WOYWW 169

It is time once again to join me as I hop around the blogs of a very friendly group of crafters, to see what they are getting up to this week. To find out more, pay a visit to our host Julia at her Stamping Ground, and join in the fun.

Apart from a few Christmas cards I haven't done much crafting this week. I have spent every morning at the vet with poor Baggins, who is still very unwell. He did pick up really well last week, but at the weekend he went downhill again. He had an X-ray yesterday which confirmed his broken jaw, but also showed he has a lot of fluid collecting around his lungs, which explained why he was struggling to breathe. However last night and today he has stayed 'in hospital' at the vet clinic so they can feed him intravenously, and inject antibiotics. I thought he looked a bit brighter today. So I shall be off there again tomorrow to see how he is. 

That did mean that this afternoon I was able to spend some time in my craft room, so I had a die-cutting afternoon. I started off with a Christmas die that a friend of mine bought, and she had not been able to get a good cut with it. I ran it through my green bug with some aluminium foil, and with several passes through the machine, turning it 90º between passes, I did manage to cut it all. However it is a very intricate die, and having cut it I had great difficulty removing the piece without tearing it. So I then tried again with a sheet of 'papel vegetal', which I think is like English baking parchment, between the die and paper I was cutting, and this time I was successful. But I did find that with some weights of card I had to put a thin piece of acetate as a shim over the centre of the image. Otherwise the middle bit didn't cut, however many times I turned it. I don't think it is really faulty, just one of those awkward dies, and she will need a bit of patience to use it. I will be able to give her a few tips when I see her at our group tomorrow morning. Fortunately we meet for our sewing group in a building immediately opposite my vet's clinic, so hopefully I can get to both!

I then moved on to try a couple of new dies that arrived in the post for me today. I bought two of them when I saw a lovely card made by our host Julia, earlier this week. I cut out each of the butterflies in the Joy craft set, and compared them with the Sissix/SU embosslit ones. I love that little grey folder which manages to give me five different butterflies within a two inch square. Those tinies are so cute, and now I have some larger ones as well, so 'butterflies for all occasions'. And lastly I bought the memory box prim poppies die. This didn't strike me as being anything very special when I first saw in online. but I have now seen it used on cards on various blogs and I love it. It is so elegant and delicate. I am sure I will find plenty of uses for it.

What else is on my untidy table? Well there is the big black folder where I store my cutting dies. The white folder at the back with black squares all over it is the plan for this month's photo-board which is almost complete of course. Then there is a sketch with a pen and pencil on top of it. I have just followed an online tutorial to draw an image I wanted, and now I have to tidy it up and make it into a digistamp. More of that another day I hope.

It also looks a bit like a chemist counter with a bottle of 90% alcohol which I use for cleaning up everything from alcohol inks to glue to permanent markers. Wonderful stuff! The baby oil I use in parchment craft and I am about to sort things our for my class on Thursday, and the lavender water is out for me to refill my little spray bottle. Nearly everyone out here carries one of these in their handbag. A quick spray on the back of your neck is very cooling and refreshing, and they do say it keeps the flies at bay too, but the jury is still out on that one!

So that's it for me for another week. I will visit as many of you as I can, but it will depend on how much time I spend at the vet. Thank you for all your kind messages about Baggins. As you know he is very special to me, and I appreciate your concern.

POST SCRIPT.

I am very sad now because I went to the vet this morning and Baggins' condition had deteriorated over night, so I made the very difficult decision to let him go. They have been wonderful to him there, and couldn't have done more to try to save him. But it had reached the point where we were keeping him alive for my benefit and not his, and he didn't deserve that. He is at peace now, but my craft room will never be quite the same again.

A Colourful Collection for Rudolf Day

When I bought the Chocolate Baroque plate of Christmas stamps that I have been using recently, I also spotted this lovely stamp by Indigo Blu, which I saw as having the potential to make some quick and easy cards. So I thought I would get it inked up for Rudolf Day, (The 25th of each month).  To find out more visit Sandra's blog, Stamping for Pleasure.

For the first card I started by checking that the stamp would fit on an A6 card which it did, perfectly. So I cut two A4 sheets of white light-weight card into quarters. I set two pieces aside in case I had to redo any, but as they all worked quite well first time, I will probably think of a another couple of colour combinations and make two more later today.

