Five on Friday #7 (Search Terms)

Do you look at your blog statistics?
Blogger lists the search terms that people use to find my blog and it's fascinating to see what brings people to me!  Here are the most popular/weirdest/funniest 5 search terms:

Top of the list = Next {Michael} Crichton or {Michael} Crichton Next - I imagine these people are looking for Michael Crichton's next novel, but come here because I read a book of his called "Next" which I included in my logging and reviewing of books during the year.

Pricked Extreme Embroidery is an odd thing to search for, but I guess that there is plenty of stitching on paper, including some string art, on here.

Helen Hunt Wearing Overalls is just about the weirdest search term ... I have NO idea how they got to me with that one at all!  Trouble is, by writing this today, my blog will come up again and again when Helen's stalkers need their overall fix ... and be disappointed yet again!

Speaking of disappointments, searchers for lego 6075 instructions were left high and dry when they popped over from Google, because while I do still have the instructions for 6075 somewhere upstairs, that's not what's published on this blog; instead it's the story of why we eat our turkey on Christmas Eve!

hand maed crad xmas - you can obviously still find my blog posts on my hand-made Christmas cards even if you can't spell :o)

That just leaves me time to wish all of my lovely readers (and Helen's fans as well)

a very merry Winter Solstice

and hope that the Mayans simply ran out of space on their calendar!

Five On Friday #6 (MORE (!) Recent Reading)

Well regular readers will have noticed the complete lack of scrapping here following my operation.  My elbow flared up a bit as I was doing too much, despite doing less than normal and so scrapping has had to take a definite back seat.  Even surfing has to be done in short sessions - hence the limited commenting I've been doing - sorry!  Turning the pages of a book does seem to be within the limits of my abilities so here are another 5 of this month's novels:

Michael Crichton's "Next" was a very thought-provoking novel about the consequences of patenting genes.  Lots of scientific research and data is put into context as the fall-out from scientists cutting corners, judges making ill-informed decisions and company CEOs putting profits before people all hits home.  A thrilling and unfortunately all too believable read.

"Hornet's Nest" by Patricia Cornwell - I have to say I prefer her Kay Scarpetta series, this was a bit 2 dimensional and completely unbelievable in places.  I know most police thrillers generally get their man (or woman) at the end, but it helps if you care about the characters doing the chasing or getting killed and dislike the perpetrators or their motives ... not the case here I'm afraid.

The third of the Hunger Games books, "Mockingjay" by Suzanne Collins was better; I enjoyed a look at life outside Panem but felt that the storming of the Capitol was overly long and complicated.  Still not as gripping as the first book but plenty to keep the pages turning.

I then raided the local library to get more supplies: Having tried out Ian M. Banks at the beginning of the month, I thought I'd better read one of his non-sci-fi books, written without the middle initial, and picked out "The Wasp Factory".  What a twisted and complicated book - various shades of madness in the main characters, murky secrets, jaw-dropping, eye-watering violence - fabulously written, drip-feeding clues that gradually make some sense, culminating in a shocking twist in the final chapter.  Definitely a good read, but not for the faint-hearted!

"Cold Earth" by Sarah Moss was very interesting - six people working on an archaeological dig in an isolated corner of Greenland, coping with inner (and outer?) demons as a flu pandemic sweeps across the rest of the world.  Beautifully written final(?) journal entries/letters from each of the characters tell the tale - I can imagine this being a very spooky and atmospheric film.

Do you enjoy films of books?  Do films of books make you want to check out the book too?

Five On Friday #5 (Recent Reading)

Whenever a book grips me I find it hard to put it down and get on with housework, cooking, gardening or other commitments.  TV programmes get ignored; I disappear to bed very early for undisturbed chapters; rainy weather is welcomed!!!

So, thanks to my enforced inactivity following my surgery and the recent rainy weather, I have been reading ... A LOT!

