl all over the floor and under quite a lot of "stuff" that shouldn't have been there. The bedroom, started last month is, unfortunately, still ongoing! I've forgotten three birthdays and remembered two (with home-made cards). I've been busy with some Guest DT work and plenty of other scrapping, including my page for my January in numbers and, without further ado here are February's numbers:

12 = marbled cup cakes made on the 2nd attempt - it would seem that I have been remiss in teaching Child No.3 (and her friend) how to cream butter, sugar and eggs together without curdling the mixture!

50 = key words in the programming language that Hubby studied during much of his 5 days off - he tries to share with me when he finds something interesting or annoying, but that's all I have remembered!

2 = the number of decades celebrated by No.2 Son with a trip to visit No.1 Son for a Skrillex concert. Hours he spent in cars, coaches and trains to get there and back: 12

4 = books read this month - "Ours are the Streets" by Sunjeev Sahoter - a very interesting tale of life for a Sheffield Muslim lad as he before and after he becomes radicalised, counting down the days until his suicide mission. Not an easy read at times, but thought provoking to the end. "The Passage" by Justin Cronin was bought for Hubby as an emergency birthday present last year, but he loved it and insisted I read it too. Set in the (not too distant) future it tells an apocalyptic tale of the human struggle against vampire-like zombies! Lots of excitement and adventure with believable and all to frail and frightened characters, it's the first in a trilogy and I'd like to read more. My friend from Book Club recommended "The Prison of Perspective" by Rudolf Bader but I can't say I enjoyed this one. It describes the lives of each main character entirely from their own perspective and perhaps because of this, I found them equally selfish and self-centred and ultimately unsympathetic. Thankfully this month's official choice was great: "The Long Song" by Andrea Levy which was a witty, rollicking tale of the trials and tribulations of slaves (and their white owners) in Jamaica during and after the abolition.

1 = an exercise bike exchanged, 2 months after the on-board computer broke, just 3 months after No.3 child chose it instead of a rabbit!

1 = also how many new recipes I tried - roast duck - and it worked pretty well: juicy, tender, perhaps not quite crispy skinned nor pink enough; there's room for improvement when I try again soon!

10 = days turn-around for 2 new passports which was a relief as there are now just 19 and 27 days to go before they will be needed.

73,392 = worldwide target for geocaches to be logged on February 29th - I did my bit and found 1 :o}

Between The Lines

2012-02-28T05:00:00.036Z

A final contribution to
Julie's Month of Sunrays

The third of the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog monthly challenges is to get colouring. I've been borrowing Child No.3's Promarkers a lot recently and decided to see what would happen if I used her extra fine nibs with the pretty patterns to be found inside business envelopes. I picked out a lovely hexagon pattern and had fun making some sunny flowers. A few scraps from my February Kit and a card was born.

I'm not certain that colouring in each hexagon individually was worth it, but I do like that the pattern shows on the punched leaves & circles: free, recycled, subtly patterned papers coloured to match perfectly!!

Lost?

2012-02-25T08:00:00.002Z

Hubby and I often go out for a walk at the weekend. We tend to tread the same routes around our village, adding variety by going anti-clockwise sometimes ... and whenever we see a sign for a footpath going across the fields we remember we forgot to study the Ordnance Survey map in advance and therefore have no idea where the path will lead!
We had to laugh last weekend when we were out enjoying the chilly sunshine:

Sometimes too much help is no help at all!

Hello Doily

2012-02-22T05:00:00.071Z

The latest challenge over at the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog is to use doilies ... not my favourite scrapping resource, but having dipped out of the first challenge this month, I felt obliged to have a go. Actually it was easier than I thought after spotting this page by Kirsty where she'd made a real statement with her doily by painting it black! (The page I made with a black doily is here)
For today's page I used Child No.3's Promarkers to add colour to a small doily, picking out the blue in the striped border I used to make chevrons for my page.

I blogged my first Month in Numbers at the end of January and here it is, down on (Scenic Route's double-sided Sonoma patterned) paper:

My doily had 12 sections to it, so after colouring, I removed 6 of them to see if there was a snowflake vibe to it ... that would be a "No!" ... so I cut it into two sections and layered them to make a dimensional semi-circle. The chevrons are cut from a striped border from Cosmo Cricket's The Boyfriend Collection. My numbers were cut with Sizzlit Ducky Wucky dies from my Kraftcore cardstock, sanded and inked to help the numbers stand out. I added some buttons and a title made from all sorts of random chipboard alphabets pulled from my stash, coloured with black ink to match each other.

In an effort to be ready for February's numbers (and create a facing page for my album), I have half-prepared a page with the same supplies and another border strip from my February Kit along with another Promarker coloured doily - a heart of course!

I'm doubt I will continue with this page design (and doily use LOL) for the rest of the year as I'll get bored, but I'll definitely use matching designs and base colours for each pair of pages - that will work well and save effort!

A Story Scrapped

2012-02-20T09:06:00.000Z

Do you enjoy the Sunday Stories that you read here and via Siân's Blog? I do - but one of my 2012 goals was to get more of my stories down on paper i.e. into my scrapbooks! So here is a page from last August's Sunday Storytelling with the memories hidden away on those two pull-out tabs:

The flowers were in my Christmas embellishment swap - thanks Susanne! - and I was inspired to try colouring a doily by this page by Kirsty. The tiny alpha stickers are by Adornit and come in a mix of colour combinations dominated by black, red and white. Unfortunately the printing (on my sheet?) isn't quite true so some of the letters end up with a black or grey (or white) strip along one edge which is annoying once the stickers are off the sheet. I guess that's the trouble with buying my supplies on-line - I have no idea if it's a one-off or a general problem with this range!

My layout is based on my Just One Sketch sketch - rotated as per prompt 2 of the class - yes I am ~~a little~~ very behind as we just had prompt 11 yesterday! It's also not square as the page is for my BOM which is 8½"x11" and I've changed the shape behind the photos to a circle and there's no border! In fact, as usual, I have deviated quite a lot from the sketch - but then I always see sketches as a starting point rather than something to stick to rigidly! Do you like sketches? Are they recognisable by the time your page is done?

Brightening My Day

2012-02-18T00:01:00.003Z

It doesn't take an awful lot to put a really big smile on my face:

Watching a blackbird pecking at the halved apple I put out near the bushes
The unbidden arrival of a hot, steaming mug of tea
Cherry blossom falling like pink snow
Listening to giggles upstairs
An unexpected hug

And most recently, spotting this month's Reading Group book on the library shelf which means I don't have to order it in specially, and nor do I pay the £1 reservation fee. On top of that bit of luck I was quite taken aback at how beautiful this particular copy is: a bright sunny yellow cover, embossed front, back and spine with a bronze design and lettering, with decorated end papers and chapter heading illustrations. It's not even an old book; published in 2010, the people of Headline Review obviously understand that we readers still appreciate a good cover, even if we don't necessarily judge the book by it!

On the subject of books ... I'm to be a World Book Night Giver ... Hurrah! Watch this space as some of those books will be given out right here!

P.S. These little rays of sunshine have brightened my day - if you pop over to Julie's blog she has a whole month of sunrays going on!

Half-Term Hiatus Here

2012-02-15T23:32:00.000Z

Our plans to go travelling this half-term holiday went out the window, but there are a million and one other things that have been occupying Hubby, Child No.3 and myself - DIY, revision, cinema trips, shopping, clubs, sleepovers, cake-making, reading, de-cluttering, appointments - but sadly not as much crafting as I would have liked. Hopefully there will be some time for that in the next day or two. In the meantime here is a page I made earlier:

The photos are from Child No.3's sketch sitting on Las Ramblas in Barcelona last Easter - at least she had a chair to sit on (and an umbrella to shelter under) - Hubby and I had to stand there for nearly two hours while we first queued for the artist she'd picked out and then watched in fascination as her portrait took shape on the paper. Made with various papers from my February Counterfeit Kit, with the addition of a scrap of red card and Boys Will Be Boys Sizzlit dies, for a sketch-based challenge over on UKScrappers but also tying in with ATDML's Thirsty Thursdays T challenge for Turquoise and the passage of Time :o)

Ten on the Tenth: Cards

2012-02-10T10:00:00.002Z

I started out post-parenthood crafting as a card-maker but found it dispiriting to give away all my creations. I would make two of each card: one to send away and one ~~to keep for myself~~ in reserve! Then I discovered scrapbooking and practically stopped making cards. Some of my card-making tools & supplies have been used in my layouts, but just recently I have been dabbling in card-making again ... with my scrapbooking tools & supplies!

Cards for all sorts of occasions ...

New Baby Card

Birthday Flowers

Civil Partnership Card (made with Tagxedo.com)

Thank You cards (from my guest post over at the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog):

Merry Christmas (see this post for Tagxedo help)

Get Well Soon

To say "Hello ... I love you!"

... and most recently, a card to celebrate my dear friend Hilary's 50th birthday:

Bunting - YAY! ;o)

It is still tempting to make an extra card to keep ... but so far that little habit is helping me get organised with cards ready for next month's occasions!
Well that's my Ten on the Tenth for this month ... there will be lots more tens over at Shimelle's place (later) today!

Tiddly-om-pom-pom

2012-02-08T05:00:00.093Z

The Basic Grey Felt Pompoms in this month's kit-to-copy from Scrapbook Circle's Note To Self kit are beautiful but, not having any in my stash, I set out to find a way of counterfeiting them.

This tutorial from Sara at Craft Snob was the nearest I could find but wasn't that close to the BG original. However with a couple of minor adaptations I have come up with what I think is a pretty close approximation for the pompoms in the kit.

For a 1½" (38mm) wide pompom you need a strip of felt measuring 3½" (9cm) long by ... well that depends!!

{I'm too lazy to get out my glue gun or my needle and thread, so I used sticky tape! Ideally it should be nice and thin (⅛"/3mm), but if you don't have any, you can use "standard" (½"/1cm) tape instead, though it is more wasteful of the felt!}
The width of your strip of felt needs to be twice the width of your roll of double-sided tape plus 1" (2.5cm). So with a narrow tape (⅛") the strip measures 1¼" and with a wider one (½") it measures 2".

1. Stick the tape along one long edge of the felt. Fold it in half lengthways so that the long edges meet and a tube of sorts is formed. Stick another strip of tape along the long edge (but don't remove the backing paper yet).

2. Make lots of ½" (13mm) cuts into the folded side of the strip (stopping at the edge of the tape) - these will form the loopy bits of the pompom. Mine are about ⅛" (3mm) wide.

3. For the coloured string I used the spare string from a parcel tag and coloured it with one of Child No.3 's Promarkers. Embroidery thread would work too ... or thin yarn ... My parcel tag string was 10" (26cm) long.

4. If you've used wider tape you can now trim your felt strip along the taped edge so that the tape strip is about ⅛" (3mm) deep. This will help to reduce the height of the finished pom pom.

5. Stick the coloured string to the exposed tape in loops about 1" (2.5cm) in from one end of the felt strip.

6. Roll the felt strip up tightly, starting at the end with most string stuck to it.

7. Using some fast-drying liquid glue (Superglue, Diamond Glaze, Glossy Accents) stick the whole shebang to a small scrap of card and you're done!

These are super-quick to make - I decided I needed a smaller pompom than my kit samples for a page I was making at my crop on Saturday and it took maybe 2 minutes to make one with a 2" (5cm) strip of felt (though I didn't add the contrasting threads).

Some memories from my days as Girl Guide in the Swallow patrol
as told here.

Of course, I've used papers and card from my February Counterfeit Kit (with the addition of a MS deep lattice punch, a QK texture folder, Man Oh Man Sizzlit dies and some punched butterflies) and have based this on a vertically challenged version of my Just One Sketch sketch. It also fits rather nicely with this week's UKScrappers' challenge and Julie Kirk's Month of Sunrays too :o)

Note To Self

2012-02-06T05:00:00.206Z

Welcome to my regular readers, welcome fellow counterfeiters from Helen's blog or the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog and of course welcome to anyone else who has stumbled across me in their surfing - take a seat and have a look at what I was up to last week:

Crop Circle's Note To Self is the kit-to-copy over at the CKCB this month (well actually there is a choice of two to copy but I've avoided the pink one LOL). I loved the bright mish mash of patterns, colours and journalling spots in the alternative kit, but where to start with the counterfeiting?

I noticed that there were lots of letters featured on the papers and searched through my stash for colourful examples ... but found only numbers. Ever one to change things up, I grabbed them and started matching other parts of the kit ...

colourful circles √
multi-coloured stripes √
chevrons - I'll make them from the stripes √
semi-circles for borders and patterns - I grabbed some circular punches √
journalling spots in a mix of colours √ plus stamps to make more if required √
lots of words and phrases to embellish with √
tiny alphas in various shades and fonts √
index cards & file tabs - another punch and a Sizzlit die will do the honours here √
felt pompoms - I adapted an on-line tutorial and counterfeited my own √

Mmmm - I'm not entirely convinced that anyone would
mistake the two kits as twins - distant cousins perhaps?!

Supplies:
Scenic Route's Sierra Place Sonoma (red & cream numbers on the reverse),
Create and Enjoy from Basic Grey's Colour Me Silly collection (will it never end?) along with Demerit, Home Room and monograms from their Recess line
Daidy D's Beacon Hill Stripe
Art Appreciation, Study Hall, borders & journalling cards from Cosmo Cricket's The Boyfriend collection
Bits & Pieces and High 5 from Clubhouse by Dream Street Papers (journalling spots & brown on their reverse sides)
MLS Blackberry Mini Alphas, Websters Pages Storytellers alphas, Adornit Tiny Whoopsy Teal alphas, American Crafts Peacock Mini Marks rub-ons
Scraps of Seaglass by K&Co for the word-fetti

Various tools to help me counterfeit have been made ready, and I'll be adding some embossing folders to make up for the lack of corrugated card!
There was no mention of cardstock in the kit list, but I can't manage without it for matting, journalling, titles etc so I added some sheets of yellow, green, orange and some new (to me) teal coloured kraft-core cardstock from Core'dinations.

Please come back ~~in a couple of days~~ for my pompom tutorial. In the meantime, do pop over to Jen to see her interpretation of the kits-to-copy!

Carry On Camping

2012-02-05T10:00:00.006Z

Having joined in with each and every month's Sunday Storytelling during 2011, I was a little miffed with myself for missing the very first one in 2012. Hey ho - never mind - here I am with some tent tales for February.

In my quest to make pages for my BOM I was looking through old photos and found yet another photo of me stood by the apple tree in our front garden. It seemed to be the place to stand - I have a variety of photos of me with every length of hair, wearing new school uniforms, trouser suits, emerald green hotpants, yellow T-shirt and matching knee length socks (nope never going to share that one!) and also me in my Guide gear:

I loved being a guide and worked towards several badges for baking, local history, path-finding, sewing etc. I remember one of the most exciting things about our weekly meetings was being in the school building in the evenings! It had such a different atmosphere at night: all those echoing corridors and tempting cupboards! The really brave amongst us even peeped into the boys' toilets!

Guiding also gave me the opportunity to go camping. My family had long ago decided that they preferred proper beds, rain-proof roofs and indoor flushing toilets so I had never been camping before. I went away with them for a weekend camp first to make sure that I could cope with life in the wild and happily signed up for a week long camp near East Grinstead (my friend Claire may well be revisiting the very same site this year with her Guide troop). Back in the day there were fewer rules and regulations about health and safety and so some of us were transported, along with tents, cooking equipment, food and bags in the back of a furniture removal van! We all thought it was very exciting but my present day self is aghast at the thought of it!

The high spot of the week for me was falling asleep under the stars when it was our patrol's turn to sleep outside the tent. I also enjoyed tying sticks together to build "tables" and "shelves" for inside the tent - they generally collapsed if you walked too close to them or lashed out an arm in the middle of the night but it was something to rebuild during the enforced post-lunch rest hour: we didn't have to sleep but were to stay in our tents off our feet! The latrines were at the other end of the field and, while not off-limits during this time, crawling across the field was a bit of a nightmare as the cows had only recently vacated, leaving surprise packages here and there! Wellington boots were required footwear as they didn't let the ooze anywhere near your skin and were quickly rinsed clean if you missed a step.

Less happy memories include the rain coming into our tent on the first night - nobody had told us NOT to touch the inside surface and we thought it was strange that the more we touched the bigger the drips of water ... until it was practically raining inside the tent and we had to decamp (literally) into the First Aid tent for the rest of the week. The weather improved, allowing us to sleep out, get stung by wasps that crawled inside our wellies and dried off the top of the cow pats making them less gooey to tread on. Unfortunately that also meant that they could be picked up (exposing the still oozy, smelly under-surface) and flung at other people, sometimes rather too accurately - I never have quite forgiven a certain "friend" for aiming at my head instead of my boots! YUK!

