So frustrating...

We are back home now in Broom, gotta tidy and clean and make everything look fantastic.. we have a guy coming round on Wednesday to see the property, and we are hoping he will take our tenancy over. It's also freezing in here STILL, the engineer can't come until Wednesday either.

What I really really want to do is go to my craft room and play. I have been looking at loads of blogs and got some fabulous ideas that I can use with quilling and stuff. But at the moment I am trying very hard to keep away from the craft room, otherwise I will just end up in there freezing to death, making myself miserable wanting to do things and knowing that time is running out and I should be wielding the vacuum cleaner and dusting.

So once the coffee has been drunk I will brave the icyness of the bathroom to shower - at least that will be warm - and then the vacuum will become my new best friend. Hopefully working in the house will make me warm, we are about to enter a bitterly cold patch according to the weather forecasters snow and allsorts!

Will post some more later, with blog addresses and other stuff.

Out To Dinner

Hi Folks, John and I have just been out to dinner at a friends house. My best freind Lizzi is a fabulous cook. she made roast beef, yorkshire puddings, roast potatoes done in goose fat - completely bad I know, but so delicious! Red cabbage, parsnips, carrots, cauliflower, broccoli, and sprouts. It was wonderful! Then we had Christmas pudding and rum sauce. I feel totally pogged! The conversation was good, Lee's dad was there, he is 90 and a great source of amusement, always got something interesting to tell you. Andy who is a musician come anything else he thinks he might want to be, including an electrician at the moment, who is rewiring my mum's house. Samantha who is fortunately getting over the upset of her fiance leaving her, and James, her 13 year old brother. We had a great time.

On Monday we are going back home to Broom, not looking forward to that, as we still have no heating, though the engineer is coming on Wednesday. It's a case of going home to tidy and clean as a prospective tenant is coming to look around the house on Wednesday also, plus the fact that Daniel is coming home too. In some ways I can't wait to get there so that once I have cleaned the place I can do a few cards to show you. I have been looking at some great blogs and I really can't wait to give some of the cards a go. Might have something to show you all then.

As for me, its nearly 1am and its time for bed. Toodleooo peeps.

Just a little something...

Hi fellow quillers and crafters, I hope you all had a very merry and happy Christmas. We spent the holiday at my mum's house in Sheffield. My 3 older sons all appeared Edward came on Christmas morning and stayed for a couple of hours before he went to his friends house where he was helping to cook dinner for bunch of em. Nick was here anyway as this is where he lives and Alex arrived mid morning.

It was wonderful to see them all. I do hope that when we move in here properly that we will see more of them. I do miss them.

Daniel is spending this holiday with his dad and step mum. Last night we got a text message complaining that he had been sent to bed at some ridiculous - his word - time. Poor lad, he has been having a hard time of it when he has been to see his dad. Helen has very different ideas from the rest of us and Daniel suffers because of that.

The picture today is a heart I made a couple of years ago, I did go through a time when I made lots of hearts, but this one is my favourite.

I did bring all my quilling papers to my mum's, but now that I have been on various blogs, I keep thinking that I wish I had brought that paper and why didn't I bring that tool, and oh I do wish I had brought my cuttlebug.

Well never mind, maybe just having my quilling papers to work with will make me do things I might not have done normally.

Ok, coffee has gone, time to work....