I took "The Player of Games" by Ian M. Banks with me into hospital to while away the time, but despite having a 7½ hour wait I couldn't concentrate enough to read more than a chapter or two.  I didn't know what to expect when I received it and was dismayed to realise it was Science Fiction of the most complicated and scientific sort!  {Think "Dune" on a cocktail of steroids and Omega 3}  This type of book requires  a large investment of time to get in tune with - you have to cope with long, unpronounceable names for characters and locations (e.g. "Mawhrin-Skel", "Meristinoux"); you have to accept that robots have independent personalities and thought, that science has progressed to allow people to regrow body parts, change sex on a whim, and live for hundreds of years - which means that they have a LOT of time for sitting around philosophising!  On top of all of this there were cons and double-bluffs within the story so some of the characters were nearly as confused as I was.  I didn't like the rather selfish, self-centred main protagonist, "Chiark-Gevantsa Jernau Morat Gurgeh dam Hassease", and despite rooting for him in his adventures within a distant barbaric civilisation during the final ⅓ of the book, I don't think I'll be looking out for any of his further exploits or indeed any more Culture novels by Ian M. Banks

My next book choice needed to be more accessible and less of a struggle so I raided our bookcase at home thinking that I'd re-read something, but it turned out that Hubby has quite a stack of books that I've missed over the years.  I started with "The Rainmaker" by John Grisham who didn't disappoint with this story of litigation in America.  The main and supporting characters were well fleshed out, the pace kept the pages turning and the corporate baddies were suitably unpleasant.  I had to Google the reason behind the title though - apparently a rainmaker is a lawyer good at drumming up new business for the firm.




Next came "Blind Instinct" by Robert W. Walker.  Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!  This book should be held up as a lesson to all authors not to set their novels in a foreign country without having spent a reasonable amount of time there.  Walker has the decency to acknowledge the help he got from "British English From A to Zed" but it would have been better if, rather than add a phrase from every page, he'd watched some modern British TV programs if he was too lazy to come and research in person.   British men in the year 2000 do not invite ladies to "alight" from a taxi no matter how gentlemanly they are and I can honestly say that I have never, ever heard anyone say ""Something is afoot!" outside of period dramas such as "Downton Abbey" or "Miss Marple".  We might have avoided taking the Lord's name in vain back in the day of Sherlock Holmes and Mary Poppins, but believe me, there are plenty of Brits that use far stronger words than "Gor Blimey" and "bloody" even as long ago as the turn of the Millennium!  Our own police are rarely armed and so I find it highly unlikely that a visiting FBI medical examiner would be allowed to even bring her gun into the UK, let alone walk around London with it in her handbag!  I could go on ... the plot resembles a string vest ... this book is so bad that it is now in the recycling!

After that disaster, it was with some trepidation that I picked the next book from Hubby's section of the bookcase.  "The Fire Baby" by Jim Kelly.  Reading the cover synopsis I was expecting a supernatural tale of some sort but was pleasantly surprised to find a "normal" mystery story intertwined with a journalist, Philip Dryden, getting mixed up with illegal immigrants in East Anglia.  A book set in Britain written by a Brit!  There were lots of twists and turns, and while the characters often got themselves into scrapes (where would the story be if they didn't?) it was a darn sight more readable than my previous book.  This was the second in a series ... I think I'll seek out "The Water Clock" in which Dryden's adventures begin.


My fifth book in a fortnight was Suzanne Collins' second book in the Hunger Games trilogy, "Catching Fire".  This was as un-put-downable as the original story.  We're introduced to more of the Districts surrounding the Capitol as Katniss & Peeta tour in the run-up to the 75th Hunger Games.  The evil, scheming President Snow has threatened Katniss' family and friends if she doesn't do her best to suppress the stirrings of rebellion ... A great page-turner with lots of action, ethical dilemmas for the character, interesting settings ...
I've already started on "Mockingjay"!

What are you reading right now?  Ever felt a book should never have been published?

