Smiley faces

Well I see I have been AWOL for nearly a month. How did that happen? I think I have just been so busy with other things, particularly jam making and sorting knitting for Africa, that I have not had the time or energy to do much crafting. But at the end of last week I found myself needing a couple of cards so I had to get my act together.

First I will share some news we had last weekend that gave us a bit of a scare, but did have a happy ending. We had a phone call to tell us that our son Mike's older boy Olly, who is 9 now, had had an accident in a children's play area and was in the High Dependency Unit at Birmingham Children's hospital with a fractured skull that was bleeding under the 'dent'. He was on close obs. with a view to surgery. A lot of folk in UK and here were praying for him and God is good! The bleeding stopped spontaneously and a later scan showed no internal damage. He has a permanent dent in the side of his head, (it looks quite big on the scan), but the consultant said that surgery would now only be for cosmetic purposes so they decided against it.

Olly is now home and recovering well, though he will need to take care for quite a while. Of course I wanted to send him a card but I did not have a suitable image in my stash and searching the computer for a digi stamp did not throw up many results. (I couldn't wait to order a stamp from UK, but digis are instant). Eventually I did find this little boy which was a freebie on this site. I printed it out, coloured it with copics and cut the image and a red card mat with spellbinders 'Marvellous squares' dies. I then covered a base card with some blue scrapbook paper from my stash, and used an off cut of the same red card to cut the sentiment with one of my first cuttlebug cut and emboss sets. It looked a bit plain so I thought I would cheer him up with some smiley face stickers left over from my days as a nursery school manager! He will be feeling a lot better by the time he gets it, but I hope it makes him smile too.

Secondly my lovely grand-daughter is twenty-one at the end of this week. She holds a special place in my heart because, not only was she our first grandchild, but along with her younger cousin she brings some female balance to our very male-orientated family, and it is nice to make a pretty, girly card for a change.
To make this one I used one of my favourite stamps, the rose script, from Graphicus, now Chocolate Baroque. I stamped it twice and coloured the rose with copics on one, fussy cut it, and used silicone glue to stick it to the other image. The off-set mat and small hearts are pink pearlised card and the base card is ivory pearl. I have an ancient pack of printed Indian papers which I used for the border, cut with a fiskars punch, and the heart backer. 
To add some bling I used decorative gems from Joycraft.

This too is now winging its way to UK, so today I need to think about a Christmas card for Rudolph day on Thursday. I also need to seriously rethink my time management, so I can get back to indulging myself down here in my 'play-room'.