Want a less filthy tale? Have something ~~smutty~~ sunny to share yourself? Pop over to Siân's place for more memories.

P.S. The page prompted by the photo is already done, but has to wait a while as it's using the only-just-announced-outside-the-Master-Forgers February Counterfeit Kit!

P.P.S, It's now up on my blog here!

Five on Friday #3 (Fonts)

2012-02-03T11:30:00.001Z

Reviewing my blog posts from the beginning of last year I came across one where I had hand-cut my stamped title (always less scary than stamping directly onto a nearly finished page) and where I admitted to suffering occasional pangs of electronic cutting machine envy: all I have is a Sizzix Sidekick and a few second-hand or sales alphabet dies. As I said at the time, I soon get over it when I remember that I have free fonts, a printer and a something to cut with! I then promised to share the computer fonts that I love to hand-cut for titles ... the following week!
HA!
I'm afraid that didn't happen, but I'm here today to resurrect my (also long neglected) "Five on Friday" theme and hereby present to you:

Five Fonts I Like to Hand-Cut

This is the same font as the Banana Frog stamps from the aforementioned page and it's great to print out directly onto your card or patterned paper. There are no fiddly middle holes of letters to worry about so it's easy peasy to do.

This also comes with a bold version that is the inverse i.e. coloured dots on a clear letter (with a coloured outline). Upper case only and you could just cut around the outside edges and leave the "holes" in place on letters like A B D O P Q R and even G.

The next three fonts can be printed out onto the front of your card or paper, but I tend to reverse them using my printer settings (or flipping them if they are in a suitable word processing package) and print them on the back of the paper or card, preferably in draft or outline mode to save on ink.

This uni-case font is a pretty close match to the one used by Basic Grey for many of their alpha stickers - great for adding a monogram to match.

I love the flicks and curves on this font, but it's easier to cut if you choose upper case letters only. I'm told that cutting with a craft knife on a glass mat is the best way to cope with the more difficult fonts, but I generally manage with a combination of my Fiskars fingerblade on a normal cutting mat and the occasional use of curved detail scissors. Slow and steady wins the race - and if you snip a tiny bit too much off you can always reprint or stick a flower over the join (see below)!

I have the Banana Frog stamps to match this one too. The vowels come in upper and lower case variants with the rest of the letters being a mix of both. Cutting it out is a bit of a labour of love to be honest, but I do love it so I'm happy to labour! Make your title BIG & BOLD & SHORT to minimise your pain!

These fonts are all free from various sites: Steelfish Outline, Budmo Jiggler, Cafe Rojo, Tennessee Heavy SF, Pharmacy. Only three of them have the £, $, ¥ and € signs as well as the important punctuation marks like !, ?, ", &, and various brackets - I hate it when I choose a font, only to discover that half the characters I might need are missing - but for titles I can generally cope without the currency signs!

Do you like to hand-cut your titles? What fonts would you recommend?

January's Numbers

2012-01-31T09:00:00.005Z

Earlier in the month I bit the bullet and made a page about my goals for 2012 - craftily mostly crafty, as I know full well that major life-style changes are more difficult and less pleasurable to effect!

Click here to read more
Januaries (!) in numbers

I've managed 2 pages for my BOM, 1 of which is put away already; I've de-cluttered the dining room, the utility and made a start on my bedroom; I've not only remembered two birthdays in good time, but sent home-made cards and made some in readiness for next month too! I've joined in with several on-line challenges and now I'm joining in with Julie Kirk's "My Month In Numbers". Julie doesn't scrap her month, though some of her friends do. I fully intend to make a page a month, but will blog the numbers first and see what happens!

So here goes:

84 = £ spent on a new tyre after a midnight mounting of the kerb outside our friends' house caused a flat! None of us were dressed to change tyres by moonlight, but luckily our friends had a torch I could hold while the men-folk got down & dirty putting the spare into place!

75 = the approximate number of Black Dice watches that No.1 Son didn't want for his 22nd birthday - we eventually found just 1 that had the right combination of colours of strap, fascia and hands (at a price we were prepared to pay). Sometimes I wish that on-line shopping didn't give us quite so much choice - there is something to be said for going to a real shop and selecting something from the things they have in stock that we can actually see, touch and try on for size!

13 = the number of people attending our 10th crop. Though as usual I only managed 1½ pages and even they weren't 100% finished!

2 = new recipes tried: Harvest Pork Casserole with Apple & Parsnip was not an unmitigated success thanks to our dinner guests turning up about an hour later than anticipated. The Grilled Pears with Stilton we had as a starter was much better, partly because I didn't start cooking that until after they'd arrived. Simple too - toasted baguette, covered in watercress, peeled, sliced pear and slices of Stilton which is all grilled until attractively browned. The watercress was not very obedient and kept poking out from under the pear, even tipping it off the bread, and the bits that were exposed to the grill were ash by the time the Stilton was melted. It all got eaten though - but another time I think I'll try spinach leaves instead.

2 = also the number of Book Club books I have read this month - "Room" by Emma Donoghue was my recommendation for December and was just as thought provoking a second time around. Thankfully the rest of my group also found it a good read - always a worry when I've chosen the book! This month's book was "The Crying Tree" by Naseem Rakha; quite a slow starter with two, rather confusing, time strands at the beginning, it explores the effects of the murder of a teenage boy on his family & friends, his killer and the prison governor. There are many, many secrets to uncover and while I suspected some of them, the final chapters had plenty of surprises. Tissues required though!

228 = £ saved on buildings & contents insurance in just 5 minutes! To say that I was surprised when the renewal quote came over 50% higher than last year would be an understatement - shocked, but certainly not speechless! I immediately phoned to complain and the insurance company immediately found me a better deal which came out £7 cheaper than last year's policy! Good news, but why couldn't they have done that in the first place?

4 = the number of hours driving to & from Bangor to spend 3 hours with No.2 Son. Well it was one way to spend a day off work and did allow us to treat him to some supply shopping and a lunch in Weatherspoon's. Shame about the atrocious weather - alternately windy, rainy and haily (is that a word?) We also got to see inside his house (he didn't have a key to the front door when I dropped him off in August last year), but still haven't seen inside his room as he'd apparently left that key at a friend's house - Yeah right!

& Now For Something Completely Blood Splattered!

2012-01-29T12:21:00.001Z

Did that get your attention? LOL
No, I haven't been careless with my craft knife, just attempting to get with the program and splat some ink/paint onto a page in a random artful way. Like having banners everywhere, I just don't "get" it. Or at least not on every page! However, over at UKScrappers and on her blog, Shimelle is doing a monthly challenge to get us to try out lots of "different" techniques; this month they included splatting, small square photos, paint under titles, writing in more than one place, adding stitches & glitter ... all on one page! Too much for me in one go, and not all all-that-different to what I already do, so I picked the "scariest" one (the splatting) and a couple of the others that I am comfortable with (small square photos, writing in more than place) and produced this:

I'm pretty happy with the page, but part of me does think that my brown paint splats do look like dried blood! Maybe I should have chosen grey paint to splat with?

It's another page for our Barcelona 2011 holiday album: we topped off our wonderful cycling tour day with a cookery "course" in the evening. As the journalling says, it didn't quite live up to the hype, but it was a lot of fun (aided by the liberal quantities of strong sangria that we made during the evening). Three of us had never eaten paella before and despite not being a great seafood-eater I thought it was delicious.

That's my January Counterfeit Kit almost used up ... I'm now down to scraps. Take a look at the back of this page to see how I was struggling to get a 12x12 out of it!

Confetti Time

2012-01-28T05:00:00.030Z

Challenge number 3 for January over at the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog is to use confetti! "Too much mess!" I screamed, but they ~~didn't listen~~ couldn't hear me from across the Atlantic!!! The other Master Forgers have no doubt been good and produced something totally in line with the challenge, but I have stuck to my guns and chosen to interpret the challenge in a non-messy, minimalist fashion ... with a card:

My poor step-mother has fallen and broken her wrist and I wanted to wish her a speedy recovery. I've used a teeny tiny heart punch to make my "confetti" hearts along with my Threading Water punch and both sides of the Blue Ridge Paisley paper from my January Kit. The alpha stickers are an added extra from My Little Shoebox.

By way of compensation for my rather sparse confetti, here is another card made from January's Kit, with counterfeit pearl dots made with Ranger Liquid Pearls, counterfeit mistable ribbons made with Promarker coloured bedsheet, that same border punch, some flower punches and the addition of Cosmo Cricket alpha stickers:

My One Sketch

2012-01-26T09:18:00.000Z

Here's my sketch for Miss Smith's Just One Sketch Class. Still way behind on the prompts thanks to the feed issues, but hopefully I can catch up a little this weekend. I started fiddling about in Photoshop Elements before deciding that there was nothing wrong with good old pencil & paper (& marker pen & scanner LOL).

Thanks to some welcome extra feed-back about my "style" as seen on my example pages I've added a couple of extra points (thanks guys):

Layering and overlapping √
L shapes: either formed with the photos and papers or the photos themselves √
Curves: curved shapes or at the very least rounded corners √
Not a lot of visible journalling √
Big, bold title (Julie) √
Not wishy-washy or frou-frou (Helen) √
Framing (Siân) √

Just One Sketch Class

2012-01-24T00:01:00.001Z

I signed up for Miss Smith's Just One Sketch Class as I am a sucker for a good cause - she's raising money for Girl Guides (in Armenia?) - and I love sketches. However Blogger isn't playing ball, so I missed the beginning of the class and keep missing the prompts. Luckily a few of my blogging friends are also taking part so when they post about the class I do get a reminder of sorts to get off my posterior and search for the prompts!!

First off we had to choose some favourite pages and analyse what features they had in common (click on them for a closer view if you're a glutton for punishment LOL):

I've purposely only looked at single 12x12 pages although I do like double paged layouts and also scrap some 8½x11 pages. It was hard enough choosing just these!

Well I see:

Layering and overlapping
L shapes: either formed with the photos and papers or the photos themselves
Curves: curved shapes or at the very least rounded corners
Uneven titles to squeeze large fonts into a small space or titles split over several lines with mixed fonts
Quite full pages
Not a lot of visible journalling
Maximum 2 patterned papers

What other factors do you think these pages have in common?

All That Glitters

2012-01-22T05:00:00.003Z

Welcome to the second of January's challenges for the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog. This one was to add glitter, bling, sparkle, pizazz to your project! But I had nothing glittery in my January kit - so I had to improvise in the way that we counterfeiters do LOL!

I took some unloved brads, and a beautiful, but not-the-right-colour star-shaped brad from Susanne's swap packaging and got busy with VersaMark ink, some glittery embossing powder and my heat gun:

Transformation complete, I set to work on my page. Remember how I failed on my JYC? Well I also gave up on my 2011 Project 12 after only 2½ months! Which was a shame as I love my Project 12 album from 2010, and I love the year in review hidden tags I did for JYC 2009 and JYC 2010. So I decided that I'd do a double page summary for the year, based on a lovely sketch over at Scrap365 magazine's website.

The year was a bit hit and miss with photos (hence the Project 12 fail so early in the year) so I couldn't find one decent photo for every month. Instead I made sure we were all on there with a couple of feature photos representing some of our year's activities.

I had fun decorating each of the circles at the top of the tags - with snippets of my counterfeited Pink Paislee Mistable Ribbons, some of the contents of my counterfeited October Afternoon Flower Sack, a few buttons and the glitterfied brads. My month names are stamps from a Scenic Route set and the free font is Veggieburger.

In my January kit I had two ways for counterfeiting the mistable ribbons - fabric (strips torn from an old sheet) and paper (border punched tissue paper) - and I promised to let you know how I got on with them.
I haven't tried actually misting on them (no mists LOL), but started by colouring them with two shades of Fiberscraps Tintz: dabbers which dispense a colour-wash a bit like very watery paint. Both took the colour well, but the tissue paper distorted and crinkled really badly as it dried. It took a while for the fabric to dry, but I used some of it on my 2012 goals page for the first CKCB challenge.

From top to bottom: un-touched original tissue or sheet strip
2 samples with Tintz
5 samples with Promarkers

Then I tried Child No.3's Promarkers out on them with much better results: a great range of colours with plenty of decorative potential using the blending pen and contrasting shades. Being alcohol-based, the ink dried really quickly and the tissue paper didn't crinkle at all. It does crease though - I'll have to get the iron out before using any of it! The fabric has taken on a starchy stiffness after colouring with the Promarkers - very different to the untreated or colour-washed samples.
On balance the fabric has worked better and if I had a die-cutting system that could cope with fabric my counterfeiting would be complete!

P.S. I haven't joined in with a Thirsty Thursday Challenge from A Trip Down Memory Lane for a while, but I reckon I've covered P for Polka-dot, Portrait Photos and Parents (that's us!) pretty perfectly ... as well as R for Red and Review!

Passing The Page with JSquared

2012-01-20T12:00:00.101Z

A month or three ago I was invited to take part in a Pass the Page venture by my friend Julie (aka JSquared). She collected a group of 14 of us together and sent a page off into the ether to be scraplifted by each of us in turn. The person before me in the chain was Ginger (if she sent you here then you're on track, if not, you might like to start at the beginning with Julie here). I scraplifted Ginger's lovely page to produce one for our Northumbrian holiday album:

We visited Alnwick Gardens where we enjoyed an interesting and informative guided tour of their unique Poison Garden (as well as exploring the beautiful water features). It's under lock and key as there are some seriously dangerous plants in there along with others like tobacco that generally kill in more indirect ways. They even have a special licence from the Home Office to grow cannabis - well out of reach of visitors - with a sign exhorting us to "Keep Off The Grass"!!

Can you see the resemblance to Ginger's page? I kept the punched border and layered horizontal strips of papers, but needed more photos and less journalling. The papers are from my home-made November Counterfeit Kits.

I wonder what elements were kept or discarded when Lisa-Jane scraplifted my page? Before you pop over to see, you should know that there is a prize available on this Pass the Page hop, kindly supplied by Deb Clark, all you have to do is comment (here, there and everywhere)!

Real Life Confessions of a Christmas Misspent

2012-01-16T23:00:00.005Z

This is where I come clean ... remember the post on December 10th where I admitted to being 5 days behind with journalling my Christmas ... well that was it ... I didn't manage another page! Not a single one.
My JYC album just didn't suit - neither the time available, the photos I had, nor the things that happened! I barely had time to read the prompts, let alone mull over what to scrap for the day. At a certain point I realised it would be too draining to have the project hanging over me all through January, so I chose to let go, move on, call it a day!

Instead I decided to take inspiration from Siân's December month in numbers & Alexa's Christmas numbers journalling and capture some of our festive memories in a single page.

The page is based on the monthly challenge sketch from UKScrappers and uses my January Counterfeit Kit, an X-cut border punch, some of the packaging from Susanne's Christmas packages as well as the most perfect embellishment from inside the packaging!
This is indeed REAL life - not everything works out the way you plan it:

sometimes you can't find the power lead for the tree lights and have to buy new ones (only to have the missing lead magically reappear)
sometimes teenagers simply will not cooperate for a photo (or even get out of bed on Christmas morning to open their presents)
sometimes you get so carried away with the food shopping that you don't need to return to the shops for nearly a week, even though they are only closed for one day!

But there's still a whole load to be thankful for including:

a son who wants to help with the cooking (if not the washing up)
a daughter who loves to help decorate the tree (and would be happy for it to be up all year round)

Oh and for the record, a 14lb turkey is about 3 days too big for our family of six (plus the dog)!!

Why Not?

2012-01-15T05:01:00.002Z

Over at the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog we were challenged to scrap our hopes, dreams or aims for the new year. Hmmmm - I'm not a great one for resolutions as I am even worse at keeping them so I thought I'd give this one a miss.
However, reading some of the blogs of my crafty friends, awash with posts of their good intentions, I began to feel a little left out. Then the CKCB supplied a lovely sketch by Creative Scrappers and then I saw Ruth post her 12 goals for 2012 - most of which were spookily perfect for me - so I thought "Why not?" and decided to join in after all.

In the end it was quite tricky to narrow it down to just 12 goals - but I've picked a mix of personal & creative, small scale & life-changing, fun & functional.

I wonder if this public statement will actually help me achieve more ... I hope so!

P.S. This one page ticks both the "BOM" and the "join in" boxes: it fits the CKCB challenge, the UKS Weekly challenge (with something old - my January Counterfeit Kit, something new - borders created with my Xmas gift from Child No.3: a Threading Water punch, and bling - clear gems coloured brown with my Sharpie pen) and the monthly challenge over at Sarah's Cards - result!!! I've even put it straight into my Book Of Me album.

Ding Dong Merrily

2012-01-12T15:23:00.000Z

Sorry, sorry, sorry - I had promised to draw a winner for my festive give-away on New Year's Eve - and totally forgot!!!! So my huge, heartfelt apologies to anyone who was in the draw with a better memory than me!

