BARGAIN of the year!

I've had a lovely day today. Really, lovely. My DD was off mursery yesterday with earache and still felt under the weather when she woke up today so I kept her off again. As it was such a lovely day, we decided to spend it outside. I'm feeling a bit broke today, but realised that as today is the last Friday of the month, we'd take a trip down to our local Sure-Start Centre where they hold a coffee morning for cloth nappy users. She was happy to have lots of dressing up things and a giant beanbag to play with and DS was happy enough playing with some of the kids his age too. I soon discovered that the two ladies there were also keen crafters and they begun showing off their recent crochet projects! I was stunned - they were AMAZING! I would love to be that talented and it made me feel determined to improve on my knitting and crochet.

After we'd finished, the kids and I set off to town where we had lunch and DD was an angel! We were about to go home, but I felt like I needed to do one more thing, so I told DD I wanted to look in a charity shop and asked her which one we should go to. "The one next to McDonald's!" she told me, so we set off towards the British Heart Foundation.

As she was looking at the toys, I spied a charity sack with some writing on it. "4 for £1" it said. I peeked inside the bag to find it was about half full of different sized balls of yarn, different colours, mostly acrylic, but almost every ball had maybe scraps taken from it - some were clearly old and some were brand new. I asked the lady behind the desk how much for the whole bag. She phoned her manager on the intercom and I was shocked at the reply. "£4 for the bag"! Needless to say, I snapped the whole lot up!

And here is the mega stash in all its glory!

That's TWENTY-SIX separate balls in total. You can NOT say that's not a bargain if you ever saw one! Now, what to make...

Rob's Birthday

Rob is my kids' dad. We separated very amicably in September last year (Remember the post titled "Pause in Life"? That's what was going on.) and are still great friends. His birthday was in March and I just found his cards. He's forgetful and keeps leaving them here.

This is the one I made for him:

The basics are all bits cut out from kits and various ready made papers, except the bits inside the "pocket" - the pen and mobile phone are cut from scraps of black card and the detail on the phone is cut from plain white paper and hand drawn on by me.

And DD wanted to make a card too, so she chose the colours and I let her pick from my birthday appropriate peel-offs. She stuck them all on herself, though I arranged the letters on the table in the correct order for her. I'm very pleased with her effort!

Hopelessly late...

You may remember I blogged about some swaps I was participating in and promised to post some photos...

Well, this is my apology. I'm a rubbish blogger and just kept forgetting and when I finally remembered, I realised I'd lent my camera to a friend so couldn't take photo's of my outgoing swaps.

However - I really enjoyed both swaps, and now I present to you, my received items from blottedcopybook's Time for Tea Swap. Many apologies to Vonnie who writes that blog as she's been chasing me for ages to blog this but I'm so forgetful. But I'm emailing her as soon as I post this blog up!

My swap partner was Fiona from Scotland [who I believe doesn't have her own blog] and she sent me the above delights - as well as some lovely scottish wafers, which aren't in the pic because my DD and I scoffed them before I got the box home *greedy*. But the items you can see include some lovely patterned paper for my cards, some cupcake shaped stickers, a pack of pink napkins with cupcakes on them, a blue mug, a box of Scottish blend tea [pyramid bags! Oh and the box is empty by this point, the tea was delicious!], a handmade cupcaked-shaped felt pin badge and a handmade miniature felt cup of tea on a keyring!

In my personal life, I am finally starting to get really organised, so hopefully I will be able to keep up with my blog a lot more efficiently!

It's been a while!

Here's some of what I've been up to!
Firstly, I picked up some wallpaper offcuts from the local DIY store, including a disney princess border. I put one of them into a frame to go onto my 4 year old daughter's bedroom wall.

I also bought a cheap scrapbook from a pound shop - it looked a bit bland so I decorated it up and am going to work on filling it soon. Here's the cover:

And on a book-cover-designing kick, I designed the front cover of a notebook for my daughter as well. What little girl doesn't like, flowers, hearts, pink and GLITTER!!??

I also picked up my knit-sticks again, to make "Little Chuckles" from Issue 27 of Simply knitting Magazine. I have completed a bit more of this now, but here's an earlier WIP photo:

And finally...
Call it a commission if you will, except I'm not getting paid for it ;) My sister asked me to make a card for a 3 year old girl and I rustled up this!


Anyway, very sorry for not keeping up to date with this. I've been very busy with numerous swaps, mainly Blottedcopybook's Time for Tea swap and the Secret Easter Chick Swap Which is being run by the lovely Incy @Incywincystitches - both of which will be blogged after their intended recipients receive them!

I've been slacking, but not in the making dept...

Yeah, I've been slacking in updating this thing, but I have been semi-busy over the last few weeks too!

February 14th was of course Valentine's Day and I created this card for the boyfriend. It wasn't my best piece of work, but the whole thing was my own idea and everything except the backing paper on the inside was hand-drawn/coloured - so it was actually almost 100% handmade. I was pleased with it anyway and I got some pretty good feedback from it.















It was also my best friend's birthday on the 13th. I haven't actually given him this card yet, so I hope he doesn't read this regularly ;) Being a guy, this card took some thought but I really liked the outcome, I hope he does too.


I decided to make a donation to the Crafter...oo Comic Relief Shop at Folksy where all items are handmade by members of the Crafter...oo Craft Forums and all money made from the sales of these items goes to Comic Relief. The following submission was sold last week, but I shall be adding at least one more card to it in the near future, so watch this space!

Please check out the shop and donate to a very worthwhile cause!

Late start to the new year!

First off, Happy Birthday to my very lovely boyfriend, Iain. Here's the card I sent him.


I was in the middle of making him a crocheted cow toy as well, but only got this far:

[That's the head and snout, by the way!]

I also crocheted myself a bracelet - nothing special. Originally, i was following a pattern for some baby bootees but I realised it was going to be far too big, so I finished it there and Voila! A bracelet!


Now I'm concentrating on Valentine's projects and experimenting with heat embossing, stamping, etc. Here's some of the forementioned experiments:

Busy this time of year...

Firstly, a cute doggy and a new style of fold



And a more classic one

Create-a-calendar #1 - Jan and Feb

January


February

The one that wouldn't go to plan

I kept doing things wrong with this, but with a little determination, I finally managed to put it all right and here is the finished project

Some quick Christmas cards

The ex-DH wanted me to do some cards for some of his work colleagues. I had no idea what to do, but I hope he likes what I did come up with. I'm calling them "lazy cards" because all the bits came out of kits!

This one is one of my favourites. I LOVE how it turned out!


I wanted to do something original with this, so I layered up the parcels a bit with lots of sticky squares. I think it brought some life to the card!


Lastly - I designed a card for a friend for a secret swap - I wanted to make it personal to her, so I added her name and made it using her favourite colours.