I then covered one piece with Antique Linen DI ink, using my ink dusters, another fairly new acquisition that hadn't been used before. I liked the subtle, slightly mottled affect I got with these.  I darkened the edges with Walnut stain and used the same pad to stamp the image. Once it was dry, I trimmed it up and mounted it onto a colour co-ordinated base card. Looking for a sentiment stamp I found this little verse stamp that I made using image pac, many moons ago, and it fitted the space perfectly. I finished it off with a few dabs of brown stickles for a little bit of sparkle.

Satisfied with this, I then made the other five in the same way, using two toning colours, except for one where I used strong contrasts. All but one of the inks were Distress Ink pads. My colour combinations, starting with the contrasts, were, Squeezed lemonade/Festive berries, Antique linen/Walnut stain, Tumbled glass/Peacock feathers, Iced spruce/Mowed lawn, Spun sugar/Picked raspberry, and Shaded lilac/ Memento Paris dusk. As you can see, I gave my recently bought Spring and Summer special ink pad sets a good try out.

On the green card I tried adding glossy accents to the baubles and sprinkled some glitter on them, but I didn't feel this really added anything worthwhile to the card, so for the others I just used the stickles.

So here is my set of six cards. I am sorry the photos aren't better. The two blues are actually very different from one another, one being lilac blue and the other turquoise. The stickles don't really show either but they add a nice bit of sparkle. It is very, very bright here today and it is difficult to photograph the colours accurately. As well as linking these to Sandra's Rudolf day challenge, I am also entering them in the:

Christmas Stampin' All Year Long Challenge 25: Non Traditional Colours.

I'm dreaming of a GREEN Christmas.

In an earlier post I said I would be making a set of cards using each of the stamps on a new Chocolate Baroque plate, so here is the first one.

I'm not sure why I chose to make it green. Maybe I was getting withdrawal symptoms. There is very little green out here right now, after an exceptionally hot, dry summer. Or maybe it is excitement about a long awaited holiday in Ireland in October, where I am expecting to see the renowned 'Forty shades of green'.

I am a bit of a realist and I tend to colour things in the 'right' colour, but I felt a poinsettia all in green wasn't too unrealistic, and I actually rather like the way it turned out. I stamped the image complete in Memento olive ink, and used Adirondak juniper and a water brush to add a pale tint to the sky. (Memento is not waterproof so I had to be careful with this). I then cut all around the outside leaving a very narrow white border, and added some stickles for sparkle on the trees, church and ground. I stamped the flower again and coloured it with copics, and then cut it out and snipped between the petals so I could layer it on different levels without adding too much bulk. The base card is a very old, pearlescent olive one from my stash, and the backing paper is from a Crafters Companions CD.

There is a very tiny church in the image so I am entering this in:

Crafty Hazelnuts Christmas Challenge 86: Use a Building.

And also in:

Holly Jolly Christmas Challenge: Monochromatic Christmas.

Party Time Tuesday Challenge 82: Shades of Green.

WOYWW 168

It's Wednesday once again, so here we go on our trip around the blogs of friends and fellow crafters, courtesy of Julia at Stamping Ground.

My desk has been quite busy today because I haven't done much this week, for reasons I'll explain later, but today I have been down here all afternoon, and it now tomorow, (I mean I started this on Tuesday night but it is now gone midnight so it is Wednesday. Perhps I should just go to bed!). Anyway I thought I'd just do a quick post about what I have been doing.

This morning I had post - yay! Part of it was a big plate of Chocolate Baroque Christmas stamps, so I decided to mount them up on foam and actually use them straight away, which is a first for me. So instead of making a set of matching Christmas cards this month, I am going to make one using each of the new stamps. Here you can see the first ones stamped up, and a little bit of colouring on a couple. I have out my tray of Memento ink pads because if I use these, I can add colour with my copics. They are very compatible. My pens are out at the side, along with a box of inks in the background. The colour chart is one I made for my copics, using the card/paper that I generally use for stamping, so I know what the colours will really look like. I have found it much more accurate and useful than the one I orginally printed out.

And now, for those who tried to guess what all my little cut out pieces of card were for, here is what I made! Not surprisingly, no-one got close, but not too many folk waste a week constructing a drum kit. This was part of my efforts last week to get to grips with my silhouette cameo machine. I didn't design it; I simply bought the file, and I made a whole load of mistakes in the making of it. 