Congratulations to: DAWN

Drop me an e-mail please with your address and I'll package it up to you!

And while I'm catching up on things: massive THANKS to my Counterfeit Kit Swap Sister Suzanne for the lovely gifts and embellishments that were so beautifully packaged in our Christmas Embellishment Swap:

I've kept all the usable bits of the packaging and used some of it up on a page already ... watch this space!

Ten on the Tenth: Nails

2012-01-10T12:02:00.001Z

I've been enjoying some mother-daughter time over Christmas, helping Child No.3 with one of her favourite gifts - a nail art set. There was also a pot of gold crackle nail varnish in her personal Christmas cracker so she has plenty of scope for fun manicures in the future. However on Christmas Day itself we had fun trying out several of the ideas from the inspiration booklet:

From left to right:

Purple base colour with gold crackle effect
Black & white Yin-Yang symbol on white base
Turquoise base with pink & white swirls
Black base with pink & turquoise starburst & gold dots
Purple base with multi-coloured butterfly
Yellow & red chevrons
Glitter base with red, white & blue stripes
Daisies on a green field
Pink base with turquoise & white swirls
Red base with gold crackle effect

Not bad for a first attempt - my favourite to do was the daisy field and appropriately enough, Child No.3 liked No.3 best! Which is your favourite?

For more Ten on the Tenth posts please pop over to Shimelle's blog!

A New Year of Counterfeiting

2012-01-06T05:01:00.058Z

HAPPY NEW YEAR fellow counterfeiters! Welcome to the start of our kit-copying for 2012.

If you have hopped over to me from Helen's blog then you are on track with the Master Forgers' Kit Hop; if not then you may want to pop back here to start at the beginning to see them all.

This month we were given links to an array of kits from Cocoa Daisy as our starting points. I know my limitations and only picked one to copy: the December 2011 Add-on.

“Cocoa & Marshmallows”

Having none of the actual papers in my stash, I decided to look for a “match” for the October Afternoon Button Box paper and go from there. Eventually I found some Polar Bear Press Blue Ridge Paisley which had a similar dark colour base with a lighter coloured intricate all-over pattern printed on top.

That was stored next to the Cabin Fever Dots from the same range which “matched” the regularly spaced flowers on one side of the Jillibean Black-eyed Peas paper while some Holly-Jolly paper from Daisy D’s made a bright alternative to the other side. I replaced the retro cards from the reverse of the OA Button Box with yellow/cream text blocked paper (manufacturer unknown!).

I had planned to counterfeit the OA Farmhouse alpha stickers by stamping white letters onto matching cardstock … but I had Polar Bear Press stickers to match already!

Instead, I had a lot of fun reproducing the OA Flower Sack of die-cuts by simply punching scalloped & pinked circles, flowers, butterflies & hearts from scraps of paper and card. I even cut some words from some OA paper scraps that I found!

That just left the MME Pearl swirl and the Pink Paislee Mistable Ribbon … well I have made my own swirls with Ranger’s Liquid Pearls before and I’ve got two things to replace the ribbon: some strips of fabric torn from an old cream sheet, cut on one edge with pinking shears and some border-punched tissue paper. I shall see which works and let you know.

ETA - I've reviewed my attempts here!

As it was originally just an add-on kit, it’s light on embellishments, but I’ll pull buttons, brads, stamps etc from my stash as required. I’ve added some plainer cardstock and paper to pad it out a little with an extra sheet of the Blue Ridge Paisley as it has a grey textured reverse, some Basic Grey Indian Summer Dogwood paper for contrast and some blue/grey & cream card.

There you have it - my take on Cocoa & Marshmallows; for more counterfeiting of Cocoa Daisy's inspirational kits please pop over to Jen who will certainly have something stunning to share with you.

Thank You

2011-12-28T04:59:00.024Z

Two little words - but so important! Here in the blogging world I often come across people who strive to add a little "Today I am grateful for ..." sentence to the end of their posts. Some of you spend a whole month displaying a really keen attitude of gratitude. It's good to reflect on what we have rather than want we think is missing (most of which we could manage without).

Today it's my 2nd Guest Post over at the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog and it's all about saying "Thank you" - or rather it's about sending gratitude in a Thank You card! Over there I've shared some card inspiration to make things a little more interesting (without eating up too much of my/your precious time) - and I also linked from there back to here because I wanted to help make this card:

It's made using Tagxedo which regular readers will know that I love ... but if you have spent less time fiddling with it than I have, you may need some short-cuts to making a similar card (no point in re-inventing the wheel eh?!).

I loaded the following words:

merci danke~schön arigato tack~så~mycket muchas~gracias
спасибо dziękuję obrigado grazie toda~raba mahalo~nui~loa
kiitos bedankt ευχαριστίες takk diolch salamat
merci danke~schön arigato tack~så~mycket muchas~gracias
спасибо dziękuję obrigado grazie toda~raba mahalo~nui~loa
kiitos bedankt ευχαριστίες takk diolch salamat
merci danke~schön arigato tack~så~mycket muchas~gracias
спасибо dziękuję obrigado grazie toda~raba mahalo~nui~loa
kiitos bedankt ευχαριστίες takk diolch salamat
thanks:200:@0:#ff0000

The tilde (~) characters keeps associated words together and the text in red is the RGB code to make the word "thanks" appear in red! The 200 forces "thanks" to be the biggest word and the @0 apparently forces it to be horizontal (though I'm not convinced)!

All settings are the defaults apart from:

Respins:
Theme = Shades of Grey
Font = Euphorogenic
Orientation = H/V
Options:
Shape = Heart (the 5th variation - above the 2nd horse!)
Word: (I wanted some repetition of words other than thanks)
          Remove Common Words = No
          Combine Related Words = No
          Combine Identical Words = No
Layout:
          Max Word Count = 50 (stops the words getting unreadably small)
          Normalize Frequency = Yes (smooths out the variation in word frequencies between 3 & 200)
          Hard Boundary = Yes (makes the shape seem more defined)

Hopefully these settings will help you get started - you can keep altering options until you see something you like and the History Option is worth looking at if you preferred an earlier version - just click on it to reload it. Have fun and THANK YOU for stopping by!

Made It !!!!

2011-12-27T23:05:00.002Z

It wasn't like I was really having doubts. I mean, how bad do you have to be to get struck off the "Nice" list?

I'd done my bit and sent off my side of my Counterfeit-Kit-Master-Forger-12-Days-Of-Christmas-Swap. My swapee, Susanne, received the parcel just seven days later and was (secretly) opening her goodies across the pond. Meanwhile I was waiting ... and hoping ... and waiting ... and hoping ... but wait and hope as I might, the postman simply refused to deliver Susanne's reciprocal parcel to me!

Seven days passed ... then seven more ... and three times seven days ... what had I done to deserve being put on the "Naughty" list?

But then - on the the very last day before Christmas, while I lay sleeping soundly, the postman knocked loudly on the door, getting poor Hubby out of bed at 6:45am on his first day of holiday rest (~~ho ho ho~~ poor thing) and delivered a package that had flown the 22 day scenic route from America ... HOORAY!!

Well it was worth the wait I can tell you ... take a look at what was securely and beautifully packed inside:

Thank you so very much Susanne - I'm extending my Christmas gift experience by opening one (or more) of these beauties each day!

Jingle Bells

2011-12-24T00:04:00.002Z

Just one more sleep to go ... are you ready for the big day?

I'm nearly there with my preparations (although I'm woefully behind with Journalling my Christmas) and have just enough time to share a little something I made for a colleague at work. She had been admiring the anti-pickpocket dangly bells on purses (apparently handed out by the local police to victims of theft) but had been unable to find where you could buy them. She was understandably reluctant to go down the getting-your-purse-stolen-so-that-the-police-will-give-you-a-free-one route and I thought "I could make one of those" ... so I did. A few bells and some beads attached by wire to a clasp ... and hey-presto:

Naturally, having bought a whole bag of bells and clasps, I had to make a few more! Turns out they are the perfect size to go inside my Mum's Christmas cracker too! My colleague was chuffed to bits (she was too curious to wait until Christmas day to open her gift)!

I'd like to offer one as a seasonal give-away to one of you lovely (anywhere in the world) readers - just leave me a comment below and I'll pick a random winner on New Year's Eve.

Merry Christmas!!!

Satnav Strikes Again!

2011-12-22T14:48:00.000Z

Seems like it's not just me who struggles with a satnav!

P.S. Mine is now back on GMT - hooray for Google - what's the betting I'll now be an hour late for something next summer!

Seasons' Greetings

2011-12-18T12:00:00.003Z

At last they're done.
Presents and Christmas cards that is.
And delivered (or at least posted ... we shall see how well the Royal Mail does now that there's been half a dozen flakes of snow ...).
So now I can feel less guilty whenever I hear the clunk of the letterbox and the thud of mail hitting our doormat ... but some of my crafty friends are not making it any easier for me by sending gorgeous, clever, crafty hand-made cards ... as I have only sent out shop bought ones!

Take a look at these lovelies from Tracie, K, Mel, Alexa and Claire:

A special thank you to K for the yummy extra in my card
(possibly slightly tempting to someone en route
as both the card and the envelope were ripped!)

Thank you so much for finding the time my friends ... if I had known you in 2005 you'd have definitely received a hand-made card, but having overdosed by making over 100 that year, I only ever make a handful these days!

Regular readers will know that I love to play with Tagxedo - and have whiled away several hours with it to help me make scrapbook pages (here & here) and blog posts this year (here & here). Lately, I've been playing around with it for card-making and this is the most recent result:

If you want to know exactly how to selectively colour your text you can check out the Tagxedo blog ... or, alternately, pop back here between Christmas and New Year for my next Counterfeit Kit Challenge post!

Recycle, Recycle, Recycle

2011-12-13T04:59:00.000Z

Today it's my turn to do the post at the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog and it's all about recycling magazines to make gift toppers. I've shared 3 tutorials that I found on the Winter-Wonder-Web - check out my post here - and I also linked from there back to here because I've adapted the Paper Pom Pom tutorial from Nice Package that I shared, as I didn't have the necessary ribbon punch. I experimented with the same 1½" circles to see if it would work and made my prototypes:

And here's one topping off a gift!

Then I tried it out with a heart shaped punch - using the title panel of old "Which?" magazines that I was clearing out. I've used 7 punched shapes for each pom-pom plus an extra, slightly thicker one punched from a glossy magazine cover (or scrap card would do too).

Fold each of the seven shapes in half vertically, score the fold line and glue them together to form a stack.

At this point (unless you are a whole lot more careful than me) it might be worth inking the edges of your stack of shapes, as well as the spare base piece, so that the edges are uniformly coloured and no annoying white bits are showing.

Finally sandwich the centre of a length of ribbon between the opened pom-pom and the base shape - you are now ready to gift wrap.

Alternatively, if you are making toppers in advance of your gift-wrapping, adhere the opened pom-pom to the base shape and attach to your parcel with a glue dot or strip of double-sided tape when you are ready.

If you don't have a heart or circle punch I'm sure it would work for any symmetrical shape - even a hand-cut one. If you give it a go please let me know what shapes work for you.

Ten on the Tenth: Not 10 JYC!

2011-12-10T21:00:00.002Z

This Ten on the Tenth post was supposed to show you my progress so far with my Journal Your Christmas album ... only the progress is somewhat minimal. I've made the bones of my album and notes about what to write, which pictures to include; I have plenty of embellishments and stickers and tags from the Kaisercraft kit that I won earlier in the year. BUT although I worked on it at today's full day crop, perhaps there was a little too much jollity, cake eating and secret santa-ing, because I have only completed 5 pages rather than 10!

Dec 1st - Panto, Dec 2nd - Crop Xmas Meal, Dec 3rd - Christmas Cards
Journalling is on the tags behind the photos/in the pockets

Dec 4th - Dreams of Decent Photo Ops, Dec 5th - Advent Calendars

So I'm still 5 pages "behind" (I know, I know, Shimelle reckons you can't get behind with this class, but I have 5 empty pages in my album that need filling NOW)! I don't quite know why I'm torturing myself by looking around at all the other things that I'm behind with ... but there are a number of other Un-Finished Objects lurking around here:

I haven't made a start on the mdf NOEL that I bought at the NEC at the beginning of November - I wonder if it will be ready for next Christmas?

Then there's the decopatch paper I asked Santa for in 2007 ... used on a pen and a coaster pen-pot, but not yet for the purpose for it was intended for: prettifying my crop box!

Back in 2009 I made a lovely matchbook mini with the help of my friend eClaire ... it's still awaiting any photos!

Then there's the Christmas star album I made at my very first Scrapping Day Retreat towards the end of 2007 ... also devoid of photos!

I've been making a perpetual birthday calendar since January 2010 but because I wanted to include a variety of my best nature shots taken during each calendar month ... it still has several months to go as I've never managed to take the right sort of photos at the right time during June, July, September, October or November!

This is becoming the story of my life! Are my eyes bigger than my crafting time? Do you have this many UFOs?

Hoera voor Sinterklaas!

2011-12-06T00:01:00.006Z

Some of you may know that we used to live in Holland when Sons No.1 & No.2 were small (in fact they were born there). One tradition we loved to join in with was the early December excitement and gift giving around December 5th/6th.

As you can seen, Sint & Piet didn't exactly factor in shoe size when leaving gifts!
Three of those packages will have contained the appropriate yummy chocolate initials!

There's a post all about St Nikolaas traditions on the CKCB today if you want to know more and get some creative inspiration from fellow Master Forger Lisa.

P.S. We also had fun before becoming parents with Sinterklaasavond "surprises" but that's a whole different post!

I'm late! I'm late! For a very important date!

2011-12-04T00:25:00.006Z

Welcome readers to the final Sunday Storytelling for 2011. I've managed to join in each month with a variety of stories from my childhood, my children's childhood and the present day and each month I have enjoyed reading a whole host of interesting tales from other joiner-inners! So I couldn't miss out this month - I'm a finisher-offer :-)

My story begins early one Friday in late November. I was making my final preparations before setting off for a weekend away with several fellow bloggers. Not one of whom I'd met beforehand. Scary stuff. Although I'd followed several of their blogs for a while, and exchanged e-mails with a few, it wasn't as if I really, really knew anyone and yet here I was about to scrap with them, eat with them and even (thanks to the budget bunk-bed accommodation) sleep with some of them!

The Telford Ten (not really that scary in real life):
Lesley, Alexa, Lizzie, Julie, K, Clair, Mel, Ruth, Jo & Me

Not to worry though, I told myself - you have mobile numbers, directions, supplies (both of the paper, scissors, glue variety and edible) and you've got your big girl pants on. I had offered to collect Ruth from the station as it was more or less on my route - which had the added advantage that we'd both have met one person before arriving officially! So I programmed my satnav and set off with plenty of time to spare - I did not want to keep her waiting!

Now, I am frequently 5-10 minutes late because things crop (pardon the pun) up at the last minute and today was no exception: I remembered I had to get some cash and buy milk to leave at home for my family, but I had factored in plenty of leeway - no problem! Off I set and made good progress southwards. The train was arriving at 13:50 or thereabouts and after half an hour or so I decided to check my predicted arrival time on the satnav ... OH NO ... I must have miscalculated (bad show for someone with a degree in mathematics) as it was saying that I was due at the station at 14:10!

Oh dear, oh dear - what a terrible first impression I was about to make. Poor Ruth - left waiting at a strange station! I put my foot down and drove as fast as I safely could - shaving a minute off the arrival time here, another one there ... getting closer and closer to the dreaded 13:50. Maybe her train would be late! That would be good (sorry Ruth). Luckily the traffic was fine and, despite going slightly wrong on one of the final roundabouts, I pulled into the car park at exactly 2pm. Phew - just 10 minutes late. Not bad considering!

I immediately phoned Ruth to tell her I'd arrived ... and she said she was still on the train. Thank goodness I thought - her train is late! (deeply sorry Ruth)

Yup - it's leaving in 5 minutes she continued. Leaving? I thought. Where??
I'll be there in about 50 minutes. What?
OK I said, nonchalantly, I'll see you soon. Strange. Maybe I'd got the train time wrong?!

It took me a moment or two of glancing back and forth between my watch, the arrival time on the satnav and the car clock before the penny dropped ... my satnav was still on British Summer Time and I wasn't 10 minutes late ... I was 50 minutes early!

It might have been budget accommodation but it was very beautiful

I didn't let on to Ruth or anyone else as incompetence wasn't quite the vibe I wanted to put across for the weekend. The cat is well and truly out of the bag - but I'm hoping it will now just add to my charm for the rest of the Telford Ten!

Want to read the final 2011 exploits of other bloggers? Pop over to Siân where there will be plenty to choose from.

P.S. If anyone knows how to reset the clock on a TomTom Go 520 please let me know because it's still stuck on BST!

