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.