The silver card was much too thick, and it had a thick plastic coating on the back, so although I got the cutting settings right on the machine, and it did cut beautifully, it was too stiff to curl and didn't want to stick! Some of you know that one of my sons is a very talented drummer who plays with a heavy metal/grunge band, and when he was around twelve, we bought him his first proper kit. It was custom made, great big things, to give the right sort of noise, and their shells had mottled green metallic surfaces. Hence my use of alcohol inks on holographic card, but again this was too thick to curl properly, even though I wound it round my glue bottle and fixed it with a rubber band over night. The whole thing was a nightmare to put together, and it is quite small (about 6" high), so it was very fiddly. But I persevered and finished it, though I doubt it will have a long and happy life. It is clinging together with a wing and a prayer! But it was a good exercise and I learned quite a lot while doing it.

My non-productive week is down to the fact that my lovely Baggins is very ill. On Saturday he had what was probably a stroke, but it could have been an accident, though we have never known him to go on the road. He usually stays in the back yard, and would never have made it over the fences and through the house in the condition he was in. There is a possibility that he was frightened by some local lads who have been playing with fire-crackers this week, causing him to fall and bang his head. I found him on our bathroom floor at bedtime, when I was hunting for him to give him his supper.  He had had a nose bleed and was only just conscious. The vet is still not sure what happened to him, but he has definitely lost his sight in one eye, and his jaw is misaligned. All Sunday he didn't move except when I syringed water into him to stop him dehydrating. He has now had two days of antibiotic and anti-inflamatory injections, and also three doses of high vitamin supplement, because he hasn't eaten since Saturday morning. But today he is much better in that he has walked around a little, and lapped water for himself. He can't eat, but I have been using a syringe to feed him with a high calorie, convalescent food, that is a powder mixed with water, so he doesn't have to chew. Tomorrow he is off to the vet again, and if he is further improved they are going to try to manipulate his jaw. It isn't broken, so they don't want to put him through an operation if it is not necessary. Today I made him comfortable back in my craft room, which is why I have been down there to work all day today. I just hope he continues to improve. He is my shadow, and constant companion, and I love him to bits. He is only about five years old, but he was in a desperate state when I took him in from the rescue centre, so he has never been robust. Here's hoping...

Candy Winner!

About ten days ago I posted some blog candy to celebrate reaching fifty followers. Yesterday was the last day to sign up for a chance to win it, so last night I put all the names in a hat and asked my hubby to draw one out. And the winner is 

Sonia

http://sonia-studio60.blogspot.com.es/

Sonia is one of my international friends from Puerto Rico.   So well done Sonia. Please e-mail your postal address and I will get it sent off to you. I hope you have fun using it.

Thank you to all my loyal followers who regularly comment on my odd assortment of crafting projects, and to those who also pop over to my other blog to read about our life in Spain. I appreciate you all, and the kind comments that you leave.

I'm celebrating

Welcome to Josie who is follower number 50 on my blog. I appreciate you all. thank you for dropping by and leaving such lovely comments.

To show how much I appreciate you I am celebrating having 50 followers by offering a little blog candy. This is open to my followers and regular WOYWW friends, and anyone else who has at some time left me a kind comment. You don't have to become a follower to be in with a chance, though new followers are always welcome, but you do need to have commented on here on a previous post, and you also need to comment here on this post, to say you want to be in the draw. In a week and a half's time, on Friday 17th August, I will put the names of all who have commented on this post, in a hat, and my husband will draw one out.

Feel free to repost the photo if you want to. If I follow the instructions from my good friend Di correctly, this post will stay at the top of my blog until the draw, and newer posts will go underneath it.

In the candy you will find a 6"x6" Life's Journey paper pad, a book of crafty Individuals miniature images of flowers and butterflies, a tiny wooden box for altering, some burlap and decorative ribbons, a few hand-made flowers and moulded clay pieces, white die cut flourishes, handmade paper ATC or topper blanks, and a few other embellishments.

I will post to anywhere in the world. I am, after all, an 'International crafter' myself! Good luck.

Just in Time!

I have had a part made Christmas card floating around in my room all week that was intended for Crafty Hazelnuts Christmas Challenge. Somehow it has taken me a while to get round to finishing it. But here it is, with just a couple of hours to spare before the challenge linky is closed.

The background is the second half of a sheet of spray-dyed card that I used for a card in an earlier post this week. I layered it onto a dark green base card.

I have been following several online tutorials this week to learn how to make better use of my Silhouette cameo cutter, and one of the things I learned was how to make a wide frame from a background design. So I used my holly background to make this. I cut it from my usual white card and sprayed it with a gold mica spray. Because the paper is slightly coated the spray stayed in droplets, but I quite liked the effect.