So Many Projects ... So Little Time ...

2011-12-01T23:00:00.002Z

More haste, less speed - that's what they say. And they'd be right! Today is December 1st and I have been so busy and rushed and overwhelmed with all the things that suddenly needed doing that I haven't had a moment today! Part of the reason is that I am rather snowed under with projects for December.

First off I needed to prepare two blog posts for the CounterfeitKit Challenge Blog - they aren't counterfeiting a kit this month and we Master Forgers have combined forces to do daily posts to keep the creative juices flowing. I'd prepared the first one ages ago, but the second one didn't get finished until yesterday. Phew - and then there was a little crafty gift exchange that needed to be sent off today as well! Not helped by having to pick Child No.3 up from an after school meeting (that overran by half an hour), missing the parcel collection at the village post office and having to drive in the rush hour to drop it off at our sorting office!

Also, I have a place on Cheryl Johnson's (free) "12 Days of Christmas" photography course: it started today but it was the festive self portrait that I was working on last night- today's task will have to wait until the morning!

Then of course there's Journal Your Christmas which also started today - I haven't even read the prompt!!! But my album is ~~ready~~ nearly finished ... (I haven't touched it since returning from my Bloggers' Weekend away ooops)

And there's more - I was rushing to get to work this morning but I couldn't locate my handbag. Yesterday had involved several trips out with Child No.3 and I'd left it on the back seat of our nippy little car ... that Hubby had taken to work! Arghhhh! So I grabbed a spare credit card to pay for fuel for the nearly empty car he'd left behind. After my 4 hour shift at the theatre, which is hectically busy preparing for pantomime season, I drove to the supermarket to fill up the enormous tank of our larger car, queued to pay and realised ... I do not know the PIN number for this card!
OMG It was soooooo embarrassing! Luckily the enormous queue was behind me so I only had to make eye contact with the cashier: Take your time - are you sure you don't know the number? No, in fact I'm not sure I ever have known it. The card I normally use is in my handbag in the back of Hubby's car. Any other cards? No, they're in my handbag in the back of Hubby's car. Any other method of payment? No, my purse and cheque book are in my handbag in the back of Hubby's car. Any form of ID? No, my driver's licence is in my handbag in the back of Hubby's car.
Luckily the supermarket has a form for people like me ... headed "Idiot" ... so I filled it in and promised to return within seven days to pay.

If the next few days are as mad as this one has been, I'm not sure I'd find the time to go, so I returned to the garage this evening just to be on the safe side! Of course, that was after picking up Child No.3, posting my parcel, fitting in a meal and attending the dress rehearsal of the panto which opens tomorrow night.

I'm certainly glad that this day is behind me!

Home-Made with the CKCB

2011-11-27T05:01:00.046Z

Welcome to November's Counterfeit Kit Challenge Master Forger Blog Hop With A Twist: we're joined this month by members of Scraptastic who are sponsoring the hopping! Leave a comment or take part in one of our two monthly hops to be in with a chance of a prize! You may have joined me from Helen's blog in which case you are on track, but if not then you may want to pop back here to start at the beginning and see all the wonderful home-decor projects that have been created from this month's Counterfeit Kits.

I was so tempted to do something Christmassy as I have several projects in the pipeline, but I thought you might have overdosed by now ... plus the colours in my November kit didn't lend themselves to the forthcoming festivities at all!

Colourful Original by Maxine

I spotted the clear instructions for this button and bloom bouquet over at Truly Madly Crafty's Blog although mine is much smaller than theirs as I was using scraps of paper from my kit (2½"-3" squares rather than 4"). The Basic Grey paper wasn't double-sided so I daubed over the back with some toning ink. I think I'll add to my bouquet whenever I have toning scraps.

Check out the tutorial - no special dies are required, though a pair of Tim Holtz super scissors came in very handy for cutting through 8 layers of paper!

Now please hop over to Jen who has also made something lovely for you ...

No Purchase Necessary!

2011-11-26T00:01:00.003Z

Today is Buy Nothing Day - join me in not spending any money!

Teeny Tiny Envelope Mini

2011-11-24T12:53:00.000Z

As promised here is are the instructions to my Teeny Tiny Envelope Mini ... a project I made for the Green Buttons Retreat back in September. It's cheap as chips to make using money envelopes, scraps of paper and card, but showcasing dozens of small photos or quotes.

Get Set

Prototype #1 with no cover

Prototype #2 with a protective cover

Musical Mini Book - more photos here

The instructions can be viewed, printed and downloaded from here. Have fun with it and please link back to this post so that I can see what you've created!

Xmas Preparations

2011-11-20T23:23:00.006Z

A few days ago I posted that I had things to prepare before Christmas ... shopping, cards, puddings ...
but there was another thing that I had to get done before December started: my prep for my third year of Journal Your Christmas!

I was lucky enough to win a prize from the Kaisercraft blog earlier this year and what better stash to use for a December journal than their Silly Season Range?! A lovely mix of red, white, green and pink papers with matching rub-ons, die-cuts, gems as well as stamps and journalling tags.

This year I decided to base my album on tags and wanted to use manilla envelopes to make pockets behind the pages from the pad of paper. I thought it was 6"x6" but after a page or two of preparation when nothing quite worked I realised that the pad is actually 6½" square (!) That's a new one on me!

For each page of the album I sealed two envelopes and sliced ⅛" off one short end to open up each envelope again. I layered the envelopes onto the back of one piece of patterned paper and covered them with a second sheet. Semi-circles cut out with a 2" punch give me access to the pockets:

By varying the placement of the envelopes I have varied where the pockets appear - left, middle or right along the top of the page, or top, middle or bottom of the side.

I have joined the pages together with strips of white card punched with my X-cut border punch ... I think I may yet have to sew the spine to the cover if the pages start to sag ... I'll have to see what happens once all the tags are in place, let alone photos, journalling spots and embellies!

If I was starting this project from scratch (don't you just love hindsight!) I'd have prepared the spine before sticking each pair of patterned pages together - no border punching would have been necessary as the edges would have been concealed.

As you can see, I'm not done yet - and the cover needs to be made too. I'm going to a Blogger's Retreat next weekend ... meeting several fellow bloggers, including, Mel, Julie, Alexa and Lizzie for the very first time ... so I'm hoping to put the finishing touches to this then.

In the meantime, here's a sneaky peek at some more Christmas preparation I've been doing!

ETA - revealed here!

P.S. That's ATDML's Thirsty Thursday K for Kaisercraft, JYC Kit and ~~manilla~~ Kraft all sorted!

Musical Mini-Book

2011-11-17T23:00:00.004Z

A little while ago I attended a scrapbooking retreat with my UKS house-mates (the Green Buttons) down near Birmingham and had a fabulous time. There was plenty of chocolate, chat and creativity as well as a few challenges and some classes. I prepared a class too, which I called my "Teeny Tiny Envelope Album". It was made from those tiny kraft money envelopes you can buy for wage slips or lunch money or whatever, but can just as easily be made with larger envelopes too!

Here are some of the albums completed that weekend - each made unique thanks to different patterned papers, photos, ribbons and embellishments. I made one that weekend too ... using my September Counterfeit Kit ... to record No.3 Child's school music trip to Normandy this summer.

The letters on the front cover have been heat embossed with PSE's "Woven Tapestry" - a lovely textural finish. Inside the cover there is a concertina of six money envelopes, each containing a tag.

The way that it's folded you can "read" it like a book and then turn it around to "read" the other side.

There's plenty of room for lots of small photos and even more space for journalling or extra photos on the tags! Just as well because her camera had about 100 photos from the 4 days! I managed to include 19 in her mini-book.

This would also make a handy little "brag" book for inside a handbag - it measures around 4½" x 3" and the photos are all nicely protected by the cover.
And I'm still playing along with ATDML's Thirsty Thursdays - so this will be for I for Interactive (and inked?). I'll be back this weekend with K for Kit, Kraft & Kaisercraft as I'm just about ready to share my JYC prep!

ETA: Instructions can be found here!

Hola!

2011-11-15T08:46:00.003Z

Sometimes there just isn't a photo to go with a story is there? Perhaps the camera was forgotten. Or maybe nobody would cooperate. Or perhaps you were just too caught up in the moment to remember to snap something.
I certainly found myself caught up in the moment back in April when we had just arrived in Barcelona for a few days celebration of our Silver Wedding Anniversary with the offspring and No.1 Son's girlfriend in tow. As usual everyone had left the organising to yours truly ... and I had researched things to do, places to go and methods of transport so that we could pack in lots of fun stuff like a bike tour, a visit to the famous market, etc, etc.

We had a wonderful time ... BUT ... it all went very wrong, right at the beginning! The downloaded instructions for getting to the hotel from the airport didn't quite match up to the map at the back of the charity shop guide book to Barcelona and neither of these matched up to reality. Child No.3, the only one who was studying GCSE Spanish and could say more than "Dos Cervezas por favor", decided that she was unable to read or speak Catalan and consequently clammed up. We watched in horror as famous landmarks receded from view through the train windows and there were fewer and fewer fellow passengers to ask for directions, let alone passengers likely to be able to speak English! We managed in the end though - I am not averse to collaring complete strangers in a foreign land and am pretty fluent in "Point".

This page was done for the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog's Tag Challenge this month ... having no photos, but still in possession of a walking map of Barcelona, I decided to punch out some tag shapes from significant sections and use the page I'd started from this month's Counterfeit Kit here. Like the stamping? LOL! I've used a cross-head screw to fit in with a (forthcoming) challenge over at UKS! And this page will do nicely for ATDML's Thirsty Thursday Challenge with J for Journalling and Journey featuring rather heavily - I love a good multi-purpose page :D

What do you do when there's no photo for a story you want to scrap with?

11.11.11

2011-11-11T05:01:00.007Z

Source

Today is special - it's Remembrance Day here in the UK - we hold a two minute silence at 11:00 to remember the men and women who have died in the service of their country.
In the last couple of weeks many people have been wearing poppies sold by the Royal British Legion - they are celebrating their 90th year of helping with the welfare and support of injured troops and their dependants.
Many other Commonwealth countries will be remembering their fallen today.
I'll be at work at 11:00 and hope that we'll be able to ignore the phones and observe the silence there and to reflect on the bravery shown and the sacrifices made by so very many people.

Today I have also been invited by Beverly to take part in another sort of celebration of the date (a palindromic occurrence that hasn't happened for 100 years (the date not the invitation!)). She asked us to share 11 photos, 11 things to do before the end of the year and 11 things that we've read/seen/experienced during 2011.

11 Photos from 2011 - more or less one a month
Ranging from a Mother's day text to a rooftop sculpture in Italy,
from 100 years of theatre to our first home-grown peas!

As for good intentions ... they mostly revolve around Christmas: make more than two Christmas cards, post our Christmas cards in plenty of time, make some frozen Christmas pudding, make an early start on Christmas shopping (please stop feeling smug if you've already done all of yours - I call Christmas shopping in November very early!), clean the oven in advance (I don't want guests to see the state it's normally in) and invite family to spend some festive days with us. The non-Christmassy ones are as follows ... plant some more peas and onions for next spring, tidy up the rest of the garden, de-clutter the downstairs rooms, finish off the year's bookkeeping and get myself organised for a Blogger's retreat at the end of the month!

The 11 things that have happened during 2011 ... well I blogged about quite a lot of stuff:

I helped start a local crop which is going from strength to strength (we hoped for 8 members and have 20 on the books)
I found out about the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog and became a Master Forger
I took a Shimelle class called Blogging For Scrapbookers and "met" lots of new blogging buddies
I was selected as a contestant in the UKScrappers Scrap Factor contest and made lots of "hybrid" pages including these
Our Silver Wedding Anniversary was celebrated in Barcelona with the family
I started regular work at the local theatre
No.1 Son gave us a few extra grey hairs but we could see the funny side!
I made him a Smash book and what's more he used it!
A year of blogging was marked by my first giveaway
We had a few days away in York
We started growing some fruit and veg and have actually harvested some crops (including the peas above)!

Pop over to Beverly's at BE Glorious to see what other "elevens" have been shared and perhaps share your own too!

Ten on the Tenth: Books

2011-11-10T08:00:00.005Z

Have you heard about World Book Night? It's a bit of a grand name for something that took place in March of this year and was held only in Britain and Ireland. A million books were given away by 20,000 "givers" - and one "giver" attends my reading group so I received a book first hand. I then spotted that some of my blogging buddies were also "givers" and I received another book by blog giveaway (which was then passed on here).

The second World Book Night will be more worthy of the name as it will include readers in the USA and possibly other countries as well. It's scheduled for April 23rd 2012 - UNESCO's International Day of the Book and Shakespeare's birthday - Happy Birthday Will! The U.S. selection has yet to be finalised, but the applications to be a U.K. "giver" and hand out 24 of next year's 500,000 books are being taken now. I've applied. It got me thinking about which books I'd recommend:

My all time favourite book has to be "The Time Traveller's Wife" by Audrey Niffenegger. I'm hoping that it might be "my" book if I'm selected as a "giver". It is intricate and interesting and funny and incredibly sad. It follows Henry and Clare as they meet, fall in love, marry and try for a family ... complicated by the fact that Henry has a genetic disorder that sends him back and forth within his own time-line so that sometimes he's old in the time of his youth and at others he experiences events in his future. It's a book that makes you think between chapters!

My second choice from the World Book Night list for 2012 is "Room" by Emma Donoghue. This is an amazing book, inspired by real events, and narrated by a small boy, Jack, who has never known anywhere except one 11 foot square Room. He sleeps in Wardrobe, eats at Table and has only Ma for company. Heartbreaking, inspiring, deeply affecting!

I had to pick a third choice book in my application but haven't actually read it (yet) so can't personally recommend it LOL! However here are a few of my other personal favourites (in no particular order) from the World Book Night Long List:

"The Handmaid's Tale"
by Margaret Atwood

"We Need To Talk About Kevin"
by Lionel Shriver

"Cloud Atlas"
by David Mitchell

"One Day"
by David Nicholls

"To Kill A Mockingbird"
by Harper Lee

"Never Let Me Go"
by Kazuo Ishiguro

"The Kite Runner"
by Khaled Hosseini

"The Curious Incident
of the Dog in the Night-time"
by Mark Haddon

Looking at my selection there isn't a great deal of comedy here although I do enjoy funny books too - perhaps that's a topic for another day?
Are you applying to be a World Book Night "giver"? Do you like similar books to me?

For more Ten on the Tenth bloggers please pop over to Shimelle's blog here.

Cutting up my Counterfeit Kit

2011-11-07T00:01:00.010Z

Welcome fellow counterfeiters (and everyone else that reads here - do leave a comment and I'll come and say "Hello" back) and my apologies for the slight delay in posting the details of my kit. It was ready, it was documented, it was actually being used ... but yesterday was Storytelling Sunday as well and I haven't yet figured out how to post about two different topics on the same day and keep them separate.
"Technologically challenged" it says over there in the side-bar → → →
which is embarrassing for a Computer Science graduate, but it's true.

Anyway back to the Counterfeiting in November: this month we have Scraptastic Club to thank for the kitS-to-copy. I fell in love with the rich warm colours of the Home Sweet Home Kit (apart from the pink that is!) and set about my stash to see what I had.
As you will see I went for browns, creams and oranges with touches of teal. I didn't have any tiny houses (I wouldn't use them if I did) and pulled some buttons instead. I'll make my own paper rosettes as required and will be trying out my brand-new Sew Easy with some brilliant birthday hemp threads from Hilary (which are a perfect match for the original kit, even including some pink). The glittery red alphas of the original have been replaced by glitzy blue ones, but just in case I struggle with them, I've thrown in some all-purpose brown ones too.

Paper (whole sheets unless otherwise stated):
Citrus Flourish from Scrapworks' Canvas Collection (double-sided)
Checked Out and Playful from My Mind's Eye's Ooh La La collection (both double-sided)
Daisy D's Boston Damask
Scrapbook Walls Pool Tiles Vellum (½ sheet)
Fusion Tangerine and Archaic Fossil by Basic Grey
Daisy D's Holly in Winter Blue
Dream Street Papers {Miss}fit Tough (double-sided)
K& Co's Folded Wood Tape Measure
Primrose Damask by Bo Bunny & brown swirly embossed Bazzill (some circular off-cuts)

The reverse sides plus
some Teresa Collins Chic Bébé Boy Ledger paper

Embellishments:
Daisy D’s Top 10 Random Lists cardstock die-cuts
MM's Flea Market Distressed Foil Aplha Stickers
Sei Poppy Alphabet Stickers
Cosmo Cricket Tiny Type alphas
A selection of buttons from my stash
Hemptique Spring Crafter's Cord
Jenni Bowlin Journalling Spots
Home-made Bingo Cards

Then there was the Add-on Kit to counterfeit: with chipboard shapes, a selection of ribbons, lace and ric-rac and some matching Ooh La La border die-cuts:

If you think my counterfeiting is starting to look familiar then well spotted: there is quite a lot of left over stash from my September kit (papers, ribbons, scraps, alphas, buttons) and I've added more papers from the same Ooh La La Collection that I used then.