Brrrrrrrrrrrr

Oh my goodness, it's freezing!!! We arrived home last night from Sheffield thinking that we would come home to a nice warm house, only to find that the flippin' stupid boiler had not fired up. Aggghhhhhhh! John spent ages trying to get it to work, he just got extremely cross in the end. So I put wheat bags in the microwave and we all went to bed to keep warm. This morning the boiler still would not fire up, we checked the oil and that was fine as we only had it filled last week.
To be honest I am pretty pissed off with the Southill estate who own our house, they put a Rayburn in the kitchen but instead of it being an alternative kind of fuel, like solid fuel where we could put logs in, they just made it oil fired like the rest of the heating. So we aren't even sure that will work either.
Oil has gone up tremendously just lately. In April, we bought 1000 litres, at £350, 8 months later in December just 500 litres is now £275! Thank God we are leaving this place and heading home to Sheffield where we have gas plumbed in.
In some ways I will be sorry to leave this place, its very pretty, and is owned by the Whitbread family who have a chain of national pubs in this country, they also own Costa's coffee shops here and I dare say various other chains as well. They live in the big house at Southill Park just up the road from here.
However within the two villages Broom and Southill there are huge village politics and from what I have heard in the past 8 months some pretty nasty things have been said about various people. I don't need to be part of that, and just want the annonimity of my own large city and just my friends and my family.
Sheffield is a great place and I am looking forward to going back. Sorry there are no pictures today I do have things to show you all but may be it will be after the holiday now when I can at least get out of bed without wearing half my wardrobe to keep warm. Merry Christmas everybody!

Figgy Pudding Christmas Card

I just love this Basic Grey Figgy Pudding paper, it reminds me of when I was a child and Christmas was a magical time. Not that it isn't these days, but as you get older some of the glitz seems to fall off.

This card is for my brother and his wife, it will be the first time that they have seen a card I have made myself. So am feeling a bit nervous about giving it to them. Sue buys lovely cards, very elaborate and seems to spend a fortune on them. So I hope she likes this one.

I hope you are all finished buying presents and that you have them all wrapped up and you are ready to go...

Black and White Christmas card

Just put this together for my friend, this year all her decs are black and white, she has used lots of feathers and silvery bits, and as she likes everything coordinating, I thought I would make her a black and white card. Will let you know what she thinks of it.

Around the world at Christmas...

Hello Everyone, You may have noticed the counter on my blog which tells me the cities that people come from who look at my blog. This has only been up for a few days, but already there have been visitors from Vladivostok, Tehran, Bogor, Fort Wayne, Indianna, and loads of other places. Please leave a comment and say hello, I'd love to meet you in blogworld and make new friends with you all.

Re-done the Snowflake card

There that looks better doesn't it? Well I think so, please let me know what you think.
Yesterday we travelled up to Sheffield to see my mum and to take some more of our furniture up there for when we move in. Not been there too long when my friend Lizzi's daughter called me - she lives across the road from my mum - to ask if I would go and sit with her for a while. Poor Samantha had received some awful news that morning, her fiance had been to see her and told her that it was over between them. The poor girl was distraught and needed someone to give her a hug and listen to her cries of anguish.
I personally could kill the nasty piece of work, he chose the day very well, knowing that her mum and dad would not be there as they were taking grandpa to see the Tutankamun exhibition in London, so he wouldn't have to face their wrath.
So Sam and I sat and watched the X Factor and laughed at some of the complete numptys who think they really can sing we coped when the tears began to fall again when she saw an ad on the tv that reminded her of Rob. It was just a very traumatic afternoon.

Snowflake card

Good afternoon peeps, its Friday and it's pretty cold and dull here today. However, I am warm and cozy with my feet on the radiator listening to Steve Wright on radio 2 listening to nice music and making cards. Feel sorry for my poor dh who is busy doing a plastering course out in the cold.
Not happy with the card above, didn't realise that its lopsided! Otherwise it's ok. Better give this to someone who's eyesight is not brill then they won't notice. LOL

Ok folks, gotta take the hounds for a wander round the village then its back home for coffee and a bit of creative craft watching on tv.

Poinsettia Chirstmas card

I have been looking at loads of blogs lately, so that I can update my card making skills. My quilling, up to now, has been good but pretty old fashioned. I have been looking at sketches of cards which show you how to use different papers, where to put the sentiment, where to put the embellishment etc. These have been very helpful, and I am sure that it will help me with my quilling. Lots of people use these sketches with scrapbooking, but have found a blog called

http://pagemaps.com/index.htm which has loads of card sketches on too. So after reading this blog I had a go at my own sketches, which I will be putting up here soon.

Hope you like the card above, a very easy Poinsettia card which is just what you need for the Holiday season when time is at a premium.

