Countdown begins here.....

WAH!!! The end of summer is fast approaching (Ha!! that's a laugh - Summer ended in June as far as I can remember!!!!) and the school uniform drill has begun :o( None of the jobs I had planned have been finished - most of them have been started, so that's some consolation! Back to school on Friday for me - the boys still have another week off but I'm going for a TE day.

But on the plus side, it means that autumn is waiting just around the corner and I LOVE autumn. I love it's coziness, the smells, the warm colours, hot puddings, toad-in-the-hole (made with vege sausages, of course!! LOL!), and new challenges. What a super link into my next news!
My wonderful teamies at TYI have got together with our lovely friend Clare and have created a fabulous new weekly challenge blog called KEEP IT SIMPLE! It's all about clean and simple cards which everyone loves to do from time to time, and our first theme is a Christmas card in traditional colours, and here is mine:

CAS cards are a HUGE challenge for me but I do want to improve, though I fear I may have overplayed the 'simple' bit with this card! LOL!! It's a big learning journey for me and I am really excited about the prospect of learning from others how to do this CAS thing, because it really is a talent in itself I think!

I do hope we have lots of players because I love to see CAS cards and I really want to pick up tips from those who do it brilliantly - plus we have some wonderful prizes to give away from fabulously talented sponsors, as well as the kudos of being picked as one of our top 3 players each week!! WooHoo!!!

So please pop along, give us a try - we'd love to see as many as possible over there!

In the meantime, I will be back later with my tag for this week. Have a great BH weekend! :o) xx

Pssssst......

There's a new blog on the block - Starting Sunday 29th August Keep it Simple! challenges will be set, and we're looking to expand the team! Let me know if you're interested!

Oh I DO want to be beside the seaside!

Oh Lord, this time of year always makes me want to be by the seaside - the weather has been awful, but if I have to suffer it, being by the coast would help to ease that burden! It wouldn't matter where I was, I just love the smell of sea air, sand, fish and chips, vanilla ice-cream.... and the colours - I just love the colours of the seaside. But I just have to keep on wishing - there's no chance of me getting to the beach this summer :o( Yesterday we got in the car and just went for a drive - I just wanted to be by water so we found ourselves in Stourport! Oddly enough, it's only about 20 minutes drive from me but I just never go there, but yesterday we found these

Sigh...... Barrett's have built these gorgeous riverside apartments right in the basin so I had to go and have a look around the show apartment! WAH!!!! I WANT ONE!!! They are just so gorgeous - compact and bijou, but gorgeous! I decided there and then that if my numbers come up on the lottery, I'm going to have a weekend retreat right here!! They're not finished yet, but when they are it's going to be beautiful round there. Leaning out of the patio door, this is the view to the left of the apartment we looked at:

It's not quite the coast, but it'd do for me!!! The only one who wasn't interested was my eldest because the bedrooms were quite small and he protested loudly about the thought of having to share one with his brother!!!! LOL!!

So over to my creations for this week - Ooops!! No stamps? WHAT??? Well, I have actually used stamps this week but I'm not going to show anything yet because this post is already getting photo-heavy! I'll start with my offering for this week's Tag, You're It! theme which is {{{gulp!}}} No Stamps Allowed. Well, my first thought was HELP!!!!! but then I started to think about what I like - the seaside - hmmmm...... and so I came up with this:

brilliant fun to do and as it was meant to be 'shabby' I didn't have to be so careful about where I splodged inks!! LOL!! It was made by cutting out 3 strips of card and roughing up the edges, then the whole thing was painted with distress inks and 'highlighted' with promarkers.

Right, well that's my lot for today. Thank you for stopping by and I wish you a very happy week ahead! :o) xx

Zentangle

A very quick seperate post here because of Inlinkz! Today was the first time I joined in with the Lots to Do challenges where the challenge this week is ZENTANGLE. Well, I didn't have a clue what Zentangle was so I did a bit of googling, then I did a bit of doodling! Oh Wow!! How therapeutic is this!!! It was so relaxing and addictive! I understand the 'Zen' part of the word has something to do with this??? Anyway, here is my offering.

Thanks for stopping by! :o) xx

Sunday again!!!

It's been a funny ol' week! I started the transformation of my craft room last week because I decided it was time to let my boys have a dining room again! Apart from anything else, it was starting to bug me the fact that my stuff had taken over in there so I set about the ruthless task of ditching stash that I've hung onto for years without using. Apart from the great big box of stickers, ribbons, flowery papers, stamps, etc. that I put aside for my friend's little girls, I managed to ditch 19 black bin bags of stuff that has been cluttering up my craft room!! I can't believe it either! A lot of it was old cardstock and papers that had faded in the sunlight, but there was practically a bag of cut-off's alone!! I do use cut-off's on my tags but the amount I'd stashed away was ridiculous! There were also a lot of storage boxes that took a trip to the tip because I knew that if I hung onto them, they'd only get filled with more rubbish! I have a lot of drawers in my craftroom too and every one of them got emptied (mind you, they're full again now!!!). And if you think that's excessive, try it yourself - it's very scary how much we hang onto witha view to using 'one day'!

Anyway, I did manage to get my craft room back and we also have a dining room once more. However, it wasn't without pain - Oh No! Stupidly I lifted one box too many and OUCH!!! My back went! So I ended up having to take a trip to the Minor Injuries Unit where I was prodded, pushed and pulled in all directions. Many tears later (God, it hurt!!) I was prescribed some meds for soft tissue damage - Thank God, because I couldn't stand up or sit down - it was agony! However, as the next few days went by I began to experience a really strange feeling. My initial thought was that it was the tablets that I'd been prescribed because I was feeling really, really depressed! I couldn't do anything and I found myself wanting to be totally alone and getting worked up about stuff that really isn't important. So figuring that it might be down to the tablets I stopped taking them and lo and behold, this horrible feeling lifted! I still have the back pain but I'd rather live with that than the awful depressed feeling I was having - too scary!

And so here are my offerings for this week. It's our Village Show in a couple of weeks and one of the categories is to make a handmade card so here is one that I made:

inside:

I was also very honoured to be asked by my lovely friend Linda to be part of her creative team for her new shop, Jazzlin's. Linda is very lucky to have found the opportunity to combine her crafting with her career and has opened her own shop in Braintree. It's still very early days but she is doing really well with the business and is building her stock. If you're a Sweet Peas Stamps fan Jazzlin's is one of the UK stockists and Linda will be more than happy to supply you with what you need. She also stocks Belles and Whistles stamps and recently sent me this stamp to play with and this is what I created with it:

Pop over to the blog and see what the rest of the fab team have been up to!

Finally this week I have found a wonderful new place to play, craft and chat over at the Lots to Do forum. Everyone over there is so welcoming and chatty and there are lots of swaps and challenges going on all the time. Currently there is a charms swap happening and I made these three to send off to Zoe. I have to confess they were heavily inspired by my lovely friend Sharon who sent me something similar a couple of years ago (though I can't deny her's were much more beautiful!)

Blimey, have you fallen asleep yet?? That's all for today - unless you fancy popping over to my Magnolia's Only blog where I am showing off my monogram tag this week for the Tag, You're It! theme. Have a great week ahead and thanks for stopping by! :o) xx