There you have it ... but wait, can you put up with a little more? I've used it already! Several of my blog buddies have been cutting up paper as directed by Shimelle in her Pretty Paper Party. Before they've even chosen their photos. Eeek!!! The idea is that having cut it up you will actually use it. So that's what I did first thing at my Saturday crop.

And here is the first page I made - about our visit to Warkworth Dunes (I told you about that one Sunday in October) using the one sheet of patterned paper I didn't cut up ... plus one that I did along with a Pagemaps sketch.

Those glitzy alphas weren't too scary after all ... especially with a little added blue ink to take some of the shine off them! But the brown mini alphas were too strong for the page so I improvised by stamping with a Studio G mini-alpha set and cutting the letters out to make my own "stickers". Am I a Master Forger or what?!

Keen to carry on, I started playing around with some of those cut up papers and I rather quickly produced this ... unfinished page! You'll have to pop back later in the month to see how it turned out!

Dental Drama

2011-11-06T00:01:00.003Z

Do you hate going to the dentist?
Most of us don't like it much do we?
We have twice yearly check-ups plus the occasional visit for emergency treatment thanks to a lost filling, a chipped tooth or an abscess. Luckily neither I nor any of my family are afraid to go - it's just a chore that has to be done!

However I can remember one occasion, many, many, many years ago, when I was extremely reluctant to attend my 6-monthly check-up, despite the fact that I'd be missing some school.
It was the missing school bit that was upsetting me. Now don't get me wrong - I was a good student during the week but I was even better at relaxing at the weekends. It's just that the Primary School that I was at had got an attendance reward scheme. So it was worth being there. As long as it was every day!

At the end of each term there was a final assembly when, if you had been there every single day of the term, your name was read out and you were presented with a selection box of sweets. This was a really big deal! Sweets were special!! And if you attended every single morning and afternoon of the whole year you were given a GIANT selection box of sweets!

Now I had already managed to claim both the Autumn and Spring prizes ... and this dental appointment was putting the ultimate prize at risk! Naturally enough, this cut no mustard with my mother and I was collected one afternoon around an hour before the end of school.

By the time the end of year assembly arrived I had come to terms with the fact that an hour off school had saved my teeth twice over. So you can imagine my surprise and glee to hear my name read out as one of the pupils who had been marked present in the register at the beginning of each summer morning and afternoon ... and then imagine my utter, utter joy at hearing my name read out again to take delivery of that GIANT selection box ... as well!!! More sweets than I had ever had in my possession in one go in my life!

Source (as I have not one photo of either a selection box or me in this school's uniform)

I can't imagine today's schoolchildren caring enough about a selection box of sweets to ensure that they attend every day of school. It can't have been an incentive because as soon as you'd had one day off with a cold - you might as well stay off for a week afterwards! It wasn't that great for your teeth either really was it?!

Today's post was brought to you as part of Sian's Storytelling Sundays - pop over there to share your own and read lots more.

P.S. If you've dropped by to see more details of my Counterfeit Kit for November it isn't here yet (sorry) ... but will be up on the blog tomorrow. I was busy cutting it all up yesterday and have already made a page with it by way of compensation ;o)

The Fruits of My Labours

2011-11-03T22:16:00.002Z

A little while ago I shared the fruits of our Silver Wedding Anniversary August Bank Holiday planting. You may recall that there wasn't a great deal that was edible other than the lettuces and tiny tomatoes. Well we are still enjoying lots of great salads (remarkably slug free still) and although we are down to the last half dozen teeny, tiny tomatoes, there are still plenty of (not so) Little Gems and a few Lollo Rossos in the pipeline ... well a plastic cloche actually!

I decided to play safe with the majority of the remaining lettuces in case the frosts appear. Next year I must remember to leave enough space between rows to accommodate the cloche as several lettuces were a bit squashed when it was deployed! I must also remember to plant fewer seeds at once as there are only so many salads you can eat in October/November.

Meanwhile the pea flowers have produced lots of pods ... I'm wondering just how long to leave these before trying to eat some peas - they are just tiny bumps at the moment, barely visible through the pods.

Today we harvested the first three raspberries (one each) ... delicious! There are still flowers being pollinated and loads of raspberries ripening very slowly on the canes ... who'd have thought we'd finally be eating them in November!

And finally I also pulled up the first half-decent carrot. It was remarkably straight (the hours spent extracting builders' rubble from the soil seems to have paid off) although still pretty small - a bite each and it was gone!
I did wash it first ;o)
P.S. That finger is for scale, I'm sure you can tell which one is the carrot!

Extreme Scrapbooking

2011-10-31T00:01:00.001Z

Ever tried scrapping beyond the page?
I've made cards, a canvas or two, some mini-books and the odd bit of wall art.
Child No.3 has recently excelled herself with my scrap supplies ... completely off the ~~wall~~ page ... in the name of Halloween fancy dress!

Normally she looks like this ...

... well actually that isn't completely normal as she generally uses a little bit of mascara and wears her hair loose. However, after borrowing some Rhonna Farrer swirl stamps, some black ink, green face paint and a sprinkling of glitter, she looked like this ...

A few punched leaves attached with glue dots to a hair-band and the application of some red false eyelashes and an even brighter wig and she was transformed into ...

... her version of Batman's enemy and eco-terrorist, Poison Ivy!

Fifty poses in front of her camera later and she had a new Facebook photo :D

Of course I had to make a scrapbook page about it, just in time for Halloween!

I've used a Pagemaps sketch (twisted onto its side) with some more of my October Counterfeit Kit and also scored some points over on UKS for the Weekly Challenge to use some printed journalling, 10 embellishments and something free (the font, Satellite, and those eyelets ... yes, I know that they're probably maple leaves, but I am so glad to get rid of them as they've been hanging around in my original hand-me-down stash from 2006).
Oh and while we're challenge combining, this page fits in with H for Holidays over at ATDML's Thirsty Thursdays.

What's your craziest use of scrapbooking supplies? Are you dressing up for Halloween ... or Facebook?

Sticker Magic

2011-10-27T05:01:00.091+01:00

Welcome to the October Counterfeit Kit Blog Hop for the Master Forgers - if you found me via Helen's blog then you are on track, if not then you may want to pop back here to start at the beginning so as not to miss out.

"Miss out on what?" you ask. Well, this month over at the CKCB the prize sponsor is Momenta Stickers and this month's blog hopping theme is to work some magic with stickers - I can't wait to see what sticky creations the rest of the Master Forgers have come up with!

I have two projects to share with you plus an apology. The apology is because neither of my projects uses my October Counterfeit Kit - it's half term holiday at the moment and we've taken the opportunity to visit friends and family so my creative time has been severely curtailed!

I have made use of my August Counterfeit Kit though - on a page based on a sketch by my good friend Mary that I started last month at the Green Buttons' Retreat. My kit had a large sheet of multi-coloured Polar Bear Press stickers that toned beautifully with the papers but I needed the title to stand out more from the page. My first attempt was to colour over them with some (borrowed) Promarkers. I left them on the sticker sheet while I coloured them so that I it wouldn't matter if I went over the edges. The finish wasn't brilliant because a) I've never used Promarkers before and b) the sticker surface was pretty glossy. On top of that the exclamation mark wasn't plain like the letter and its pattern showed through a little.

So I decided to detract from my rubbish colouring by over-stamping with Saddle Brown Stazon. I placed the stickers on some cellophane packaging and used a striped circle stamp by Artemio. The pattern on the exclamation mark is now practically invisible!

This page will go into my Egyptian Holiday album: my friend and I ate lunch on our balcony each day, but we discovered that 2 seconds wasn't quite enough time for me to get back to my chair after pressing the camera button

My second sticker project is from quite an old page, one of my favourites, created for a challenge from Indigo Mill.(I miss that shop). Here, I took a really nasty, cheap, glossy paper and transformed it using un-loved peel-off stickers and a couple of shades of chalk ink. I removed some adhesive from the peel-offs by applying them to my skin a few times and then placed them randomly onto my paper. The ink was dabbed over the stickers onto the paper. The stickers were carefully removed and I repeated the process until I was happy.

I reckon both of these ways of altering stickers would also work well with part used alphabets - you could mix and match alphabets by colouring and stamping them to match each other or you could use up all those unloved consonants to make a subtle background. Let me know if you give either of these a go.

In the meantime why not hop over to Jen who has more sticker magic for you and don't forget to drop by Momenta Stickers to see what they have to offer.

P.S.You know I like a good combination challenge ... so my first page ties in with October's Die-cut Challenge over at Scrapbookers Anonymous - thanks to the Tim Holtz rosettes!

Keeping Calm

2011-10-25T11:38:00.003+01:00

I was catching up on my blog reading after a few days away (visiting lovely friends) when I saw Siân's post about keeping calm and ... *insert phrase here*. She wanted to know what phrases her readers liked to add. I was Googling to see what was out there and came across a fabulous website, Keepcalm-o-matic, where you can fill in your own words, add your own images and produce your own poster. So here is mine:

As I said to Siân, there aren't many problems that a cup of tea cannot help with! Further reading on the Keepcalm-o-matic site led me to discover that the phrase KC&CO may be under threat ... take a look here!

Magic Tulips

2011-10-23T05:01:00.015+01:00

As you may know tulips are pretty important in Holland and were once more prized than gold. Not surprising then, that they feature in the Dutch theme park, the Efteling, one of the oldest theme parks in the world.

I lived in Holland as a child and enjoyed many visits; pretty much everything I remember is still there (plus lots more) and we have visited several times in my adult years (before and after starting a family when I worked in Holland) and we returned in 2006 to reintroduce the boys to their childhood memories.

When I was a child, one of the most magical animatronic sets was where a sorcerer flies on a magic carpet between two towers, serenading yellow tulips into life from the window of one tower, before returning to revitalise the red tulips around the other tower. Our visit in 2006 coincided with some of the worst August weather and we rarely had to queue for more than 5 minutes for the various rides, but I was amazed to come to the "Fliegende Fakir" and find that we were entirely alone. Nobody else there at all! Can you see the puddles and the wet jeans?

"This attraction hasn't changed at all since I first saw it over 40 years ago;
what was different today was that we were, briefly, the only people watching
the tulips rise and fall to the sorcerer's magic flute."

My October Counterfeit Kit was great for this page as it brightened up the soggy photos and reflects the magical feeling the Efteling evokes in me. I also took up the third CKCB challenge this month: to pile the layers on a page. I have cut up a strip of Kaisercraft Allsorts Passionfruit, punched loads of circles from a sheet of Allsorts Blue Heaven, layered my photos and added a few squares from my Life Happens paper to match the bottom of my ancient (rather creased) Creamotion yellow paper - so glad that that is ~~covered~~ used up!!!

P.S. The use of punched circles and Creamotion paper also ties in rather nicely with Scrapbookers Anonymous' C Challenge :D

Welcome to the World

2011-10-19T08:00:00.003+01:00

One of the things that amazes me about blogging is how many people stumble over here to my little corner of the world wide web ... and even more interesting to me is where they come from.

When I started blogging I thought a few UK(S) friends would come over to say "Hello". My circle of regular visitors has expanded around the world thanks to joining in with the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog and a couple of Shimelle's classes (including Blogging For Scrapbookers). It's lovely to establish links and friendships across the web through creative blogging. However, just as I read blogs without making my presence known, hop, hop, hopping from pillar to (blog) post, I know that I have unknown visitors ... and I'm curious ... who, where, why?

Well, the "why" is probably from hop, hop, hopping like me, as my blog is not readily searchable. The "who" will never be known unless they say "Bonjour", "Goede dag", "Labdien", "Aloha" or even "Saluton"! But the "where" ... that I have solved to a degree!

Early on (get me, this blog isn't quite 15 months old yet!), I came across a fun free gadget - Flag Counter - which I installed at the bottom of my blog to keep track of all my visitors in a visual way. Currently the flags in my collection range from the United Kingdom to the United Arab Emirates.

On April 1st I had an extra special flag for the day - a Pirate who last visited on October 12, 1492!

And now I have had another special visitor - my 50th flag - from Estonia. Tere tulemast!

Are you curious about your unknown blog readers? What's your favourite blog gadget?

Sweet Scrapping

2011-10-15T05:01:00.035+01:00

The first challenge over at the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog this month is to take inspiration from sweets ... or candy as they say across the pond! I have scrapped about sweets before (chocolate to be specific) but I wondered what edible delight could provide a nugget of creativity for a project with my October Counterfeit Kit. In the end I chose to use some seaside rock as a starting point.

No! Not this kind of seaside rock ...

... nor this, although they make a tasty seaside souvenir ...

... yes, it's this sort of sweet, minty goodness ...
with letters around the outside, but all the way through the inside too!

I decided to echo the cross-sectional view of the rock for my title. Using MS WordArt's "Button (Pour)" shape (with a blank middle line) and Budmo Jiggler I printed directly onto the plainer side of some Kaisercraft Allsorts Passionfruit paper. The photo is from our holiday in Holland in 2006 - I actually thought that the album was complete, but I found a few photos in the "reject" stack and decided to make some room for them! Here, Child No.3 is looking a lot more than 5 years younger than she is today (or is it that she now looks more than 5 years older than she was then?). Her legs could barely support her after a long and tiring day out; I think she really wanted to be carried!

The black bobble trim from my home-made kit was stuck to tape on the back of the striped circle to mimic the way that the seaside rock has a skin of colour. I also took inspiration from the paper rosette post on the CKCB and "altered" the rosette I made with my new Sizzlit die by punching holes on each fold before construction.

P.S. Are you playing along with A Trip Down Memory Lane's Thirsty Thursdays challenges? I am. And I was lucky enough to win a yummy prize last month. Why not pop over there to take part in the challenges from E onwards and you could be in with a chance of a prize. This page fits in with F for Family as well as taking inspiration from a Favourite Food!!!

Ten on the Tenth: Grow Your Own

2011-10-10T12:50:00.001+01:00

Our most unusual Silver Wedding present was a vegetable patch - a gift that goes on giving - or will eventually!! That was back at the end of May, but it took me so long to prepare the soil and our "summer" was so inhospitable that nothing much got planted until late August. We have had some edible treats and there is plenty to eat in the pipeline, but the truth is that it's now a race against time for several of the crops. October started wonderfully and gave everything a big boost, but has now reverted to windy, cold, rainy normality. So I'd better document the (potential) harvest before the remaining plants curl up and die!!!

So here, in alphabetical order are the 10 crops (and I use that word in its loosest sense) from our vegetable patch:

I can't really take credit for these as the tree came with 10 tiny apples on it. Four fell off between the garden centre and the tree's second planting (I moved it after a day in the wrong place) but we harvested the remaining fruit, removed the spiders webs, cut off the odd lumpy bits, and really, really enjoyed the crisp sweet apples.

The carrots are, as yet, an unknown quantity as I really have no idea how you know when they are ready to eat. Someone told me they start pushing up the soil when ready, but I suspect that was a joke! The lettuces are thriving, but are actually meant to be Little Gems and look nothing like what I buy from Tesco!

The Lollo Rosso lettuces are doing well and I have tried a couple of leaves which were tasty. So far (touch wood, fingers crossed etc etc) the crushed eggshells have deterred the slugs - or perhaps the slugs haven't yet made their way across from my flower beds? The peas, however, have a long way to go before they can be harvested - the packet reckons I can sow in late October for an early crop so I'll plant some more soon.

The single red pepper was green when it gave up its weak hold on the mother plant and fell to Earth. Now it's red but extremely wrinkled. I shall not be opening a market stall any time soon! The salad onions are growing reasonably well, but again, I have NO idea when they'll be ready to harvest! Why oh why is soil so opaquely black?!?!

We love raspberries and grew these very succesfully before we built over the previous veggie plot with our extension. We now have canes growing inside potato sacks in an effort to contain the runners. The crop is going to be massive - providing the frosts stay away!! Tick tock, tick tock!!

Much less successful are the strawberries. Not one has ripened to something close to a recognisable fruit. I'm beginning to think that these are just too much trouble for the taste.

And finally there are the tomatoes: the smaller ones are meant to be that small (from a cherry tomato plant) and are super sweet and delicious but have quite chewy skins; the larger ones are from a survivor from last year's efforts - I salute that plant's dedication to life as it has had no help at all from me and yet it has triumphed over frosts, droughts, draughts and floods!

There you have it - my ten on the tenth - for more of the same (though probably entirely different) please head over to Shimelle's blog here.

