I Finally Did It!

Bought a Cuttlebug that is, what did you think I meant?! Yep, I went to the Stamping & Scrapbooking Exhibition at Ally Pally a few weeks ago. It was the first time I'd been to a craft exhibition & I was like a child in a sweet shop; so much to see & so little time, so much to buy & so little money, lol! I had a wonderful time wandering around all the exhibits, watching the demos, (excellent demos at PaperArtsy), chatting with other crafters & creating a wish-list in my head. I could have spent an absolute fortune, but I managed to restrain myself & bought a few clear stamps, the Cuttlebug & some Nestabilities. I've been having a look at prices on various sites since & I feel I got a bargain.

A friend who's getting married in January asked me to make the invitations & I got them finished on Saturday, so Ive had time since to upload the pcs of the cards I've made in the last few weeks. They're mostly birthday & Halloween cards & they've all - except one - gone to the USA. I'll save the Halloween cards until nearer the big day, but here's two of the birthday cards.

I think this is my first proper attempt at distressing. And it's definitely the first time I've used Tim Holtz products - inks & the stamped images.

This card is for a cat-lover & unfortunately, I can't remember which online craft store I got the little cat stamp from. This is also the first time I used my Cuttlebug & everything else is from my stash.Thank you for looking & I hope you like them. I won't be around now until next week, so have a great week & thanks for stopping by.

Love & light.

Please sir, I want some more.

I don't have a card to show you - I haven't uploaded the pics yet - but I want to thank Rica, Joy, Ruth & Gina G for welcoming me back to the blogging fold, I really appreciate it.



Jen's comments made me laugh, so I thought I'd show you a pic related to them. BTW, it is true that she had to drag me out of Jo-ann's & Michaels; never before has one woman been faced with so much temptation!! :) Here's the pic.................

Jen mentioned the coconut shrimp & this is it. It is found at a fab fish restaurant called 'Steamers', on Titlow Beach. But oh, the coconut shrimp! Jen had been telling me for ages how delicious it was, but I couldn't get my head around the combination of shrimp & coconut. Until I tasted it. It is utterly DELICIOUS!! The sauce is sweet chili & the flavours work so well together. We went to Steamers twice more before I left. :) It's a terrific place, the staff are wonderful & on a summer's day you can sit outside & enjoy the sea breeze & the beautiful view of the Puget Sound & the Narrows Bridge. And they have very nice ice cream too. :)

I won't be here for the next few days, got things to do, so I'll be back over the weekend. Hope everyone is having a great week so far.

Love & light.

Own up, whodunnit??!!

Who stole the last six months??!! Honestly, I have never known time to go by so fast. I won't bore you with all the gory details; it's suffice to say I'm back, I'm feeling LOADS better & I hope to be here for a LONG time to come.

What I will tell you is that, thanks to a very kind invitation from Jen, I have been to the USA!!! It was BRILLIANT & I loved every second of it. The weather was perfect from start to finish; I actually got a TAN!! Yes, I wore a hat, as my hair is still in its horrible, post-chemo state, & used factor 15 sunscreen, but because we spent so much time outdoors my usual snowwhite skin turned a gorgeous golden brown colour & it's true, a tan makes you feel so much better. Jen lives in Washington State & it is beautiful. We went to so many places, including Mount Rainier & Seattle, and it was just fantastic. I met lots of Jen's friends & her colleagues at The Grand Cinema, Tacoma & her gorgeous daughter, Jessica; they're all wonderful & made me feel very welcome. I visited museums & art galleries - I was particularly impressed by the art of Preston Singletary & Nancy Wolden's jewelry. I saw a stunning exhibiton of Andrew Wyeth's paintings at the Seattle Art Museum, which is a museum I definitely recommend if you're ever in Seattle.

If I were to tell you everything I did, this post would go on for days & you'd be bored rigid, so I'll move to the two most important places I visited: 'Jo-ann's' & 'Michael's' - the craft stores! I won't tell you all I bought, (stamps, papers, ribbons, TH distress inks, etc.), but you'll get the picture if I say that I spent $50 in my first 10 mins in Jo-ann's & I had to pay excess baggage at the airport when I was leaving!! Enough said, right??!! :)

I took lots of photos while I was there & I might post one or two here from time to time.