Next I printed the gingerbread tree using a Pink Cat Studio digi-stamp. I didn't like it on white card so when I had coloured it I cut each row of men out and glued them onto a cream pearlescent card mat that I had also cut with my cameo. (Neither the colouring nor the cutting are perfect, and I know the image is a bit crooked, but fortunately my friends and family understand that my current eyesight does not allow for much accuracy and they make allowances for me! I am still waiting for a date in September for my cataract operation, and I am down to nearly zero vision in my right eye).

I then made a small tag and stamped on a greeting from a seeD's word collection, and added a fimo candy cane that I made for a challenge last year. I fixed it to the card with a red bow and added a second bow in the top right corner to balance it up.

So, this is not the best card I have ever made, but it is useable, and I am entering it in:

Crafty Hazelnuts Christmas Challenge 85: Festive Food and Drink.

WOYWW 167

Can you believe it is Wednesday again, and time to take a hop, skip and jump around the various blogs that you can find at Julia's Stamping Ground. Do join in and see what is keeping us all busy.

I do believe I might manage a short post today, (short for me anyway). I am writing in the 'wee small hours' and falling asleep over the keyboard, but I just know there won't be time before I go out in the morning. We have had another little heatwave this week with temperatures up in the forties, and it is very draining. One day we had the 'Sirocco wind' again which sweeps in straight from the desserts of Africa, laden with fine red dust that dries out your eyes and nose, and anywhere else it can find! The fans were on but it felt like sitting under a hot hair drier all day, so we had to give in and use the air.con. for a day or two. So needless to say, I have read a couple of books this week, but crafting has been kept to a minimum. I did finish the tiger card with the alcohol ink background I was making last week. You can see it here.

What's on my workdesk this week?  Well, as you can see, the alcohol inks are out again. This time I used bottle green and meadow on some holographic silver card. You can also see an assortment of odd shaped cut outs in black and silver card. The new blade and cutting mat for my Silhouette Cameo machine arrived yesterday and I wanted to try them out. Can you guess what I am making? Well if it all comes together, I will return in the week and show you what I have made. Otherwise it will all end up in the bin, which right now is probably the more likely outcome!! maybe I'll have a new source of patience after a few hours sleep.

Thank you so much for all the kind comments you left me last week. A big welcome to my new followers. Don't forget there are still a few days to sign up for my blog candy. See my post about it here. I'll be back with the winner at the weekend.

Happy Workdesk Wednesday everyone!

Sent with love

Chris's sister is currently struggling through a course of chemotherapy, and I wanted to send her a little love.  We are not in close contact with her, but I wanted her to know that she is in our thoughts and prayers. 

I decided to use one of the poppy images I painted a couple of weeks ago, to try out my new Chocolate Baroque stamp. (See here for what I used). I trimmed it down and cut a scalloped mat for it using my original nestability dies.

For a backing paper I started with an A4 sheet of white paper and sprayed it with yellow, green and blue inks. I have a real mixture of spray inks - some very old Sticky Fingers dyes, glimmer mists, memories inks, crafty notions and others, and I use them together, generally adding one of the ones containing mica as the last layer to give it some shine. This one had a fine misting of gold to finish.

When it was dry, I cut a piece large enough to fit a 'non-standard'size card blank that I found in one of my boxes. I darkened the edge with  a Momento olive ink pad, and used the same pad to stamp a large leafy flourish stamp by Barbara Gray of Clarity stamps, coming up from the bottom left corner, and a smaller version of the same image coming down from the top. Then I added small snippets of the image on the other two edges to balance it up.

Using a Marianne die, I cut two dark green leaf swirls and curled them round the poppy to echo the swirls in the stamping, and fixed the assembled topper onto the card.

I haven't quite decided yet, but I will probably add a simple sentiment, 'Thinking of You', or just 'With love', before I post it.

Tiger, tiger, burning bright...

In my WOYWW post yesterday, I showed some backing card I had made with alcohol inks, and a cut and printed file, so now I can show you what I did with them.

Back in January last year, I did a post about using my craftrobo for scrapbooks. I didn't have many followers back then so you may like to take a look at  the post here. In it I showed pages for a scrapbook I was making for my son Jonathan, and featured a page titled 'Fire'. I am now making a birthday card for him, and perhaps you can see why I chose this image of a fiery tiger!