Snowman

Here is my Diane Crane style snowman, I'm sure Diane would have made this neater and smaller. However it looks quite cute in real life. Though the greeting doesn't look straight, it is, it just looks this way as I had to straighten the card on the computer so it looks a bit lopsided. Hard to keep it straight on the scanner as his tummy tends to swing it left or right.

The surrounding paper is Basic Grey Figgy Pudding.. Oh what fabulous papers these are, they are just so retro, they just remind me of Christmas paper from when I was a child.

Tonight I have a class at Garden City Crafts in Letchworth, this is a great craft store and very friendly. Tonight we will be doing a gift tag, just a simple poinsettia as these ladies are beginners. Now its time for me to start cutting paper for it all, this is the bit I hate!

Fantastic day today with Diane Crane, she is an amazing quiller, so neat and everything she does so small. This is the pattern I did today called Kissing Sheep, mine looks ok, but Diane's was fabulous.

Silver bauble

Greetings Earthlings, been a busy afternoon today, found these cards buried in my card drawer

and faffed about with them until I came up with this. It looks really dark on the scan, but it is a very glimmery black pearl and mirror silver. In real life it looks very good, even though I say so myself.

turquoise and gold

Turquoise and Gold Christmas Card

Red and White Christmas card

Not sure I like this one. I was trying to make it similar to the ice blue one I made last year, but this one doesn't seem to be as good. it doesn't seem to sparkle like the other one, it seems dull. Has anyone got any ideas please?

Modern flowers

These are flowers out of Claire's book, it looks like the paper under the flowers is rumpled from the glue, but in fact it isn't, and it looks all nice and smooth in real life. The frame came from Paperchase and it is a shadowbox frame and looks very modern. I do wish that I had wiped the frame before I scanned it... lol, never mind. Quite like it myself, what do you think?

Christmas stuff

Working on lots of Christmas stuff. These are small 3" gift bags made of very thick mulberry paper. I am afraid the scan didn't do a great deal of justice to these little bags, they look much better in real life.

Hi Folks, I seemed to have missed September out completely.. Oh well nothing much happened so you haven't missed a great deal.

This is a frame inspired by Claire Sun-ok Choi from her new book 'The Art Of Paper Quilling' I love this book, and would recommend you to buy it, if you are a quiller.

So what happened in September, well like I said before, not much. I bought a new laptop, passsed my first stage certificate in EFT (Emotional Freedom Therapy).
Alex and Nick went to Italy and fell out, well it was daft them going together, they are such completely different people, Nick likes to sunbathe, Alex wants culture. Think they are friends again now though.
Was asked to make an 80th birthday card for a friends mum, got to make an 89th birthday card for my mum this month too.

At the beginning of October I gave a talk to the Scissor club on quilling. Thankfully it seemed to go down well and there was lots of laughter, whcih is how it should be. We made poinsettia flowers and made a gift card, and then some of them had a go at a snowflake. Everybody liked my work for which I was most grateful, some of it is quite old now, but it still looks good.

This weekend I signed up for a craft fair in the village hall, its only two hours in the afternoon of Dec 8th, but it will be nice do and hopefully I might sell a few things.

Today I made 4 small gift bags - well the gift bags were already made I just made the flowers and leaves to stick on them. Will photograph them when they are dry and put them up here later.

Lavender and Daisies.

Greetings People,

Got two fabulous quilling books the other day, one by Jane Jenkins and one by Diane Boden Crane. Both have much to offer any quiller. How Diane thinks up all these things like the chocolates - which are amazing - is beyond me. Jane's book is slightly more arty and has wonderful fairies and angels in there. They have already got my imagination going and am thinking up Christmas decs as I write.

We finished our NLP course and am now a qualified NLP Practitioner... anyone need a phobia sorting?

Expecting my mum to stay on friday, she will be here for about a week. It will give her a rest from ironing Nick's shirts and cooking his tea. Though to be honest I think doing these things keeps her going, shes not doing too bad for 89.