Two Tutorials For The Price of One

2011-10-08T16:28:00.001+01:00

I was planning to do a quick photo how-to for the felt flowers in my October Counterfeit Kit and then got several comments and one request about how I'd made the blinking images of this month's kit-to-copy stop blinking! Happy to oblige - just scroll down past the flowers!

Felt Flowers

The cutting mat has 1cm squares to give you an idea of scale

These are really quick and simple to make - simply cut 5 (or 6 or more if you prefer) squares from felt. Trim these squares to circles (or leaves or other fancy shapes) and cut a notch out of one end. Take a shape and pinch the two sides of the notch together and sew through them; repeat with the next shapes and form a circle of petals; tie off your thread. Insert a brad through the centre of the flower and arrange petals evenly.
My Tim Holtz scissors were brilliant for this as they allowed me to cut through 5 layers of felt in one go.

De-animating blinking images

First off - when you see a blinking image on a web page you seem to be able to stop the animation by pressing the ESC key (this works in Firefox and Explorer - not sure about other browsers). There are browser settings to permanently disable animations but I'll leave you to Google that yourself.
Here's the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog blinking blinkie ... try pressing ESC and see what happens! If you want to restart the blinking (glutton for punishment eh!), just refresh the screen. Timing of the ESC key allows you to freeze the animation at any point in the sequence.

If you want to save a copy of just the first image (actually called a frame) of the animation - simply save the blinkie to your computer (it will have a name ending in .gif), open it with some sort of photo editing program (e.g. MS Picture Manager) then save it as a jpg file (e.g. via Export in MS Picture Manager). Simples!

The problem comes if you want to extract one of the later frames from the animation ... then you need to involve a gif editing program! This is a bit beyond me ... but I did find an on-line gif-splitter which will separate the frames of an uploaded animated gif file. You can then save an individual frame back to your computer or download a zipped file containing all the individual images. (Quite) simples!!

Hybrid Counterfeiting

2011-10-06T05:01:00.181+01:00

There's been more forgery going on in my house this month - this time the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog has chosen the September 2010 kits from Little Red Scrapbook. Initially I thought that the colours of the main kit were rather too pink and floral ... but the alternative Halloween theme kit was a little too ... (how shall I put it?) ... a little too Halloweeny for this Brit! We do have fun at Halloween here, but it's simply not on the same scale as in the USA and I have a limited number of ghostly, ghouly, pumpkin filled photos to scrap.

So I decided to brighten up the main kit, but I think the Halloween kit's colours had a subconscious influence and what I've ended up with is possibly a mix of the two kits - a hybrid perhaps?!

Paper:
¾ sheet each of Spirit (1) Imagine (10) from Basic Grey's Colour Me Silly collection
Green Diamonds (2) - unknown manufacturer?!
Passionfruit (3), Lime (4), Blue Heaven (5) double sided papers from Kaisercraft's Allsorts range
The Fifth Ad (6) from Gin-X's Desperately Seeking Summer range
½ sheet Rainbow Life Happens (7) by Christina Cole
Tangerine Sweet Stripes (8) by Doodlebug
Yellow graded paper (9) by Creamotion

Cardstock:
Black lacy cardstock (1)
Black, golden yellow, lime, lilac and kraft (2-7)

Embellishments:
Free hybrid tags from Becky Higgins Project Life 2009 (8)
Gypsy Harvest Doodles by Daisy D's (9)
Basic Grey Colour Me Silly alphabet stickers (10)
Various black blooms and home made felt flowers
Various ribbons

I'm a bit nervous of this kit now that's it's all together - it is VERY bright (brighter than the snapshots, which were taken late at night, show) and I don't have any particular photos in mind to scrap with it ... we shall see how successful I am as the month progresses ... at least it hasn't cost me a penny!

P.S. This month's CKCB Sponsor is Momenta - details of how to be in with a chance of a prize this month are here.

A-Z of me

2011-10-04T05:00:00.036+01:00

I've enjoyed reading a few of these A-Z posts around and about recently and thought I'd have a go:

A - Age: Old enough to know better!
B - Bed size: Super King
C - Chore that you hate: Cleaning shoes - delegated (by incompetence) to Hubby
D - Dogs: Happy to play/walk with my Mum's dog - happier still to return it
E - Essential start to your day: A mug of hot tea
F - Favourite colour: Blue
G - Gold or Silver: Gold - silver requires too much maintenance
H - Height: 5' 9" down from 5'10" - the weight of my years is beginning to tell!
I - Instruments you play: Calculator ;o)

I sold my bicycle to buy one of these ...
and it didn't even have an equals button!!!

J - Job title: Chief Cook & Bottlewasher - former IT Specialist - occasional Box Office Assistant
K - Kids: No.1 Son, No.2 Son & Child No.3 - all born at home
L - Live: Cheshire, UK
M - Mother’s name: Inga
N - Nicknames: Jemma (it's not my given name!), Jimjams, JJ
O - Overnight hospital stays: Cruciate ligament repair
P - Pet peeves: Apostrophe abuse
Q - Quote from a movie: "I'll have what she's having." (When Harry Met Sally)
R - Right or left handed: Right
S - Siblings: One brother, two half-sisters, two step-brothers, three step-sisters
T - Tattoos: Rather you than me!
U - Underwear: Comfy - I am not from generation thong!
V - Vegetable you hate: Asparagus
W - What makes you run late: Underestimating how long it will take me to be ready to leave
X - X-Rays you’ve had: Teeth, knee, neck
Y - Yummy food that you make: Chinese ribs, Nasi Goreng, frozen Christmas pud, Anzac cookies
Z - Zoo animal: Orang-utan

Storytelling Sunday Ten - Great Expectations

2011-10-02T00:10:00.036+01:00

Last year we had a lovely week in Northumberland - I've already made some pages about our exploits at Alnwick Gardens, Go Ape (plus this one) and Hadrian's Wall. During the planning stages, Child No.3 was taking a rather more active interest than normal - because she was allowed to bring along a friend! This was a first for us, as three kids are normally quite enough to have on holiday, but as No.1 Son would only be with us for part of the week and Child No.3's friend would shortly be emigrating, it seemed like the right thing to do. No.2 Son declined the opportunity to be embarrassed by his parents in front of a buddy and would happily have stayed home alone if we'd let him! So that left us with a search for self-catering accommodation to sleep 6 people in 3, preferably 4, bedrooms.

We discussed everyone's likes and dislikes, where they wanted to go and what they wanted to see; we researched tourist attractions, pored over the map and Googled places to stay. One cottage I had up on the computer screen was just yards from the beach and both Child No.3 & I rather liked it - we had visions of being able to spend lazy afternoons eating ice-creams on the beach, after mornings spent exploring Roman ruins and castle battlements.

However I later discovered that it wasn't available to rent when we were able to go ... and instead booked a super place near Hexham which was well placed for Northumberland's attractions and it had a hot tub! Trouble was that Child No.3 didn't really take in that it was a different cottage and was busy assuring her friend that the beach was in walking distance of the back door! Ooops! The nearest beach was 30 miles away on the other side of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and therefore a good hour's drive each way. Ooops indeed! We didn't let Child No.3 down completely though; towards the end of our week we managed a picnic at a beautiful, if windswept, beach. The two girls were happy to be in their swimming costumes with sand beneath their toes, but not quite brave enough to go swimming in the ice-cold sea.

However, there were other members of our group who don't particularly like a beach ... or sunbathing ... or picking sand out of sandwiches! It just goes to show: you can only please some of the people some of the time!

This story has been posted in conjunction with Siân's Storytelling Sundays. Pop here for more tales!

Still Life?

2011-09-29T21:43:00.002+01:00

Here's another page from my Green Button Retreat last weekend - from a misting and masking class by Ali. She generously shared dozens of misting inks, masks and templates so that we could all have a few goes with her techniques. This was my third (and final) attempt!!
It was all a bit random and uncontrolled for my mathematically ordered brain - but once I stopped trying to control the spray and allowed myself to "go with the flow" I really enjoyed myself. Thank you Ali for your generosity - perhaps I'll put some mists on my birthday list!

I used Ali's cogs and sequin waste masks plus two colours of blue and a lovely delicate shimmery mist to tone perfectly with No.3 Child's photos of a street artist we'd seen in Las Ramblas in Barcelona.

I used gold acrylic paint to stencil through the waste from a chipboard question mark and painted a variety of chipboard letters with a thick and lumpy layer of paint for my title. I don't know what I'd do without chipboard alphas in my supplies - I buy white or plain and cover them with paint, paper, embossing powder to go with my projects - they are so versatile!! Do you like chipboard? Why not check out what other people have been doing with chipboard here at Scrapbookers Anonymous. I'm also playing along with ATDML's A-Z challenge - with C for Cosmic Shimmer!

Shared Stamping

2011-09-27T05:01:00.254+01:00

Welcome to my post for the CKCB Master Forgers' Blog Hop - you may have joined me from Kim, or just happened by - in which case, feel free to catch up with previous hops by starting at the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog. This month's hopping is sponsored by one of the Master Forgers, Sherri, and her Etsy Shop selling Ippity Stamps.

I've just returned from the most brilliant weekend away: scrapping with friends old and brand new!! My UKScrappers team is part of a "house" and a bunch of the girls from our "house" teams got together for a meet up near Birmingham. A few of us had done classes & challenges to share and the weekend was packed full with creativity, chat and chocolate ... plus 3 meals a day with NO washing up to do! Heaven!!!!

One of the classes was given by my good friend Claire K. I knew in advance that it would be perfect for this post as she was sharing a stamping technique which is surprisingly quick and easy to do and creates a really effective decorative frame for your page! I saved some of my September Counterfeit Kit especially for this and, with Claire's permission, I took photos of my page as the class progressed so that I could share with you.

Choose a decorative CLEAR stamp, ink, a photo and base card or lightly patterned paper.
Decide what shape you want your stamped frame to be: circular, square, oval ... or something else entirely??? Cut the shape from scrap paper (I used the back of some unloved old stash but others used the inserts from page protectors).

I've used Kaisercraft Christmas Bauble stamps from their Silly Season line
It's worth practising the next steps on some scrap paper before you try it on your decent stash ... or have a go on the back of your page first!
Lay your scrap paper shape into position and keep it there with repositionable glue/sticky tak/paper clips/magnetic posts/paperweights/a third hand.
The stamping around the shape will almost certainly leave a gap or an overlap, so work out where you can conceal this with an embellishment cluster, title letters or a journalling block. Start stamping from this point, around the edge of the scrap paper shape - with part of the stamped image on the scrap paper and part on your background paper or card.

I lined up the centre of the bauble along the edge of the circle with adjacent images just about touching.
It didn't always work exactly, but nobody but me will really care!

Remove the scrap paper shape to reveal a crisp outline frame.

Gold Stazon (lent by Claire) was really effective on my cardstock
You can now use the paper shape as a template to cut patterned paper to fill the centre of the frame if you wish. (I decide to mix it up and just use a partially curved strip of paper across the bottom of my circle)
Place photo, title, embellishments journalling blocks etc onto your page, not forgetting to conceal that gap/overlap in the stamped frame.

Claire suggested using ric-rac/ribbon to outline the frame shape for added definition (or if your stamping has been less than perfect). Mine was good enough for me, but with 20/20 hindsight I did wish that my join had been a little higher up the page. I had to make quite a large embellishment to cover it up yet leave the page balanced.

As you can see I got carried away with another bauble stamp on my background and also used it to help make layered petals for my "flower". I toned down the Quickutz Blossom die-cut title lettering by overstamping with an Artemio dotted circle stamp.

Many, many thanks to Claire for a great technique (and allowing me to share it today) and a special thank you to a class-mate, Karelyn, who lent me her circle-cutting system for my photo mats. Aren't scrappers just the best, most generous people?!?!?!

The keen eyed amongst you may notice that I have supplemented my September Counterfeit Kit supplies with red cardstock and fancy ribbon ... but those pearls were in my kit, honest! I just attacked them with a red Sharpie pen!

Oh and I have one more stamping thing to share with you before you hop over to Margie for more stamping surprises ... a free e-zine of The Best of 2010 from Craft Stamper - a seriously lovely UK stamping magazine. Hurry though, as you only have until October 1st to download it!

ETA: Challenge combining as ever .... this is loosely based on Kaisercraft September Sketch #3, ties in with A Trip Down Memory Lane's "D" for Daughter and fits in with Scrapbookers Anonymous' stamping challenge - how many birds have I killed with this page? :P

100 Years of Company

2011-09-26T13:32:00.003+01:00

I have worked on a voluntary, casual and, more recently, part-time basis at my local theatre for ten years and at the beginning of the month, the theatre celebrated its centenary: 100 years of plays, concerts, magicians, ballets, operas, comedians, films, boxing matches, circuses and entertainment of all kinds. As part of the celebrations Illuminos created a stunning light show which was projected onto the outside of the building telling the story of the theatre's history. You can see the lion that attacked one of its trainers, the fire that ravaged the building, the ghosts that haunt backstage, the bus that was pulled through the streets by the circus strong man, and many famous faces that appeared there over the years including Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel. The live show was brilliant so I'm really glad that Illuminos have recorded it so that I can share.

Best watched in Full Screen mode (and for some reason it goes black for a couple of seconds, 3 minutes in)

September Stamping

2011-09-23T05:01:00.031+01:00

Over at the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog this month has been all about stamping - thanks to Sherri (a fellow Master Forger) and her Etsy Shop selling Ippity Stamps. Sherri is sponsoring this month's Blog Hops (on the 26th & 27th). Challenge #3 was to create an embellishment with stamps. I decided to take a plain manilla tag and see what I could do with a few scraps from my Spetember Counterfeit Kit.

I stamped a wood-grain frame directly onto the tag and added strips of patterned paper after running them through my EK Success border punch. I then stamped the leafy circle (by Artemio) three times onto blue & white patterned paper and punched the images out with a 1" circle punch. Finally I stamped the large dotty circle (also Artemio) once onto the same patterned paper and punched four tiny circles out of it. A little ribbon and some brown pearls and it was ready for a project. The scraps are from the page I made here for Scrapbookers Anonymous.

I'm away on a scrapbooking retreat this weekend and I wanted a quick card to give to the organiser ... a quick trim of the ribbon, a fold of some cardstock and the addition of some stamped letter tiles and ... hey presto! ... a card was created! I can see me making a lot more of these tags - they are a great way to use up scraps and can fit equally well on a page or a card.

The Traveller Has Returned!

2011-09-21T23:59:00.000+01:00

It all seems a very long time ago.

Actually it's two months since No.1 Son left on his travels to India, Cambodia, Vietnam and Bali. And two weeks since he returned - safe and sound! Some of you may remember my extra worries about his well-being following a mis-adventure while celebrating his exam results. His injuries did impact his journey - long coach and train journeys were even more uncomfortable than they might have been and trekking had to be contained in days trips. I was less than happy to hear about motor cycle "taxis" being used, especially as No.1 Son's dreadlocks didn't fit well into the supplied riding helmet!! But he has survived, with dozens of great tales to tell, hundreds of photos, several new culinary skills and a desire to do it all again!

I sent him off with a home-made travel themed smash book, but I honestly expected it to have more of an impact on his girlfriend; No.1 Son has never managed to keep a travel journal before. Imagine my delight to find that it was nearly full of his jottings and drawings and small trinkets. Apparently he would have filled it completely but for their total exhaustion during their seventh and final week - they simply sat reading books in the shade by the beach every day!! It has taken a bit of a battering and got "slightly" wet at least once, but it is bursting with details of places, names of new friends, dates of excursions, prices and exchange rates, warnings of scams, journey times and recipes, ...

Before & After

No.1 Son is no longer on daily pain medication, which is good, but the corset has stretched beyond usefulness in the tropical heat, which is bad. He's back to university at the weekend and hopefully a full check-up at the hospital very shortly after that. Phew ... I just can't stop worrying can I?

Wet & Wild

2011-09-19T12:43:00.002+01:00

Over on UKScrappers last week there was a fun challenge to use an advertising slogan as your title - and of course my mind went totally blank!!! I get this when I answer surveys too - no matter how hard I think, I can neither recall the product when told the slogan, nor remember the slogan when faced with the product. Yet while I'm watching the advert I'm usually irritated because I've seen/heard the combination so many times. Marketing budgets are wasted on my butterfly brain!

Thankfully Google pointed me in the right direction and I eventually found a 7-up slogan from 1965/66 that fitted these rainy pictures from last July (please note the typical British summer holiday weather) when we visited Hadrian's Wall at Housesteads Fort. I've used my September Counterfeit Kit along with a sketch from Sarah's Cards.

The rain allowed us to imagine how much the Roman troops must have missed
the Italian sunshine - we could have done with some ourselves!!

I think No.3 Child is responsible for getting rain droplets onto the camera lens and chopping off my feet ... don't we all look like we're having a grrrrreat time .... aha, now that reminds me of a slogan I can link to the product - Tony the Tiger and his Frosties!