I really had the best time & while I have thanked Jen privately for her generosity I'm thanking her again now publicly, so she knows how much her invitation meant to me. (I hope I get invited back again!)

On to the purpose of this blog: I am proud to say that I have made cards this week! Astonishingly, I got requests for cards from Jen's colleagues, so I've been working on them. I've also been asked to make the invitations for a friend who's getting married in January. And of course, people are beginning to ask about Christmas cards, so I will have to start them soon.....I seem to remember making a new year's resolution that I would make one or two Christmas cards a week, starting in January. Needless to say, that didn't happen.

This card was for someone who's become an Eagle Scout in America. I printed off the motto & the eagle from Google, mounted them onto stiff card & covered them with Anita's 3D Glaze to give them a metallic appearance.

The next two cards are self-explanatory, but can you name the two Beatles referred to on the first card??!! Yes, it's not difficult is it?! :) My initial idea was to make a B&W card for the second card, but when I saw the Andy Warhol image, I knew what I wanted to do & Jen had given me the strawberry paper, so it was easy to come up with the rest.

When I post my newer cards you'll see they're completely different from these. I'm doing a lot more stamping, embossing & distressing & I'm loving it. But that's for another day.

I hope everyone who visits my blog has had a good summer. Apologies again for not being here & for not visiting your blogs. I am no going to promise that I will blog every day, or visit your blogs every day, because there just aren't enough hours in the day. But I will do my best to blog a few times a week & I would love it if you popped in from time to time. Thank you.

Love & light

Return of the Prodigal Blogger!!

Yes, it's me, I have returned. Many apologies for not being here for the last five weeks & for not visiting the blogs I follow, I have a lot of catching up to do. I got bogged down in various issues & couldn't decide what to do, (I still haven't solved the problems, but I'm a little less stressed about them now). Then I spent a week in London with my friend, Jen. We had a terrific time & did so much, I will post about it day by day & show you some photos - that I took! Yes, I bought a new camera & took LOTS of pics! Hopefully, some of them will be half decent. :) It seems to be quite a good camera, but the test will be when I photograph my cards, which I haven't done yet.

Since I got back from London I've tried to spend a few hours each day working in the garden. It needs a LOT of work after the winter, but it is so nice to be out there & see lots of green shoots appearing. I have hundreds of daffodils, the tulips are almost open, for the first time my Hellebores have flowered & they are GORGEOUS & there are lots of new Hosta shoots peeping through the soil - now, if I can just protect them from the snails!

For today's card I have to journey back to the distant past - well, early March! I promised to make cards for the daughters of some of the people on the DC forum & this is one of them. It's the first time I used a House Mouse image - they are SO cute! I used watercolour pencils & Whispers pens to colour the image & when the cupcake was dry I rubbed glitter glue over the 'icing' to make it shiny. It doesn't show here, but it looked quite good in RL.

That's it for this post - short, but sweet, lol! The next ones will probably be longer, because tomorrow I will download my London photos & start to tell you about our week. I promise I won't go into too much detail, otherwise you'll all be bored to tears! :)

Thank you to everyone who has visited my blog since I've been gone, I truly appreciate it. Until tomorrow, love & light.

Friday Sketchers # 42

Hope everyone is having a great Sunday, sorry I didn't post yesterday; it was another one of those days & I didn't get a card made. Can I start by saying that I dislike this font intensely? I know, I know it's stupid, but I do. I always use Trebuchet to write my posts, but today my font options have disappeared. It's very irritating. :)

A huge thanks to everyone who commented on my 'Tilda in the Garden' card, it is much appreciated. Now that a little time has passed since I made it, I'm actually quite pleased with it. So thanks again for all your encouragement.

On to today's card. For the first time, I have attempted the Friday Sketchers challenge. This is the sketch that Mumur designed. There are a lot of elements, but I really like the layout.

I chose black & pink, because it's been a while since I used those colours. Initially, I was going to use a 6x6 square card, but as I put the card together it started to look very crowded, so I switched to a C5 card instead.