Dreading tomorrow, I am going to the hospital to see a guy about my shoulders. I am so fed up with not being able to move them properly, can't put them behind my back which makes dressing /undressing difficult. Am so sick of moving like a 90 year old instead of a 48 yr old.

Neuro LInguistic Programming or just NLP

Hi Folks, for the past 6 days John and I have been on a very interesting course in which we are learning to be NLP Practitioners. We have been at the home of Joe and Melody Cheal who are Master practitioners and have been teaching us and also 8 other people too. We are a diverse lot, there are social health professionals, project managers, a communication lecturer, RSPB managers, HR professionals and us, who are basically doing the course because we feel it will help us personally.

Today, we wrote our first trance. Learning how to use the correct words positioning them in such a way that as you are listening to them you begin to relax your senses, and your internal and external sensations. Starting off with a normal sounding voice and slowly softening it and pausing it. Making you go deeper and deeper into your relaxed state. Thats right..

Then of course we had to bring these friends out of the trance, I mean I could hardly leave them there could I? Could I?

What a day!

Sorry no pictures today. This morning we spent in the garden clearing branches up and mulching them. We have an acre of garden and it has been left to grow weeds since the last people left in September. Apparently the lady who lived here before us, grew lots of things, asparagus, fennel, elderberries, blackberries, to name just a few, there are 4 apple trees, 2 pear trees, a pond we didn't know we had, paths that are all over grown. It's a real mess. I have a lovely lady who comes to help, she's a proper gardener who knows what the plants actually are... which is more than I do!

Anyway this morning we were being busy and my arteries started playing up, not as bad as before, but enough to want to go to the hospital. It took ages in the emergency room, how come they are so busy on a monday.. do all these people wait so they can have a day off work? Anyway they did an ECG on me which was fine. And then I had to wait to see the Dr. 2 and half hours later... I saw a fab guy, stick a baseball on his head and he could have been the latest rap singer! He answered all my questions, in a language that I could understand - no Dr speak here - told me things that I didn't know, that I should have been told last time this happened, and really set my mind at rest. The best thing was the fact that he had sat in the same chair I was in, he too had a heart condition and knew all the stupid things that we think and let our mind prey on. It's so nice to know I am not going doo lally and that I am not alone in this! Apparently 4 in 100,000 get this so its not that common and if you are going to have a heart condition this is the best one to have as it's reversible and there is no problem with my heart its just the silly arteries.

So thats my day...hope yours was better.

Interesting wedding...

As it is the wedding season, I thought this would be a nice card to show you. These are Bodylicious cards, which come with a template of the bust part of the card, so you can turn them into dresses, bikini's, basques, or whatever you like.

Yesterday turned into a nothing day, we were supposed to do the jungle -garden - but in the end we had lunch at the post office, where talk turned to weddings as well. Across the road from the post office is a small chapel, and I believe a wedding was about to happen there. But wandering around smelling the Evening Primrose plants in the post office garden was a rather impressively dressed priest, who wore a long black robe with a scarlet skull cap and an orange scarf. And then into the shop came another churchman, dressed in long black suit with a huge orange flower in his lapel spiky hair and wearing huge rockstar sunglasses. He bought a pack of cigars.... Interesting.. we don't often get such 'colourful' figures in the village.

After we left the PO, we wandered to Hitchin, a small market town to do the weekend shopping and then to Milton Keynes to Borders for a cup of coffee and to look at the American magazines

After dinner of blackened salmon with refried beans and rice, I spent the evening trying to get my computer to play my EFT dvd's. Seems like Simon of Haynes - the computer guy - had lost my dvd player, when he was sorting it all out. So in the end we had to buy a download so that I could play them. Spent ages doing that and by the time I had got my dvd in the player, it was getting to 11pm, an hour watching, and then falling into bed.

Suncatcher

Gosh, two posts in one day, this is a suncatcher I made from flowers that were not being used for anything else, and were just in my flower box. Looks a bit odd there, but looks fab when hanging in the window. The crystals on the bottom are Swarovski.

