The Pitfalls of Sharing

There are a few times that I regret teaching the boys to be so generous and giving.  This week is definitely one of those times, it was a week when I would have appreciated their selfishness in keeping their germs to themselves.  Instead, they have very freely shared their sore throats, coughs and temperatures.  As often happens, I seem to be getting a double dose.  However,  despite the temperature, I did struggle to get some more cards made up for Daniel.  He was going to an open day, and wanted to take them with him.

Now that's done, I am now going to wallow in my misery, tissues and olbas oil at my side.  Hopefully, as long as you don't get too close, I won't be sharing it with you.

Playing with photos

We've been going through some more of the photos, and a few more have made it to cards.

We have more to do, but I ran out of cards.  I've got a coupon to use, so all being well, we'll go and stock up later today.

More Playing with Photos

We've played with some more of Daniel's photos, and we've made some more cards.

The photos of the parrots and the butterfly were taken on a day out, but the plant is one of Daniel's.  Carnivorous plants are his speciality, and over the last few years, he's taken some lovely photos of them.   He has taken hundreds of photos over the years, so it will take some time to go through them to find the gems.

Cards

My son was going around taking photos the other day to enter into a competition for his carnivorous plants which got me to thinking.  He's taken some lovely pictures from different places, so I thought I go through them and see if we couldn't make some cards.

These were from experimenting with the paper and and printer.  You'd think it would be so easy to work out which way it's all meant to go, but somehow, it took three attempts to get it right.  Trouble is, I have several different sizes of photo paper, so it will be trial and error again next time.

These are two that we've done so far, now to go through his other photos and see what treasures we can find.

Something Gentle for the Weekend

Feeling a bit under the weather over the weekend meant I didn't want anything too complicated to do, or anything big.  Small and easy was definitely the order of the day.

I ended up going through some old magazines I want to clear out, and came across these four designs.

They were supposed to be for bookmarks, but as I didn't have any of the card blanks for them, they were made into little cards instead.

They're only about four inches by two and a half, so are quite sweet, and the combination of cross stitch and long stitch, made them very quick to complete.  Perfect for a lazy weekend.

A different approach

The first job of the day was to make some changes to the dog bed to see if it made things easier.

I cut away part of the front, and just zigzag along the edges twice over to keep them together and stop fraying.

It made things easier, but definitely not ideal.  The cats may get their bed after all, but not before he's got a bigger bed, I don't think anyone is going to be able to take this one away for a while.

As I hadn't made any cards for a while, and stocks were dwindling, I thought it was about time I made some more. 

With the pergamano cards I've done before, the parchment was the outer cover, and I hand sewed card to the inside.  This time I mounted the embossed design onto card.

I cut the design to the outer border, mounted onto coloured card, and then using decoupage sticky pads, the card was mounted onto a plain white card. 

I'd forgotten how relaxing I find doing the embossing, so I may not leave it so long before I do some more.

Blocks Received and a Card Made

 Two more blocks recieved in the Barn Door Swap, these two from Carol.   Love them both but the pink is my favourite.  I can't wait to see all the blocks together.

 I've also finished putting a card together.  This was a freebie from an old cross stitch magazine I had.

Spring Lambs

Last week, I got to the situation that all my hand projects that I had prepared were all finished and I the embroidery projects I wanted to do next needed me to buy some supplies.  I  don't like sitting in the evening without having something to do, so I got out one of my old magazines and did this little cross stitch.

It brought a bit of spring into the house.

Once it was finished, I searched through all my card mounts and found this pale green card.  I cut an oval of wadding to go behind the stitching to give a padded effect, now someone can have spring all year round.