I also visited Housesteads in August 2009 - it poured then too!! One day I'd like to walk the length of Hadrian's Wall, but given my track record, I'd better invest in some decent waterproofs first!

P.S. As I love combining challenges, this page also fits in with Scrapbookers Anonymous' "B" challenge as I've used Basic Grey paper and Buttons!

Cracking On At My Crop

2011-09-12T10:16:00.005+01:00

Every month I attend a local crop.
Every month I prepare to take full advantage of 6 hours of uninterrupted scrapping time.
Every month I print dozens of new photos.
Every month I take along my latest Counterfeit Kit (& often the remains of the previous kit too).
Every month I spend the first hour or so unpacking, admiring pages & purchases ... and chatting.
Every month I spend the next hour or so pushing paper around, eating cake ... and chatting.
Every month I spend the final hour or so wondering where the time's gone, sticking stuff down ...

... and (you guessed it!) chatting!

Every month I come home with two 90% complete pages & at least a dozen un-scrapped photos!

Sometimes I use the photos during the month, sometimes they get taken (along with the newly printed photos) to the next month's crop. I have had some ready-trimmed photos from a March trip, to Orvieto Cathedral, sitting in my crop bag since May or June ... and despite printing new photos for last Saturday's crop, I decided enough was enough and these pics deserved to make it onto a page!

The weekly challenge over at UKScrappers provided a lovely sketch from ~~Ali Edwards'~~ Cathy Zielske's (thank you Dawn!) Make It Mondays which was unfussy - a prefect foil for the luscious decoration on the front of the cathedral. I've never been inside, though Hubby tells me that it is relatively plain with black & white striped walls - but the outside is absolutely overwhelming - I find it quite stunning that so much effort has been put into the facade which can't really be appreciated by us mortals on the ground.

Do you have photos that keep getting neglected when you are choosing what to scrap with? Have you made a start with September's Counterfeit Kit? Do you have a better crop chatting to scrapping ratio than me?

Ten on the Tenth: (Old) York

2011-09-10T10:00:00.147+01:00

A mix of new and old buildings around the university lake

Hubby studied at York University. He loved it and regularly reminisces about the pubs and the parties and the people he knew there, but I had never been to York - ever. Thanks to Tesco points we arranged a short break during the last week of the summer holidays and took my Mum & Child No.3 along too. The University has grown from 3000 students to 13000 in the last 3 decades which meant Hubby spent a lot of the first hour shaking his head at how things had changed and getting lost while he showed us around the campus!

It rained a lot during our first afternoon, but luckily it had dried up by the time we went on our Ghost Hunt ... well hardly a hunt, more like a tour around a few of the "haunted" areas with some storytelling and audience ~~participation~~ humiliation - great fun!

Apprentice stonemasons can train at York

York Minster is a beautiful cathedral and was top of my Mum's list of "Must Sees"; we were fortunate to enter in time to catch a wonderfully informative tour by a volunteer guide. The tour was free, but then we had just paid to enter the building - and like most of the attractions in York the entrance price is quite high, but does allow you free return visits for a year, so if you are staying a few days you can dip in and out of various venues and revisit your favourites.

No visit to York is complete without seeing at least some of the walls that surround the heart of the city. Due to old legs and limited time we only walked one small section, but I'm determined to return soon and try to complete the circuit.

Child No.3 managed more wall walking than her Granny

I am reliably informed that Betty's is the place to go for Afternoon Tea ... however we baulked at queueing around the block and then paying £16.50 each for it ... so chose a smaller establishment and opted for a Cream Tea instead - it was delicious!

I knew that nobody would put up with me geocaching during our visit, but I did spot that there were two virtual caches that I could collect without disrupting the touring:

The Stonegate Devil

Holes in The Wall

Initially I was looking for a literal hole in the wall, but finally got the joke when I remembered that here in Britain we refer to cash points in banks as "holes" in the wall .... there are four banks here (Roman, Dark Ages, Norman & Medieval) - different levels of fortification over the ages. This was a new location for Hubby too - though I think he had visited the pub of the same name during his student days!

Possibly the closest I shall ever dare to be to the "Chunnel"!

Our hotel was just outside York and we took the Park & Ride bus in each day to save parking costs and congestion. On our last day we hopped off the bus early to visit the National Railway Museum - free (but the car park would have cost £9!) and despite three of us not being that enthusiastic about trains, we did enjoy a couple of hours there!

We visited quite a few of the historical attractions in York including Barley Hall (thank you again Tesco points) where there was also an exhibition of film and television costumes through the ages. We saw wonderful suits, dresses and hats from films like "Elizabeth" and "The Kings Speech" and TV series like "Cranford" and "The House of Eliott". You were even allowed to try on some of the hats!

Quite a flattering shape of hat

The Yorkshire Terrier

When walking around York you really have to keep looking up as a lot of the beautiful old architecture is still preserved (and some of the doorways are built for much shorter medieval folk) and this building in Stonegate was no exception - Hubby was inside buying some Yorkshire beers for his weekend! After all he hadn't had a cream tea!

Want to see other people's ideas for Ten on the Tenth? Take a look over at Shimelle's place here!

Peachy Sweet Counterfeit Kit

2011-09-06T05:01:00.001+01:00

Time to reveal another kit that's been counterfeited. This month at the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog we are being sponsored by the lovely Sherri (a fellow Master Forger) and her Etsy Shop - and this month's kit to copy is the September 2010 Kit from the Sweet Peach Crop Shop
There were 2 kits on offer - a main kit and a themed add-on kit plus a couple of paper and embellishment add-ons. I loved the main, but in the end I chose the "Juicy" themed kit to counterfeit.

Sweet Peach Crop Shop's Juicy Themed Add-on from September 2010

As usual, I have almost zero of the supplies in this kit [are we completely out of touch with US manufacturers here in the UK? No! It's probably just me as I tend to shop in the sales so my stash is out of date even when it's new!] and I had to put my thinking cap on:

The kit-to-copy features dots, checks, stripes, yellows, greens and browns ... so I dug out some dotty, checked and striped paper from a My Mind's Eye "Ooh La La" collection pack that I won last year and which features lots of green and yellow. I knew I had some ancient ruler paper too. I didn't have any corrugated alphas, so I substituted some swirly textured cardstock and I'll cut my own alphas with some Sizzlits dies. Then I rooted through the rest of my papers to add some more counterfeit stash.

On the embellishment side, the kit-to-copy has some chipboard tags, lots of journalling tags, some pearls (at last something I can match exactly), some ribbon and bottle-caps ... bottle-caps?! Never quite understood the need to scrap with them myself?! So I'll be using buttons instead!

Cardstock: 1 sheet each of white, duck-egg, aquamarine, brown, mustard cardstock, ⅔ sheet Chandler Dotted Swiss and 1 sheet of brown swirly embossed Bazzill

Papers:
Simply Sweet (green pattern reverse - see below), Get in Line (striped on reverse- see below) from MME
2 x ⅓ sheet Hannah Blue & Ivory & 1 sheet Folded Wooden Tape Measures (both by K&Co)
Accessory Sheet For Him from MME's Ooh La La Collection
Ancient from Basic Grey's Archaic Collection
Fall Festival Cocoa & Primrose Damask (both by Bo Bunny Press)
the postcard reverse side of {Miss}fit Tough by Dream Street Papers

Embellishments:
A selection of buttons from my stash
Beige & Brown pearl dots
Sei Poppy Alphabet Stickers
Cosmo Cricket Tiny Type alphas
MLS Butter Mini Alphabet stickers
Maya Road chipboard tickets
Some green lace, brown grossgrain and yellow ribbon

And there you have it - a kit that I will use which has cost me exactly ZERO new money - can't wait to show you what I make with it now!

September's Storytelling Sunday

2011-09-04T23:00:00.005+01:00

Well it's that time of the month again .... Siân's Storytelling Sunday and I have taken added inspiration from Siân - from the book that she passed out last September ("Still Missing" by Beth Gutcheon) which I reviewed here.

It was back in the summer of 2000 and we had just arrived at our campsite near Grosseto, Italy after a week in a central Tuscany. I say campsite, but we haven't stayed in a tent since one very wet fortnight in Brittany, when the tent leaked from both above and below! No, we were staying in a two bedroomed mobile home and looking forward to mornings on the beach, afternoons in the pool and nights in proper (bunk) beds. We always found holiday catering for ourselves was fun - fresh bread, salads, barbecued meats, some fries from the campsite take-away, followed by ice-creams from the bar - what's not to like? (Especially with three fussy kids in tow) Trouble was, we'd only just arrived and the campsite shop had already closed and both the cook and the pot washer were tired. So we decided to treat ourselves to an evening meal in the open air restaurant and leave the supply shopping until the next morning. While we relaxed afterwards with the remains of the carafe of vino rosso, the small people began to get restless and wanted to do something - the playground was right next to the restaurant, within sight of our table and all three went to swing or slide or climb. After 5 minutes or so, while Hubby was settling the bill I went to fetch them to choose ice-creams before bed.

But the play area was now deserted. No children at all, neither ours nor anyone else's! And it was no longer dusk - it was really quite dark.

Retracing my steps I found that No.1 & No.2 Sons had established themselves by the arcade games opposite the play area (in fairness they had already been without computers & TV for a week which is a long time when you're 8 & 10), but that left Child No.3 ... they'd left her happily messing in the sand pit apparently. This was when the doubts began to creep in, hearts began to race, stomachs began to churn ... it was dark everywhere except the bar/restaurant/arcade area where it was brightly lit and she was neither back at our table, nor ogling the ice-creams, nor watching the boys. For a moment I wondered if I was looking for her in the wrong coloured clothes - was she wearing blue not pink? Was that why I hadn't spotted her? No - she simply wasn't there!

It was a complicated walk to our mobile home but Hubby checked it in case she'd somehow wandered back there. Meanwhile I had started asking at nearby tables if people had seen her, checked and re-checked the playground half a dozen times and was really beginning to worry. Was she lost? How could she ask for help in a foreign country? Had she been taken? There were too many places to hide a small child on a campsite this big! How would we find her? Hubby and I took turns to ~~walk~~ dash in increasingly large circles around the restaurant area to see if we could spot her but without success - we decided it was time to report her loss officially.

Of course this story does have a happy ending - on Hubby's way to the reception building he spotted her ahead of him - slightly teary, hand-in-hand with a kind soul who had found her wandering about between the nearby tents. She'd taken a roundabout route back from the play area to our table to find it empty and then gone off into the dark to find us! She was probably missing for about ten minutes, but they were, without a doubt, some of the worst minutes of my life. I get goosebumps just thinking about it.

Now as you can imagine, we do NOT have photos of this unhappy event. In fact the holiday photos are all pretty poor, coming from a pre-digital time, but the story needed scrapping and so I picked a photo of Child No.3 from earlier that very day to use with this story.

August Counterfeit Kit, used plus the UKS August Week 5 Challenge criteria

For more, hopefully happier, stories please pop over to Siân's and why not share one of your own - everyone is welcome.

CKCB News!

2011-09-03T17:43:00.004+01:00

WOW - over at the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog they have announced some new Master Forgers to join the creative team - some seriously talented and clever counterfeiters will be playing along each month!

It's nearly time to reveal the latest kit-to-copy too, but you'll have to wait for the 5th for that. In the meantime, I have a small announcement of my own to make .... I have been busy with Random.org again in order to draw a name from the kind people who commented on my CKCB August blog hop post (here) and this is what it produced for me:

And the number 7 commenter was the lovely Mary B Congratulations Mary - I'll be in touch to arrange delivery of your prize!

Still Missing Returns Home

2011-09-01T12:00:00.039+01:00

A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to receive one of Siân's passed books (details here) via Rinda. The book, "Still Missing" by Beth Gutcheon, started its journey last September and it will now be returning home after a year of travelling around the world, having visited Amy, Jacky, Mel, and Becky as well.

"Still Missing" and a beautiful card from Rinda

"Still Missing" describes every parent's worst nightmare: the disappearance of a child. Alex, not quite seven years old, doesn't complete his two block walk to school one morning and his mother Susan, doesn't realise until he fails to return home that afternoon. The book takes you through her initial panic, the involvement of the police, the media prying, the recriminations, the waiting for news of a breakthrough ...

I tried reading it each evening in the half-hour before "lights out", but found that my sleep patterns were being affected by me empathising too closely with Alex's mother, so I had to find time in the day to read instead. As the novel progresses, hope for the missing boy diminishes yet the reader's investment in the story increases - we all want a happy ending, but of course we know that cases like these do not always end happily and Beth Gutcheon raises the tension levels as each sighting, lead and "breakthrough" comes and goes. As time progresses the boy's mother is encouraged to start letting go, to move on, even to think about having another child! Naturally enough she cannot do any of these things and continues to press the police and media to keep searching for her son.

Four years ago Madeline McCann, aged just four, went missing from a Portuguese holiday apartment and her parents are still waiting, still hoping, still trying to be a family for their remaining two children. Beth Gutcheon's book, written in 1981, gave me a deeper insight into the McCann family's continuing suffering as Maddy is still missing.

Thank you Siân for sending this book on its travels to me - it was not a comfortable read, but I am a better person for having read it.

One Day Winner

2011-08-29T09:00:00.060+01:00

Well after a bit of jiggery pokery with Random.org

my World Book Night copy of "One Day", which was offered up to one of my blog readers here, will soon be on its way to:

Beverly

who wrote: "My son's girlfriend and I have been reading books then watching the movies adapted from them (we saw The Help today...awesome!) since our guys prefer battles and cars and action. I'd love to have this on our book and a movie list :)"

Congratulations! Please let me know your postal address (you can e-mail via my profile) and I will take a trip to the Post Office. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Counterfeit Exclusive!

2011-08-27T05:01:00.002+01:00

Welcome to August's Counterfeit Kit Challenge Master Forger Blog Hop - with an exclusive sketch by Allison Davis from Sketch Support - this month's CKCB sponsor! If you've joined me from Kim's blog you are on track, if not and you want to see what the other Master Forgers have been up to then please check out the CKCB for a full list of the hop.

I'm cheating a whole lot this month ... because when I saw the sketch I knew I had the perfect photos for it along with the perfect papers .... but they weren't in this month's kit - they were in July's!!!! So forgive me - I couldn't resist! Here's the perfect sketch:

and here's my take on it - the photos are from the most marvellous bike tour of Barcelona in April. It was a brilliant way to get a flavour of the city and culminated in a lovely lunch at the beach.

I had to do some careful cutting of my Basic Grey "Assembly Required" bicycle paper to make just one sheet of that and one sheet of the brown "Confession" paper stretch across the two pages.

The other papers are strips and scraps from my July kit - making 5 patterned papers in all on my page - fitting perfectly with a challenge over at Sarah's Cards - one of my favourite online shops!

As you can see No.1 Son's girlfriend struggled to eat her lunch in a ladylike manner! The tour was very entertaining and apparently there are Fat Tire Bike Tours in Paris, London and Berlin as well so hoping to try them again on future city breaks!

Now if you want to see another interpretation of that fabulous sketch please pop over to Margie, where she'll have stuck to the brief more closely than me and used this month's kit!

P.S. There's still a little time to tell me why you'd like to receive, read and pass on a World Book Night book here.

P.P.S. Someone, somewhere on the Master Forger Hop today is giving away a little something to a commenter ... could you be the lucky recipient?

Flipping Sketches!!!

2011-08-23T05:01:00.010+01:00

I love using sketches so this month's challenges at the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog have been right up my street. August has been sponsored by Sketch Support who have some super sketches on their blog (and two books of them for this month's prize - details here). One of the things I love about sketches is that you can twist and turn and flip them to create whole new pages - here is a double page spread I made with July's Counterfeit Kit for a challenge over on UKScrappers based on a recent Pagemaps sketch from June 2011 - the left hand side sticks fairly closely to the original and the right hand side is simply the sketch flipped upside down. Throw on some stars and some extra shapes to tie the the pages together and the two halves make a whole!

Anyway, back to the CKCB and August's 3rd CKCB Challenge: to use one of Sketch Support's sketches but flip it in some way first!

I used this single page sketch from June to make a card for Challenge #1 and I used the same sketch to create my page for this challenge- turning it through 90 degrees first and then flipping it vertically!

My thanks go to Ally & Nic at my local crop who helped me with the title: I couldn't think of a punchy title and was explaining that my friend and I were looking deeply unattractive in our snorkelling masks when they started singing "Deeply Dippy" by Right Said Fred!

Can you see the likeness to the sketch? Everything is from my August Counterfeit Kit and the flowers are again based on a tutorial by Dapfnie which is available on UKScrappers here.

One Day

2011-08-22T14:28:00.003+01:00

A while back I was lucky enough to be the winner of Alison's book giveaway and be the next to read one of the 2011 World Book Night books - "One Day" by David Nicholls.

