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

ATC's - Wings

Wooo, it's been a loooong time! It's not that I haven't been doing anything, I just haven't had time to blog but now that school's broke up I hope I'm going to get a few more chances over the coming weeks.

My first offering for July (OMG, it's nearly over!!!) are these 3 ATC's which I have made for the Stampman's brand new ATC swap. The first theme is "Wings" so I drew these 3 (almost) identical wings. I am so pleased that the swaps have started again because I love to make ATC's and often use my hand-drawn originals on them - it's a great excuse to release a bit of pent-up creativity that doesn't always work on other stuff!

So if you fancy getting your hands on one of these babies, you'll have to take part in the swap and who knows, you could find one in your return pack at the end of this month. There's also a fab giveaway prize too which is a very tempting incentive to draw you in too!!

Thanks for stopping by and hope you're enjoying the weekend wherever you are! :o) xx

Inspired by...

Happy Sunday all! Have you ever seen a painting or card, or any other crafted creation and thought to yourself "Oh Lord, I wish I'D done that!"? Of course you have, every one of us is inspired by others, whether that be other bloggers, famous/non-famous artists, crafters worldwide..... Every year in Bromsgrove we have an Arts Festival. It lasts for two weeks and there are a number of performances and street artists and concerts etc. take place all over the town. One of the things I love most is the Art Exhibition at one of the churches because it brings together some of the most amazing works of art by some extremely talented local people - one day I would LOVE to have the guts to exhibit something myself but up to now I haven't had the bottle! This year I found some mounted but unframed pictures by a lady who I think is called Linda someoneorother and I just swooned at them! Unfortunately though I wasn't in a position to splash out and buy them so I took these photo's of them to remind me how gorgeous they are and to aspire to be able to paint this good - ha! then I woke up!!!


The picture above is a painting of Chaddesley Corbett Post Office. I just love this lady's style of painting and I would give my eye teeth to be able to paint like this. Over at Tag, You're It! this week our theme is Inspired By..... and I chose this picture as my inspiration to make this Good Luck in your new home tag. This is my second tag for the June Swap which our lovely Janet is hosting.

I'm not fooling myself by imagining it's anything like as good as the original, but it's a start and it was such fun to paint - even though this was actually my 4th attempt!! LOL!!

Thanks for stopping by here, and I hope you have a great week! :o) xx

Too hot to sleep

Ugh! It's a fact that us Brits are always talking about the weather - maybe because it's so diverse. And right now it's just tooooooo hot! I'm really tired this morning because I just couldn't sleep at all last night! Instead I spent half the night tossing and turning and listening to Joe Public's solutions to Britain's binge-drink culture on TalkSport! I even had the fan blasting out all night but I just could not get comfortable. I did do my bit for England yesterday though - we're not footy fans in this house (thank the lord!) but I am feeling a bit left out by the red n' white craze that's taking over the country right now. But there's no way I'm going to be hanging flags and pennants out of the windows here so I made my hanging baskets using only frenzy red and vanilla white petunia's, and now I feel quite patriotic! LOL!

So, over at Tag, You're It! this week we're starting our June Swap. We are really hoping that many people will join in this because at the end of it, we all get back 4 lovely surprise tags from the other players as our lovely teamie Janet has offered to collect all the tags in, mix 'em up and re-distribute them for us. I know from doing this many years ago what great fun it is not knowing what you're going to get in return and how lovely it is to recieve something from another crafter that you may not even know! Our first theme is Needle and Thread. All our themes are open to interpretation, and although it was absolutely my intention to get my sewing machine out and do some proper stitching, unfortunately I just never got round to it so I went for the faux stitch look. You see the problem is, my workstation (aka dining table!) was in such a horrid mess and I felt that I just had to clear it all and get things put away. So I did and there was lots of room for my sewing machine then..... but there's nothing more enticing to me than a lovely clean workspace and an idea brewing in my head, so out came the stamps, out came the inks, brushes, acrylic blocks, d/s tapes, papers, scissors, box of scraps, flowers, pearls, bling, ribbons, the glitter glues, and lo and behold, it looked exactly the same again in no time at all - and still no room for the sewing machine! So I gave up domesticity - it doesn't suit me! I did however manage to produce this:

Very, very simple, but then I think tags should be. The image is coloured with distress inks and stickles and the sentiment is a home-made rub-on which I'm very impressed with and intend to make many, many more!

Today is the last day of the holidays - back to school tomorrow and my therapy starts here. I calculated that I have only 34 more school days to go before the 6 weeks holiday - great, except that my baby has exactly the same number of days left at First School. I'm struggling to imagine him beginning a new life at Middle School from September, though he's really cool about it - he just seems so young to be joining 'the big kids', and it's going to feel pretty strange for me being at my school without him..... Oh lord, get me a therapist, quick!!!

Thanks for stopping by, and have a happy Sunday - I will be spending it at the Cinema and Frankie & Benny's entertaining my son and his friends for his 9th bithday bash! Thanks for stopping by! :o) xx