Getting into the swing again

Well, I have got back into the swing of making cards again, not that I am totally happy with them, but M thinks they are good, and as class is tomorrow, they are going to HAVE to be good enough!

I have used the Create a Scene stamps, oh boy! I have to get me some of these now lol.  I love 'em! The colored one has been colored in using watered down Brilliance inks, I like the shimmer that they have, and the second one has just been left monochrome black and white, I was not sure I liked it too much, but as a technique I suppose it is fine, stamping onto the acetate causes a lot of people problems.

Naughty Blogger!

Well as usual I have been a naughty blogger and not blogged for over a week, things have been a little frantic here in Ffrogland, you think that when you have your kids up and reared that is it, but oh no, not a bit of it!

I may be a naughty blogger, but I am trying to be a good crafter, and as I have permission from Voodoo Vixen to use one of her mini books for the classes I am putting together for the Collage, I have been busy making samples. I even LIKE some of them! No pictures as yet, but as soon as I have them all done and presentable I will take some. 

So far I have the Star Book, a Flip Book, Annette's Circular Book, a Tag book, a Maze Book and now I am working on a Felt Book. There is nothing as slow as the wheels of education when you want to get something finalised! The hoops that have to be jumped through are amazing and a chain of command about 10 miles long!

Sometime soon I am also going to have to did out my craft room, why am I such an untidy crafter? The rest of the house is reasonable, the odd dust bunny and I am not that fussy about cleaning windows, but when it comes to my crafting space, I suddenly become a right slob! Drawers pulled out, bits of paper on the floor and a pile of "things" I have been using at my elbow. I usually manage to end up crafting on a space a gerbil would have trouble balancing on.

I always blame the storage I use, and am constantly trying to devise new ways of storing things so I will not get into these pickles. If I am honest I will admit that it is the "storage" part of storage that I am not good at, it implies using something and putting it back into whatever devious plan I have come up with to keep these essential pieces of craft equipment in check. It all looks nice for as long as it takes for me to use said items. As soon as the item has been used, it is put away from me and I go onto the next step, no, of course I do not put it back in the drawer/file/folder/box/tin I got it from, I am on a roll and I NEED to get onto the next stage. Even though I have numerous pairs of scissors, can I ever find one? Nope, it is under or in a pile not far from my elbow.

I am just going to have to accept that no matter what "system" I use, I am never going to be able to be a tidy crafter.

Hey Ho!

Quiet Easter

Well this has been a very quiet Easter break for us. M and the Boys helped Miss Mouse to move all of her belongings to the new Mouse House, and he managed to do his back!  Still in bed and moaning and complaining like a good 'un, so I know he is OK lol.

I did run away on Easter Sunday to take little Miss K 

on an Easter Egg Hunt at beautiful Mussenden Temple, we should not have been, but we were surprised at the greed of children nowadays. The older ones took off at a great rate of knots and filled pockets and arms with as many eggs as they could carry, leaving the smaller ones with nothing, little Miss K was so disappointed at not finding any eggs, another small child had two, so gave one to her. This was lovely, but not the point, an Easter Egg Hunt is supposed to be about finding eggs, not relying on the kindness of others, who have been properly brought up, to share.

She loved getting an egg, but it would have been even nicer if she had been able to actually find it herself.

So that she had some nice memories of the day, I took them to the beach afterwards, like me, she loves the beach, in any weather.

Rock pooling is an all time favourite of ours, I have never grown out of the fascination of what lives in these little left over pools of water. It seems that no matter what age you are, at some time in your life, if given the chance, curiosity will get the better of you, and staring into these little worlds will always be one of the things to do at the beach.

Then there is chasing Daddy to clean off your sandy hands on his clothes, this is always a good game, just how much sand can you transfer to his jeans?

I am not sure who enjoyed this game the most, her, him or me! 

I really do need to go and do some crafting sometime soon, it seems like ages since I sat at my desk, and it is need of a good tidy up anyway, I had thought that I would be a good girl and use the scraps for card making, you know the idea, use the scraps before you start to cut into more pristine paper, instead of putting them all carefully into a drawer, never to see the light of day again until you have the grand purge because you cannot get any more into the drawer. Well it is clearly not working for me, so into the drawer all the bits will go again :)

Crazy Weekend!

This has been a lovely, but crazy weekend!

Our houseguest moved out into a flat of her own, and to help I roped in my sons to help, so they brought their families down as well, so there were 6 adults, 1 3 year old, 1 baby, 2 dogs and 2 cats in the house. Noisy, crazy and GREAT fun.

Miss K had a great time with her cousin, she just loves to hold her and try to feed her, but Miss E is not always as sure she likes to be a doll. She is growing so fast now, 13 weeks old, when did I get old enough to have 2 Granddaughters?

Both of them are little posers too, get the camera out and they love it, no problems getting lots of photos to scrap with them, Miss K is even going to turn out to be a bit of a camera buff too, she knows how to turn my camera on, how to take a picture and how to view them! She also watched me downloading from the camera to the computer and showed me how to do it next time too! Just as well she loves her scrapbook, it won't be long now until she is making her own :)  

The house feels very empty this morning, just the washing and tidying up to do now, but I would have it no other way, and I do have the 200 pictures I took to keep me going till the next time lol.

More Cards!

Well here is a surprise, as it is that time of the week, I have some more cards to show you, these, as usual are for tomorrow evenings class, so you might just notice the theme here, a sort of harder card, and then another in the same vain.

This week we are going to have another go at penny spinner cards, not that hard in the usual way of things, but not that easy when there is a race going on in class to see who can do their cards first and get gone! Why , oh why does this have to happen?

Today was Him Indoors's Birthday, pity we were both suffering from rough head colds, too much so to bother with going out for dinner which is our usual thing. We have got to an age where expensive Birthday presents are not needed, so dinner out somewhere nice is what we usually do, but tonight it was dinner in, a nice Chinese dinner including duck pancakes, yummy. I did offer to get him slippers and a nice beige v-neck cardie in honor of his advanced years, wet fish and my ears were mentioned lol.