March's Numbers On Paper

I'm not quite sure where the month of April has gone, but I suddenly realised that the end was nigh and I still hadn't blogged my March Month In Numbers!!!  Not wanting a repeat of last year's Project 12 (which also stalled during March) I have set to work to remedy the situation, putting these numbers straight down on paper - using scraps from my April Counterfeit Kit - and also prepared the opposite page ready for April's numbers too.

The titles were cut with Man, Oh, Man! Sizzlit dies 
from the film-strip frame waste from my Bellagio Fountains page

5 = blue toes for Mum who fell awkwardly after helping with the Talking Newspaper recording.  Luckily nothing is broken, just badly bent. {She's still limping but on the mend after six or seven weeks}

3,  2 and 1 are for the physio appointments, consultant appointments and steroid injection I had for my various ailments ... getting old is no fun at all!

1 = an unexpected overnight guest, delayed on her way home to the Isle of Man when the ferry company texted her to say that the ferry had broken down ... and was returning to Douglas without any passengers!  Luckily she was able to reverse her journey slightly and stay with us.  We put the world to rights over a couple of glasses bottles of wine!

2 = free tickets for the Moscow State Circus at the theatre where I work occasionally. It was a brilliant show on our tiny stage with laughter at the various clowns, wincing at the contortionist's impossible angles and wonder at the strength, grace and skill of the various acrobatic acts. 

24/7 = Hubby's cover at work ... much too restricting even though he wasn't called out!

7 = nights I spent in Vegas with 5 friends.  I dared to do my 1st helicopter flight and notched up my 100th geocache while I was there too.

4 = days spent in Krakow by Child No.3 who "enjoyed" her visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau and now wants to get married in the Salt Mines!

There wasn't quite room on my page for some of my other numbered notes so I'll add them here:

4 = books taken to Las Vegas, where, apart from the travel guides, I didn't read a thing!  Once I was back in the UK, I did manage to read 1 story about harvesting people for organs to order - yuk - "The Fifth Vial" by Michael Palmer.
45 = minutes spent on the phone to No.2 Son trying to determine what he thinks he's doing at university!
200 = blog posts celebrated with a Tagxedo tutorial.

I used a border punch to add interest
to some more counterfeit washi tape

If you pop over to Notes on Paper I'm sure you will find that other people joining in with Julie's "My Month In Numbers" will be a lot less tardy than me ... they've probably done April's already (I know Julie has)!

Rolling, Rolling, Rolling!

Last Monday I blogged about World Book Night and offered up a number of books to be shared via with my blog readers.  There were fifteen commenters by the deadline, ten of whom were willing to give a temporary home to a WBN 2012 copy of "The Time Traveller's Wife" by Audrey Niffenegger.  Fortuitously, and perhaps not totally surprising for a someone who loves numbers, I own a 10 sided die!

So with a zero standing in for #10, I got rolling:

The winners have all been notified and their books are ready for posting.  So sorry if you were unlucky, perhaps one of the luckier recipients will pass their copy on via a blog giveaway - keep your eyes peeled!

Globe-trotting

Regular readers will know that I recently travelled over 5000 miles in order to use a 40% off coupon in Michael's in Las Vegas.  Another reason I wanted to visit was the opportunity to go globe-trotting up and down a single street, namely Las Vegas Boulevard.  We took an open top bus tour on our first morning and travelled from the Egyptian pyramid and sphinx that is the Luxor hotel to see the Italian gondolas gliding around the canals at the Venetian hotel.  Along the way we passed the New York skyline fronted by the Statue of Liberty, admired various Roman sculptures outside Caesar's Palace and looked up at the Eiffel Tower outside the Paris hotel!  All in the space of 3km!!

I was inspired to use red white and blue and pennants on my page by this striking London Tour page over at Daphne's blog.  I've used my April Counterfeit Kit, added some blue & white buttons and, in line with the 3rd CKCB challenge for April, used some washi tape.  Well actually, I've used some counterfeit washi tape, because I don't own any of the real deal!

