Card making

I am not usually very pleased with the cards I make, but have been so inspired by my new friends in my new craft forum. I decided that perhaps if I looked upon them as small scrapbook pages I might do better! So I printed out some photos that I like from our trip to RHS Wisley last year, and made these! As I normally like to work from sketches I printed out a whole load of card sketches from www.pagemaps.com. Here are the finished cards, and I love them!

What I need to do now (and I am so inspired!) is to stamp some images and use them instead of the photos!

It's Mum's birthday on Thursday. I probably won't be able to see her because I have such a streaming cold, but I think they are seeing friends anyway. I have ordered some flowers to be delivered, which I know she will love.

from untidy to tidy!

Friday didn't go to plan! I was supposed to go to Sarah's for coffee, but found out at the last minute that it was cancelled (I checked the answer phone just before going out the door!)

Then I was supposed to take Mum in to see dad in hospital, but I have a sore throat and headache, so couldn't do that. So I had a whole day free! I started by catching up on forum chat, then vacuumed downstairs, then decided to tackle my very messy dining room! Here's the before and after photos!

The weekend

We had a great time with Andrew and Lynda yesterday for lunch. Unfortunately (or fortunately whichever way you look at it!) Andrew, Mum and Michelle had to rush off to collect Dad from hospital! It's a bit weird, we expected him to be in for weeks, but I guess because he hasn't had a severe reaction to the chemo he has been allowed home. He is not feeling too bad, a bit tired and he has a rash from one of the drugs. He will probably go neutropenic (very low white blood cells) so he has to go back into hospital on M0nday for a blood test.

It has been a really lovely day today, blue skies and sunshine and not so cold. We took Merlin down to the beach again for walk as it was low tide, and took more pictures of the wood! They are piling it up in huge piles now so that the buyer can ship it off in lorries. Wonder what they'll do with it? I guess they will use it for chipboard and paper. I have spent about 1 hour in the garden cutting things down and tidying, now I am on here fiddling!

Coffee

I am really keen to scrapbook my everyday life this year. Thus, I am doing 2 challenges, one is an A-Z of Everyday things with http://itsacreativeworld.typepad.com/its_a_creative_world/a_to_z/index.html, the other is http://thoselittlebigthings.blogspot.com/, where the first prompt is COFFEE CUP! I am going to scrap this page, but thought I would write my thoughts down here first, then it doesn't matter how long it is until I scrap it! LOL I am intending on getting a D rin album and doing all different sizes of LO, depending on how much I have to say about the object. I think this one will be a 12 x 12!

So here is my favourite coffee cup. I love the saying and the funky picture on it, and it is the perfect size for my morning cup of real coffee. I have a cup of coffee just before I leave work in the morning, at about 9am, and then my second cup after I have taken the dog for a walk. I always have a weightwatchers or Go Ahead bar with my second cup, and usually drink it checking up on my forums. MMMMM Lovely! My favourite coffee at the moment is Kwonggi Mountain which I buy from Waitrose. I buy ground coffee and make myself a cup in my little cafetiere. At the weekends, we use the bigger cafetiere and often make frothy milk too! I really love my morning cups of coffee, and would not like to give them up. It is all part of my routine now.

I try not to drink too much coffee, occasionally I will have 3 cups per morning, but I don't drink strong coffee after lunch. I f I have a cup later in the day it is usually decaffienated.

When I go out for coffee I always have a Large latte! I love the coffee at Nero's and at M&S.

Wood on the beach!

What an awesome sight! A ship (Ice Prince) went down in the channel off Dorset last week, and has dumped all it's cargo of wood on our beach! There are thousands and thousands of planks! I went down this morning - along with a whole load of other Worthingites to look and take photos. It is going to be some task to collect it all and clear the beach. I don't know how far it stretches, but I walked from Grand Ave to the pier, and this was the sight all the way along. It was quite a sight with high tide and the waves crashing over the wood. It is quite a high hight tide today (5.7m accoring to the beach office man on Splash FM radio this morning!) I'll pop down again later in the week and see how far thy've got with the clear up operation.

Westpoint exeter weekend

Wow what a fab weekend I had! I went to stay with Lesley along with Tash and Burn. All friends from Tandastamps forum. We had a real girly, giggly weekend. Big big thanks to Lesley for putting us up, and to tash for driving, and for Burn for making me laugh so much (Granny Ede and Do your ears jhang low in particular!!!)

On Saturday we went to the craft show at Westpoint, and here we are with Andrew and Alex from Tanda.


Burn, Tash, Lesley, Alex and me













Possum and her friend Alma. Possum very kindly printed us each an ATC book to make.











Andrew, Burn and Possum's neice Emily
















This was one of my favourite stalls. The threads were the most beautiful colours imaginable.











A host of gorgeous glitters! Love those reds!(The lady on the stall was not too keen on me taking a photo in case I was gpoing to put it in a magazine - I wish!!!)












Lesley and Burn cutting some card to make a book with Lesley's bind-it-all.

















Tash using the Bind-it-all.




















Giggling with a glass of wine!!!

Dad

Poor old Dad! He has had a hard time of it lately. He went into hospital on Christmas eve with a very nasty chest infection. He had been on chemotherapy for 3 months and the dr told him that his white cell count was really low (he has myeloma a type of white cell/bone marrow cancer) Well, they pumped him full of nasty antibiotics, which cleared the chest infection, but made him really sick. He didn't eat for 2 weeks, and hardly got out of bed. He finished the antibiotics on Monday, and they let him go home. He is so weak he can't get up the stairs to bed, so DH and DB went to move the bed downstairs yesterday. Luckily they have a 'back' room that Dad likes to paint in, so they moved stuff out of there. They seem both very miserable about having the bed downstairs.

Today, he went to an apppointment with the dr and he is off all drugs for 1 week, to see if he can get some strength back. Then, he has to go on a very powerful chemotherapy which will knock him back quite severely again! Oh dear....

He has had myeloma for 10 years, and this is by far the worst I have seen him. I think he is weaker than after he had a stem cell transplant (like a bone marrow transplant but your own stem cells go in, so no rejection problems) at Hammersmith hospital - a procedure he has had twice!

Christmas Journal pages 19 - 26

Phew! Another project finished! Wow h I have loved doing this one, adn I am really pleased with it! Only trouble is, it really doesn't fit in it's binding!! Not sure how to store it!

Christmas journal pages 27th dec to 6th jan