The image is from the net and I used my Silhouette Cameo machine (I upgraded from craft robo last Christmas) to make a cutting file for the outline. I then printed off the centre part of the image twice, and cut it by hand, though I should really have made print and cut files for this part as well, but sometimes the old fashioned way is faster. I layered up the tiger face over the flames, and then an extra layer for the nose and forehead section, rounding them a little to give them shape, and fixing them together with silicone glue. I glued the entire image to some white card.

Then came the layer using my alcohol background. This was made by pouncing on glossy card using a TH felt applicator and cranberry, butterscotch and red pepper inks. The gold was added using a Krylon pen which is what we used to use before Adirondak brought out the metal mixative inks, but I still prefer it. You can't see it very well in the main photo but this little close up shows it better.

The final layer is the same black paper that I used for the flames.

For the sentiment I used a font called Blazed, which I either bought from scrapnfonts or downloaded for free from dafonts. I honestly can't remember which. It has been in my font file for a very long time.

I then put the assembled card front onto a bright white base card. I hope you like it. I am pretty sure my son will.

By the way, don't forget to take a look at my blog candy, (Top post on this blog. See 'I'm celebrating' in the side bar blog list). You still have time to sign up for it.

WOYWW166

I'm really on the ball today. I'm writing this just after midnight, but I guess it is still only 11.00 pm in UK. I have had a slightly more productive week that I have managed just lately, making a few cards mostly for men. I have one more male card to make for my son, and it is the early stages of this, that you can see spread over my work desk today.

I am playing with alcohol inks and a krylon gold pen, to make a vibrant background. I have all the original colours of Adirondak alcohol inks, and some of the newer ones, but I nearly always end up using my favourite three, cranberry, butterscotch and red pepper. There is a cut out shape on my sticky carrier mat from my silhouette cameo machine, and some odd shaped, partial images, printed on white paper. Hopefully I will be able to show you how these all pull together in a couple of days.

I like my workspace to be fairly tidy, but if I pan round to the left, you can see an area that I don't often display. I guess you can see why! The green box houses my pan pastels and has my distress markers in front of it, there is a pile of paper off cuts left after my card making this week, and an array of odds and bods that I bought when I visited a new todo shop this week. They have all been thrown over there, burying my box of 'all things sticky' which is supposed to be readily available at all times, mainly because I haven't a clue where I am going to store them. There are a couple of spray bottles, some cotton cosmetic pads for using oil pastels to colour parchment, and some wooden items that I might get around to altering one day! ('Todo' means 'all' in Spanish, and todo shops are general stores, often also known as Chinese bazaars. They are cheap and cheerful, sell a bit of everything, and you get what you pay for, so the quality is not high. But they are a useful source of oddments).

Several people, last week, asked me what I do with my daily photo project, so here are the pages from July that I posted last week, now mounted on their backing paper. 

Because both the script and photos almost fill their page, there is little room for anything else. For July I stamped a few leafy vines on the script with a Lavinia stamp and added some wooden flowers embossed with UTEE in russet. On the photo page I cut the letters to say July on my silhouette machine, and cut a mat for each one in a slightly darker colour, and again I used the same vine stamp and a couple more flowers. That is all it needs as I do not want to distract from the photos. It is not really a scrapbook, simply a way of displaying the photo project attractively.

And finally, I have welcomed a few more followers to my blog just recently and now have reached fifty, so I am offering some blog candy to celebrate, to anyone who has commented on my blog at any time previously to this. You do not have to be a follower, just someone who has visited now and then. See the details in a post at the top of my blog. (above this one), and comment on that post, not this one, if you want to be entered in the draw. You can, of course, comment on this one too if you'd like to. I love to hear from you all.

What a muppet I am! I followed Di's easy instructions for making my candy past stay at the top of my blog, and at the same time she told me how to schedule a post so I thought I'd have a go with this one. Sure enough it posted at the set time, but I have just realised that I still need to come into it here, to link it to Julia's blog at the Stamping ground, so that I can share with all you lovely ladies who enjoy trolling round other folks work rooms to see what every one is getting up to. So pay Julia visit and join in the fun.

Both ends of the spectrum....

..... the age spectrum that is. Having had five sons, who in turn have given us seven grandsons and now a great grandson, I find myself making more than my fair share of male cards, and as we all know, this is not the easiest of tasks. This week I have been making two cards; one for my brother who is 83 this week, and one for my great grandson, who unbelievably is one in a week or two. It seems no time at all since I was celebrating his safe arrival!