Julie Fei-Fan Balzer has this tutorial for "washi" with text.  I've used Scotch Magic tape (the translucent matte variety) pressed down onto one of my kit's vintage book pages to lift the text with a very layer of paper and then used red & blue water colour paint to tint the paper side of the tape before applying double sided tape to stick it to my page.  I like the effect and I'll be trying it out on other types of paper.  At least this way I don't have to have 30 feet of the same pattern - why is washi tape sold in such enormous lengths????

Blogger It!

Dear Blogger
Why do you mess me about sometimes?
I have a give-away post here but nobody knows because for some reason you have decided to not to show it in Google Reader or people's dashboards!!!
Why?
Did I do something wrong?
Please let my blog readers know that I have a few World Book Night books to pass on right here.
Pretty please!
Best wishes,
Jemma of Just-Jimjams xxx

World Book Night 2012

Tonight it's World Book Night - the 2nd one to be held in the UK, and a slightly more world-wide affair this time around as the USA are joining in along with Germany!  In the UK & Ireland 20,000 passionate readers will give 24 copies of one of their favourite books to their friends, colleagues, neighbours, passers-by and anyone they feel would enjoy reading it.

In addition World Book Night will be giving a further 620,000 books directly to the hardest to reach readers through prisons, care homes, hospitals, sheltered housing, homeless shelters, libraries and charities.

I applied to be a WBN giver and was lucky enough to not only be selected, but be able to give away my first choice and favourite book - "The Time Traveller's Wife" by Audrey Niffenegger.  For me, this book was thought-provoking, moving, stimulating, uplifting and exciting. While it is complicated with flashbacks and flashforwards through time as the hero travels to events in both his past and future, the book is worth a slow read to savour all the implications of just how much our lives are shaped by others.

I promised to keep a few copies back to give away via my blog: if you would like to be the temporary owner of a WBN copy, please add a comment below by noon (UK time) on Friday 27th April.  I say "temporary" because the idea of WBN is to spread the love of reading and these books are meant to be passed on ... and on ... and on!  Each book has a unique Book Crossing ID number and you can log its stay with you, add your thoughts (good & bad) about the book, and chart its progress in the future.

So, if you fancy reading this book and would be willing to share it with your friends, colleagues, neighbours or someone passing you by, please let me know!

Fountain Filmstrip

Today I want to share a page I made for the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog's 2nd challenge of the month - to scrap with small photos.  I took hundreds of photos during my recent trip to Las Vegas and yet this page actually uses several of my friend Jacqui's pics (she took a more complete record of the myriad shapes made by the magical fountains outside the Bellagio Hotel than I did).  I used a Sizzlit film-strip die to include several shots of them: the frames are 2cm x 3cm so I used a my printer software to re-size the photos to fit behind them.

The film-strip frames die was also used to add texture to some of my patterned paper; to stop the cut-outs from falling out I added double-sided tape to the back after die-cutting and used this to stick the patterned film-strips to the page.  Everything is from my April Counterfeit Kit apart from the Echo Park blue title alphas which needed a little extra ink to make them tone better with the cardstock.

Have you been playing along with Shimelle's weekend crop?  The deadline is almost upon us which is why I've linked this page there too - it ties in nicely with her 15th challenge - to scrap with less than perfect photos - by printing the blurrier ones really small you can appreciate the shapes made by the fountains without noticing the imperfections!

Hieperdepiep Hoera

Another page for Shimelle's scrapping week(end) - this one based on an old sketch here (challenge #9), uses a neglected stamp set (challenge #8) AND is divided into quadrants (challenge #14)

The photo is No.1 Son around his 2nd birthday next to the Lego set we gave him, wearing the fantastic paper crown made for him at the creche he attended on the days when I worked.  We are still friends with his nursery assistant from that time and José helped me with the spelling for the title - it's the funner version of the Dutch for "Hip hip hooray!!"

Red distress ink transformed my butter-coloured mini-alphas!

This also does double duty with the UKS Weekly Challenge to scrap a birthday photo, use old paper (my April Counterfeit kit is full of old papers), a "weather" colour (sunshine yellow), and 4 of something!
This must be some kind of record for a multi-challenge page LOL!