Materials used:

• C5 white cardstock
• Patterned paper - Tesco
• Black circular Nestie & pink frame Nestie - RAKs
• Black swirls - gift from Eisbaerin
• Corner swirl stamp - Inkadinkadoo
• Long floral swirl stamp - Marie Curie for Cancer Care by Papermania
• Whispers pens
• Bright pink & clear embossing powders
• Versafine ink pad - Onyx Black
• WOJ sentiment
• Prima & Papermania flowers, adhesive gems & pearls, pink brad, black & pink ribbons - from my stash.

Unfortunately, the scan has bled the colour from the long, floral swirl; in RL it's a bright, zingy pink. And the black corner swirls aren't placed exactly where they should be. Apart from that, I think it's turned out pretty well. Hopefully, the recipient of this card will like it.

That's it from me for tonight. I'm going to have a read through the Sunday papers & watch some TV - LA Ink is on at 10. :)

Love & light.

Me & My Bright Ideas!

Happy Friday folks! I hope everyone has had a good day. Did anyone who has the BBC see the weather forecast yesterday where they said it would be -99C in Kent this morning?! It WAS a little chilly when I got up, but I wouldn't have thought it was that cold, lol!! :)

On to today's card. Surprise, surprise, it's another Tilda! The Tilda challenge at DC this week was hosted by Jennie & she chose 'In The Garden'. So, flowers, grass, trees, etc., it should be easy to come up with an idea, right? Wrong. Jennie posted the challenge on Friday morning & it took me 'til Wednesday night to come up with something, which went completely out the window when I started making the card yesterday!

My first bright idea was to use my cherry blossom stamp & turn it in to a tree by hand drawing a trunk & I coloured it with my Whispers pens, then I tried to find a garden-type paper in my stash; something green & grass-like. Nothing. Instead I found this HOTP 'Ladybugs' A4 sheet that Jen had given me & the swirls made me think of the wind. That gave me my second bright idea - I would stamp the cherry blossom twice more, cut out the tree & then cut out the flowers from the other images & use Tilda with a broom, so that she's tidying the garden. Brilliant, no?! :) :) Yep, I thought so. Until I started the cutting & the trimming.......Oh. My. Goodness. :) It took HOURS! Then I had to place 1mm foam pads on to the back of the tree & the flowers - my fingers were sore afterwards! Thankfully, the rest of the card was very simple, especially as I decided not to strain my brain further by trying to come up a sentiment! I'll probably just put something in the inside at some stage. So, that's it, hope you like it.

Here is some astonishing blog candy! Sassy is offering this on her blog until midnight, March 21. Visit her blog for all the info & follow her instructions.

Before I say goodbye, I must tell you I have been given another award. Kay is a crafting buddy at DC & she very kindly gave me this. Thank you so much Kay!

Isn't it pretty? I have to pass this on to my Top Ten favourite blogs, so I will make a list & post it tomorrow.

I'm going on my blog tour now, to see what you've all been up to today.

Until tomorrow, love & light.

Tilda In The City

Sorry there was no post yesterday, it was one of those days. Many thanks to those who've visited my blog & left comments in the last two days, I am very grateful.
Today's card is one I made a few months ago for the Tilda Challenge at DC. I couldn't show it before now, because I made it for Jen's birthday & I didn't want her to see it. Well, her birthday was on Tuesday - she spent it at Disneyland in California! ( She said it was nice being ten again!) - so here's her card.

It won't surprise anyone who follows this blog that I chose London for the city & I chose the London Eye because Jen & I love walking along the Southbank when she visits & the Eye is always the start & the end of our walk. This is a gorgeous photo of the Eye at night, so I used colours that fit with the image. The papers are Core'dinations Hocus Pocus & Papermania Blue Tones. I coloured Tilda with my Whispers pens & everything else is from my stash.

I've got a blog candy alert for you. Janet is offering these gorgeous to celebrate 50,000 hits on her blog. She estimates that her counter should reach that number around March 17. So visit her blog, follow the instructions & good luck.

I have nothing else to report, except that it's ****** cold today! So I'll end here, see you tomorrow.

Love & light.