It sat here for a while before I decided it should reach the top of my to-read pile, then yesterday I realised that the film was due out any day and I always prefer to read a book before I see a film, so better get cracking! Several hours later, I had a break to cook a meal for the family, and then returned to this completely engrossing book. I wanted to know more, I simply could not wait to find out how it ended. And then I was sad that I had kept going, because now I did know and the book was finished and there weren't any pages left to read (and not many tissues left either)!

So thank you Alison (and Ruth who gave the book to her (and the World Book Night Organisation for sending Ruth her books)) and especially thank you to David Nicholls for bringing Dex and Em (or should that be Em and Dex) into my life for one day. I loved the way there were snippets of life from the last 20 years told through letters, conversations, diary entries and how believable the characters were - real people, living real lives, making real choices.

And now comes your chance to read this wonderful book (a special must-pass-it-on-to-someone-else-via-your-blog-after-reading edition) - just leave me a comment below to say why you'd like to read it and check back in a week to see if you're the one! [International enquiries most welcome] That will give me time to re-read and savour the pages before I decide whether I can brave watching the film in public - I could always wear dark glasses for leaving the cinema!

An experiment in journalling

2011-08-20T21:00:00.007+01:00

I love journalling on my pages - to me that's the point of scrapbooking - it's important to add the story behind a photo as well as adding the who, what, where & when. Last year we had a lovely family break in Northumberland and visited Alnwick Gardens (the castle is famous for being Harry Potter's Hogwarts) which were spectacular!

We visited the Poison Garden - layout is in the pipeline - and loved the spectacular fountains and water sculptures everywhere, especially in the Serpent Garden.

I was experimenting with having several "stories" running across a page: labelling the photos, telling the general story of where we were, and adding some extra info about one particular photo - namely No.1 Son showing us how skinny he is by being able to fit into a gap I could barely slide sideways through!
What do you think - do the three types of journalling work, or are they confusing?

I've used my August Counterfeit Kit, but no orange papers this time! This page also fits in with Shimelle's recent challenge to incorporate 3 things on your page (journalling spots & large stamped butterflies, types of journalling) and also Scrapbookers Anonymous's challenges (discovered through Julie's blog) to use journalling spots and/or stash beginning with A - August's Counterfeit Kit ... or possibly American Craft cardstock as a base!

Feitercounting!

2011-08-15T05:00:00.048+01:00

August's first challenge over at the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog is (naturally enough) using a sketch from this month's sponsor Sketch Support, but it comes with a devious twist: either use a page sketch to make a card or use a card sketch to make a page!!!

As you can see I chose a one page sketch (#10 from June) and took inspiration from it to make a card with my August Kit ... another one to simply say "Hello" to a friend. The flowers are based on a tutorial by Dapfnie (the third placed winner of the UKS Scrap Factor competition) which is available here. I liked the sketch a lot and have also made a page where it is much more recognisable - but you'll have to wait until later in the month for that - sorry!

Shimelle has been inspiring people this weekend with 3 days of challenges (still open for prize participation until Sunday 21st) including one to use only half your page ... and I thought I'd combine this with the other half of the CKCB challenge i.e. to take a card sketch and make a page from it! I chose Sketch Support's #8 card sketch from June as I thought it would lend itself nicely to a page with plenty of "white" space.

My photo is from last year's holiday in Egypt, showing us bare foot and happy on the last night at the shisha bar. The photo is not the best quality, taken in poor light by a passer by, but it's the only one I have of the whole group - we were rarely all together as the divers & snorkellers had very different holiday schedules!

I did actually try the shisha pipe (very brave for an ardent NON-smoker), but failed miserably to get a tune ;o)

Ten on the Tenth: Top 10 Tools

2011-08-10T10:00:00.002+01:00

Today I've been thinking about my 10 must-have scrapbooking tools - what would I really not like to do without?

In no particular order (well alphabetical, but not importance):

Black Foam Dots - these are less likely to show under things and, thrifty as ever, I use the foam surrounding the dots too!
Corner Rounder Punch - probably my oldest tool
Didi Glue Dots - perfect instant sticking for tiny things; this roll is crumpled because I had a 15 minute tussle to get it back out of the dog's mouth - still work fine thankfully!
Finger Knife - paired with a metal ruler I can, and do, cut anything
Glue Eraser - great for cleaning up little squidges of ...
Hema's Photo Glue - cheap and cheerful (apart from having to get it from Holland) this re-positionable liquid glue is wonderful!
Pentel Hybrid White Gel Pen - after trying all sorts of brands this is the one that works for me
Precision File Set - love this for filing the edges when decorating bare chipboard with paper
Sewing Machine - great for adding texture to a page (and Hubby's wedding present to me ♥ )
Sizzlits Round-a-Bout Dies (and my Sidekick I guess) - love this font

Quite interesting to realise how many "excess" tools I have - punches, trimmers, stamps, pens, dies, rulers, eyelet setters, circle cutters, shape templates, scoring board, embossing tools, decorative scissors, staplers - but although they don't make my top 10, I won't be getting rid of them!!

Check out Shimelle's Blog for more Tens on the Tenth

And the winner is ....

2011-08-08T10:00:00.002+01:00

This time last week I reached a year of blogging and organised a Blogiversary Hop to celebrate. Despite Blogger's ~~best~~ worst efforts the blogs were hopped (many thanks to the blogging buddies who helped me out), the numbers found (some more easily than others), the sequence spotted (prime numbers) and the missing number located (with/without the help of some extra clues).

I have drawn a name from the correct answers e-mailed to me and it turns out that 13 was lucky for:

*** HELEN ***

Once I get your postal address there will be a parcel winging it's way over to you! Have fun with it.

August Stories

2011-08-07T05:01:00.017+01:00

Did I ever tell you that I once sat down for a chat with Mickey Mouse?
"That's nothing special!" I hear you cry, after all, so many children have now seen Mickey and friends in Florida, California, Tokyo, Paris, Hong Kong and Shanghai.
But I'm talking about way back in 1963 ... in Bognor Regis! Mickey & I had a fine old time as you can see:

Despite the fact that the slide is dated July 1963, I suspect that both Mickey & I had very cold knees and the picture was more likely taken much earlier in the year.

Later I popped over to Miss Muffet's tuffet for a while, but she wasn't there ... I wonder why?

Finally I went aboard for a short cruise with the Butcher and the Baker.

Such were the attractions on offer for children back in the 60s. No animatronics, no white-knuckle rides (the railway around Hotham Park was fun but it didn't exactly set your pulse racing); just a few fancy chickens, a couple of goats, some guinea pigs and most exotic of all: a llama or two! I don't actually remember the animals of Pets Corner, but I do remember the excitement of meeting the characters from my bedtime nursery rhymes, including poor Humpty Dumpty, though sadly I do not have any photographic evidence of our encounter.

I visited Bognor Regis a lot as a child as it was there that my paternal grandparents ran a boarding house: plenty of spare rooms for my father, my brother & I when he came home to the UK on leave. We children were indulged by the paying guests and occasionally given a few pennies (old ones mind) to take to the arcades on the pier. I'm rather ashamed to recall that I often mentioned the local attractions to the residents in anticipation of their generosity!

I was fascinated by the little balls of butter and tiny pots of marmalade that my grandmother would prepare during the afternoons, ready for the next day's breakfast trays. There were service bells in each room too - my brother & I would delight in ringing them and then dash down to see the panel in the kitchen indicating which room we'd just been in. It must have driven my grandfather mad and was utterly pointless as we knew perfectly well which bell we'd just rung. Happy days though!

I've only just scanned these slides, and so there's no layout to share, but I did make a page a while back of me outside the boarding house with my first proper bike: as you can see, I (or more likely my mother) really liked me dressed in red!

These innocently happy memories were brought to you in conjunction with Siân's Storytelling Sundays - pop here for more.

P.S. There's still time to hop around my Blogiversary friends and find the missing number to be in with a chance of a give-away .... I'll be back with the winner on Monday 9th!

Choice Counterfeiting

2011-08-06T05:01:00.001+01:00

Are you counterfeiting? I have been: over at the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog they've announced the latest kitS-to-copy from My Creative Scraproom (although it's not their latest [which is are lovely - check it them out here] - the CKCB went back to September 2010 for inspiration this month).

We were give the choice of four kits to counterfeit (a main one, two add-ons and a limited edition kit) - and while I was tempted to have a go at them all, the thought of my half-used July (and June) kits made me stop at just the one!

I chose the stunning Creative Add-on Kit as I love the bright colours and small patterns ... trouble was I had NO Echo Park papers at all. So I looked through my stash to see whether I had some papers with:

butterflies (sort of)
trees (no chance)
small colourful circles (plenty)
narrow colourful stripes (plenty)
small colourful flowers (surprisingly few)
diagonal colourful checks (none)

... and came up with circles, stripes and matching alphas from Polar Bear Press and butterfly floral paper from Sei ...and these were the starting point for my kit:

You will note that they really aren't anything like the original, but this whole challenge is about using what you've already got so that's what I'm doing. I then selected a few more papers, some butterfly stamps and a variety of embellishments (with buttons instead of flowers) to produce this kit for August:

I'm hoping the addition of teal alphas, ric-rac & buttons will help me ring the changes when it comes to using the kit, the full contents of which are listed below.

Cardstock: AC Vanilla, 2 cream/green flecked, Bazzill green, yellow, peach & brown

Papers:
Sei Morning Meadow (plain cream reverse)
Polar Bear Press Sherbet Stripes (mottled green reverse)
Paper Loft Sanded Geometric in green
Polar Bear Press Sherbet Dots (mottled peach reverse)
Doodlebug Design Obviously Orange Dots
Dream Street Papers Forget-Me-Not Stitched With Love
Imagination Project Desperately Seeking Summer
Leopard skin print (unknown brand)
K&Co Teal Scrolls

Embellishments:
Polar Bear Press Sherbet Ice stickers
Orange, green, teal alphabet stickers (MM?)
Cosmo Cricket Tiny Type teal alpha stickers
MLS Mint mini alpha stickers
K&Co Brenda Walton Mira Words rub-ons
Daisy D’s Top 10 Random Lists cardstock die-cuts
Selection of buttons in orange, green and teal
Various ribbons
Jillibean Soup Journalling Sprouts in white/brown
Glitz Frosting flowers
Maya Road Vineyard chipboard shapes
Banana Frog Butterfly stamps

P.S. There's still time to hop around my Blogiversary friends and find the missing number to be in with a chance of a give-away .... I'll be back with the winner on Monday 9th!

Today's the Day!

2011-08-05T09:40:00.000+01:00

... when the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog announce the latest kit-to-copy - and tomorrow I'll show you what I've been inspired to put together.

In the meantime, (yet) another reminder that my Blogiversary Hop will be lucky for someone ... as this is the give-away that one person will be receiving (and as I love international give-aways, mine is too) if they can spot the missing number from the sequence of numbers dotted around some of my blogging buddies and e-mail me before Monday morning!

Count(erfeit)ing the Days

2011-08-03T23:00:00.006+01:00

It's nearly time for the BIG reveal over at the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog of August's kit-to-copy ... 2 more sleeps! In the meantime I can share that this month we have another great sponsor - one that is right up my street - namely Allison Davis of Sketch support fame. The monthly blog hop winner will be receiving not one, but two sketch books as a prize - for joining in with the hop or just for commenting along the way. I'm really looking forward to this month's challenges with our soon-to-be counterfeited kits as I'm sure there will be quite a few sketches featured and I love using sketches.

I also wanted to say that there's still plenty of time to have a go at my Blogiversary Hop - and find out which number is missing from the numerical sequence I shared with some of my blog buddies - ALL of whom have now posted their numbers (hooray!). The draw will be late on Sunday night (or more probably, first thing Monday morning)!

And if, despite sending me the missing number, you are feeling lucky, then why not hop over to the Banana Frog Blog as they are having their latest monthly blog hop (a summery short one) and have a set of lovely Banana Frog stamps up for grabs - I have won a couple to add to my collection and thought it was about time someone else had a chance!!!

Happy Hopping and please do come back here in a few days to see how I got on with my counterfeiting!

Blogiversary Part Two

2011-08-02T05:00:00.003+01:00

There wasn't meant to be a part two - but there were two things to note about yesterday's Blogiversary post:

1) Poor Missus Wookie's number couldn't be found because her post didn't appear. I know that MW had holiday plans and had scheduled something for me, but I also know that Blogger was throwing a few spanners around my friends' blogs yesterday!

ETA 3/8/11 - Missus Wookie's post is there now - Hooray!

Not to worry - there was actually a ~~big~~ little clue to the missing number in my number. Did you look closely at it? The missing number is also missing from it! And MW's number is NOT missing! So take another look (click onto it for a closer view), and if you have managed to narrow it down to two missing numbers ... you'll be able to eliminate one of them!

2) Mary posted the most wonderful little jpg to the comments yesterday - and I thought it deserved a proper airing!

I think I'm having so much fun that I'll plump for "Remind me next year" !!!

Blogiversary

2011-08-01T03:57:00.083+01:00

Welcome to my Blogiversary post - 1 year of clogging up the internet with my creations, thoughts, photos and the odd video! 114 posts (counting this one) over 12 months with an average of just over 9.5 comments per post (thank you). 41 followers when last I looked, and 101 Google Reader subscribers - some of whom are the same people. According to Blogger I've had over 7,000 page views and my Flag Counter gadget at the bottom of the page says that my visitors come from 43 different countries!!! (including a chatty crafty arty "pig" on holiday!)

Source

Do you get the impression I like numbers? Well you'd be right. I do. Sudoku puzzles are fun. Numerical crosswords are even better! I love that numbers and sequences and patterns are everywhere. Did you know that there is a spiral hidden in a pineapple? Or that pine cones, artichokes and sunflowers are also Nature's representations of the number sequence named after Fibonacci? One of my childhood heroes was the brilliant, witty, talented Tom Lehrer who sang clever songs about science and pigeons and mathematics too:

WARNING: Don't listen to it more than once or you'll be hearing it in your head all day long!!!

Source

To help me celebrate my Blogiversary, I nabbed an idea from Sandie, and roped in a few blog buddies to do a blog hop. As I like numbers I have asked each of the hoppers (hoppees?) to share a number with you.

And because I like winning give-aways I thought I'd reciprocate and supply (a small) one of my own, so once you get back here, put the numbers in order, have a think, and drop me an e-mail to say which one is missing to Jimjams at dreamj dot co dot uk.
I'll draw a winner from the correct answers next Monday, August 8th.

Please start by visiting Sandie and she'll point you in the direction of the next person on the hop.
If you get lost, here is a complete list of places to visit:

Sandie @ Itchifingers
Furrypig @ Chatty Crafty Arty Pig
Siân @ From High In The Sky
Hilary @ Pictures and Paper Bits
Alexa @ Trimming The Sails
Helen @ Craft Imperfect
Missus Wookie @ Missus Wookie's Wanderings ***
Mel @ I Speak Melsh
Mary @ Mary's Musings
Mel @ Created By ATDML

*** ETA 1/8/11 - please bear with my helpers if one ~~or two post~~s ~~aren't isn't quite there (yet) as it's holiday time and Blogger doesn't always play fair~~ ... I'll be back with clues tomorrow if any are still missing!
ETA 3/8/11 - YAY Missus Wookie managed to get her post online - use the clue if you're still confused!

Oops - I nearly forgot - you need a number from me to get you started .... how about:

The Power of Flowers

2011-07-27T05:01:00.031+01:00

"Say it with flowers!"

That's was the advertisement slogan to encourage you to send flowers to your loved ones - to say "I love you", "Happy Birthday", "Get well soon", "Congratulations", or even "Cheer up"!

Well this month, in honour of the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog's sponsor - Miss Arts Papercrafting School, we are investigating the power of flowers on our blog hops. If you've joined me from Kim's blog - then you're on track. If you've just happened by, you can find the start of the hop here.

To ring the changes this month I decided to make a greetings card rather than a layout - to send my love and congratulations half way round the world to welcome my brother's new baby boy. I've used my July Counterfeit Kit and several flower punches to create a soft, dimensional border; I also had to nab the Cosmo Cricket tiny alpha stickers from last month's kit as they matched better than this month's alphas! Not a particularly traditional baby card - I'm hoping it will stand out from the crowd!

Having punched out a load of spare flowers, I put them to good use and made another card ... just because. It's good to have a few cards in reserve when you feel like getting in touch with someone; I'd far rather receive a postcard or a letter than an e-mail. Wouldn't you? Speaking of receiving things in the post, Julie Kirk is running a Going Postal series on her blog here - lots of fun ideas, including making "Hello" cards!

If you want to see what some more flower power in action then please pop over to Margie's to see what her flowers have to say! Thanks for stopping by.