The Michael Powell stamp that was out of stock when I ordered it, has now arrived, so I decided to ink that up for my brother's card. I am not sure it was a very wise buy, though I do like it. It proved to be a very fiddly task colouring it. I used my copics because I like their brush ends for colouring small details. As with the previous one I did, I stuck fairly closely to the colour guide on the back of the stamp. 

When it was finished I cut it out and edged it with a dark blue ink pad. I then used double sided tape to mount it on some burlap and then onto some pebble scrapbook paper that has lurked in my drawer for a very long time. I used a small strip of mottled blue paper to cut a row of waves and glued this along the base of the card. The other thing I wasn't so keen on about this stamp was it's size/shape. The only real option was to use it on a lengthwise DL card, which I wouldn't usually do, but I don't like making A5 cards except for something very special, and our Post office ups the charges a lot for that size. So a sideways DL it had to be. I made a slight error in cutting the waves, but I didn't have any more of the paper so I used it anyway, and hid the mis-cut under a silver anchor charm tied with blue bakers twine and some of the frayed fibres from the burlap.

For my great grandson's card I used a super Mo Manning digi image that I spotted soon after Isaac was born, and bought ready for this card! 

I printed it off and coloured it, again using my copic markers. Then I couldn't find any paper that I liked to mount it up, so I went online and found a perfect digi set of Wild West papers, alphabet and embellishments on the Scrap Girls site. I printed off a sheet of the yellow paper with blue hobby horses to cover the base card, and a sheet of distressed blue from which I cut a scalloped square. (I actually cut it, with proper scissors. No machines or dies in site! That's very unusual for me). Then I used the alphabet set to make the Happy Birthday banner and added a horses head to each end. I printed these and cut them out, along with a sheriff badge that was also in the embellishment set. I coloured a number one  peel-off with a blue permanent pen and stuck it on the badge.

I am entering the first card in:

Party Time Tuesday's Challenge: By the sea.

and the second card in:

Fashionista Chalenge 5; Birthday or Baby (mine covers both).

I am also entering both cards in :

Sassy Cheryl's Challenge 127; All about the boys.

Make it Monday 101; Anything goes.

WOYWW 165

This is an unusual Wednesday for me as I am actually joining before lunch time, the massive blog visiting fest that is hosted by Julia on her Stamping Ground each week . Do visit her to find out what it is all about. I am earlier this week because I woke up with a 'dicky tummy', probably due to the heat we are still experiencing, so I decided to give my usual Wednesday sewing group a miss.

Which doesn't mean that I have anything more exciting on my desk to show you than last week I am afraid. I did say last week that I only want the Olympics in short, sharp bursts, but I do watch the gymnastics. Beth Tweddle was training with Christine Still at Lilleshall, at the same time as my son was there, (back around 1995 when she was twelve and he was ten). We knew she had great potential then, and I am filled with admiration at the focus and determination she has shown to get where she is today. And it is great to see her doing so well in the Olympics this year. So I haven't spent a great deal of time at my  desk down here.

All that is on it this week is the photo collage and accompanying script page for July, for my Project 365, together with two lovely sheets of pastel swirl paper that I printed from a digi-set bought at Thyme Graphics. Later today I will hopefully put the two together! Even Baggins has dessertd me, looking for somewhere cooler to lay, which is fortunate as the project pages are 12"x12", so I need most of my desk space to work with them.

I thought I would also take this opportunity to showcase the ATCs I have received recently from you lovely folk. Due to family matters getting in the way, I just missed the third anniversary of WOYWW, and their ATC swap, but five ladies kindly offered to include me in a late swap. I have been waiting for the last one to arrive and I have it now, so here they are.

I had beautiful stamping and colouring from Sandra and Maxine, one of Shoshi's clever zentangles, something that I believe is called 'dumfing' from Annie, and one of Peggy's beautiful Filipino ladies. Thank you all so much. Aren't they beautiful? And I love the fact that one came from a few miles down the road from where I used to live, and one from New Zealand, as well as places in between. The internet has made our world so much smaller and more accessible somehow, and I love the fact that I have crafting friends from so many different countries now.

And while on the subject of friends, I have had a few new followers recently and am now just one away from the big '50'. I will have to do something about it when I get there. In the meantime, welcome to the new folk, and thank you for all the kind comments you leave for me. I do appreciate them.