Victorian Pin Pricking

I love pin pricking, it's somehow very satisfying to create a lovely pattern so easily. This is the second one I have to show you - the first is two posts away. I tried to replicate the pricking pattern with the quilling, didn't quite work out, but it looks pretty good anyway. Stay tuned for more of these.

Wonderful news today, my son Nicholas has got the results for his Masters degree in Law, and basically he got a distinction. So I'm doing the happy feet dance and thinking thank goodness one of them is sorted! I have 4 sons, all very different, but only one of them is the kind of person who knows where he is going and what he is doing. Nick has always been like that, where as the others are a bit dithery 'shall we have this or shall we have that'. Doesn't matter I love them all anyway. Nick will be a good lawyer and although I am biased I know that he will do his very best for people.

Been to Craft Central today in Royston Garden Center, I needed something to cut ovals with. My large oval punch is fine, but a bit too small for the card I am making at the moment. So I bought an X-cut Shape Cutter System, I already have their circle cutter which is great, it allows you to cut six sizes of circle with a special little blade.

Was very sad to see Card Inspirations of Tewin, is closing down. A fine craft store with lots of ideas. I have bought things from there for years even before it was Card Inspirations when it was Designs on Paper. They always had loads of LCC quilling paper there.
I think the fact that there are now so many craft magazines and the dreaded craft tv programmes which have been so detremental to proper craft shops. These days people think that if you have stuck a ready made topper on to a blank card you are a "CARD MAKER" Sorry, all you have done is stuck something that someone else has designed on to a piece of paper. Where is the artistry in using sticky tape?

Ohhh I could vent for hours on this topic, let me know how you feel about it..

80th birthday card

This is a card I made for the baker and his wife to give to a friend who is 80. I printed the Happy Birthday message in black, and was so lucky that because of the card I used, it turned the printing to silver. This made it very easy to put silver border lines along the edge of the lace vellum paper which really seemed to have finished it off nicely.

I took it to the post office so David the baker can pick it up in the morning when he delivers the bread. While I was there Becky the dog whisperer was there and she ordered another 80th birthday card for her mum to be made for September.

John and I spent about 3 hours in the post office, having lunch in the tea room, chatting to Lizzi and Paul and drinking coffee. Its a nice life... just wish it were warmer and not quite as wet.

Long time no see!

Well hello there!

Lots of things have happened to me in since the last time I wrote. A week after I did the farmers market last November, John had a mad midlife crisis, and ran away for couple of weeks, leaving me in a state of complete shock. However, we got over that, then I had a strange type of heart attack in which my artery spasmed, which put me in hospital for a week. Then we moved house!

I'm a strong woman, I'm still here!

Quilling took a rather large back seat while this was going on, the last thing I quilled was the Snowman card. To be honest I really didn't want to quill at all, just thinking about it put me straight back to the night John left. It was all a bit traumatic to say the least.

Now though, we have moved to a lovely village and are renting a 200 year old farmhouse, and I feel like quilling again. So things have definitly moved on for me.

The village we live in is called Broom, two pubs and a few houses, but just up the road is another village called Southill, and there is a fabulous post office and tea room run by some lovely people called Paul and Liz. They come from near where I live up in Sheffield, so its nice to hear a familiar accent. They have a tea room there and Liz makes the most fabulous sandwiches and John and I can very often be found here having lunch.

I have joined a network group which meets at the post office once a month and a fair was planned earlier on in the year which we did last Saturday. It was a roaring success for all concerned and I took all the stuff left over from the farmers market and sold about £50/$100 worth. I was very pleased considerng that I hadn't made anything new for it.

So now my enthusiasm has been fired up and I am now planning things to make for the next one which will be late October/ early November.

Also I have joined the Scissor club, a group of ladies meet once a fortnight in the village hall, we have various speakers, usually to do with crafts. Last time it was sugar roses, very interesting and beautifully made.

This is a card I made this week, I fancied doing a bit of pin pricking, and faffed about with a basket of strawberries to fill the space up.

It's nice to be back, and I hope to have lots to tell you from now on.