Five on Friday #4 (Blog Loving!)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five on Friday #3 (Fonts)

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?

Five on Friday #2 (Favourite Pages)

It's been a while since I did my first "Five on a Friday" and so far I haven't blogged any of the pages I made specifically for the various rounds of the UKS Scrap Factor Competition.  So I thought I'd share five of my favourite pages.  As it makes for a photo heavy post, you'll have to go to my UKS Gallery if you want more details about the pages and supplies used (you have to be a registered member, but it's quick & easy & free to join).

Week 3: "This week your layout shall be lyrical. Take inspiration from a favourite song and scrap away with the lyrics, title, or wherever your creativity takes you!"

At that time my favourite on-line tool was Tagxedo and I used it twice to create the background and titling for a BOM page celebrating the first album cassettes I owned - given to me by one of my (step-)brothers.  Still love the music now too.

 

Week 5: "Create a layout with just ONE photograph. How will you give that image the special treatment?"

Having recently found our wedding album and several envelopes of photographs languishing in our attic I have a gold-mine of old, old photos ready for scanning and scrapping.  I'd used one wedding photo for the auditions and thought I'd do a page about the adventures that lead to our engagement on the steps of the Sacre Couer in Paris.  The whole sorry tale was part of a Sunday Storytelling here.

Week 6: "This week choose any theme and style you like, but you must include multiple photos! We challenge you to find unique ways to showcase additional pictures."

I decided to use a collage method taught to me by Tracie to make the paper for a page showing how No.1 Son has evolved changed over the years.  It was a steep hybrid-learning curve making the overlay that week too.

Week 8: "This week your layout should be inspired by film or television. How you interpret that is up to you: in visual design, quotation, a literal theme or something else entirely!"

An opportunity to scrap some photos from 2006 when my three were still building things with Duplo despite having boxes and boxes of Lego available: Child No.3 had built a roller-coaster from the first episode of a crazy Aardman claymation series called Rex The Runt - the title is one of Vince's catchphrases that often gets shouted here as an argument closer!  I had fun with an on-line bar-code generator for this page.

Week 10: "This week, patterned papers are OFF-LIMITS. Use plain cardstock or solid colours to create a layout that is still true to your style."

I love bright colourful pages and so a rainbow of textured tissue papers seemed like a way to meet the challenge of having no patterns.  I  used a different technique for each line of colour and word paths to trace my journalling about our day in Chester around the various photos.

Phew - a long post with a lot of photos - thanks for sticking with me this far :D

If you do pop over to UKS you can see the final pages of the Scrap Factor Competition from the two remaining contestants Katherine & Nic - voting is still open until Sunday if you haven't yet made a decision. 

Five on Friday #1

Today is Day #5 of Blogging For Scrapbookers - Are you taking part?  Are you keeping up?  Well it's 4 days since I promised myself I wouldn't post every day, which must mean I'm doing really well, not having posted since then!!  I have been good and read each prompt on the day it was posted, but then there's still plenty of time for me to get behind, especially as I am working a 9½ hour shift tomorrow!

Prompt #5 was about photos - which is lucky because I was out with my camera and wanted to share my favourite photo of the day - straight from my super-duper little point and shoot Canon Powershot A700. Love the sunlight through the leaves of this Hellebore.

I used 5 different types of card and paper to make the latest instalment of my 2011 Project 12 album.  I'm not using the supplied Pagemap sketches this year, and have decided to keep the same format each month - collage on one side and journalling on the other - hopefully I won't get bored with this before December.

Coincidentally that double layout includes page #5 from my March Counterfeit Kit - my pages haven't been as prolific this month, but not bad considering I started two weeks late!

And the final 5?  Well it's the number of audition layouts you have to submit to enter the Scrap Factor Contest over on UKScrappers.  There is a category each for paper, digital and hybrid scrappers and a massive £500 first prize for the creative soul that makes it through to the end!  Good luck if you enter :D