Lunching ladies again!

Firstly an apology for not posting yesterday...blogger was down the one time I managed to get organised enough to go on the internet! It was a lazy day yesterday with not a great deal to report anyway, just much cuteness from Alex as I spent most of the day playing with him. Today has been fun though as Alex and I went out to lunch with Julia, my best friend from Sheffield. We originally met when I started my PhD in 1997 and were flat mates until she got engaged to David in 2000. She is currently pregnant with her second child and turned up with a bag of clothes for Alex as she is doing a grand sort out before number two arrives! We had a lovely chat and lunch sharing all our news before she had to go back to work.

The other excitement for today was that we managed to clear out our study enough to fit Alex's baby gym in as well as my crafting desk and Tim's computers, so it really is a family room now. It means that I don't have to craft on the sitting room floor next to him, I can craft at my desk and turn round to play with him. We also had great fun as he is now beginning to giggle and blowing raspberries on his tummy really makes him laugh...very very cute indeed, especially when combined with hiccoughs!

I have had a busy couple of days crafting as well...my brother turns 30 in August and so I wanted to make something special for him. He gave me a picture for my 30th which inspired me to make a digital scrapbook page of him and his new family (his son Daniel is 9 weeks younger than Alex). The papers mostly came from Shabby Princess freebie downloads and I am really pleased with how this layout turned out. I am just awaiting the frame and printing of it before i can give it to him.

I have also been experimenting with stamping and embossing techniques as I have seen some really effective ones used for both cards and ATCs. On this one I used autumn coloured ink pads to randomly colour the background, then stamped images of leaves using clear versamark and embossed using clear embossing grit, the coloured over the whole page in black ink and then finally wiped the black ink off the embossed bits to reveal the autumn colours beneith. It sort of works, but needs refining somewhat and possibly some different materials to make it work better.

I also had the wonderful treat of receiving A, B and C from the Alphabet swap on the CM&PC forum. They are such lovely cards and all so different. A is for Aroma is by Sheila Morrison (Thistle 13) and combines stamping, stickers and punch work. B is for boat is by Tracey Aldred and the stamped image of the boat is combined with some texture paint and overlayed on some stripey blue background paper to represent waves. C is for clock is by Gill Sweetman and is a waterfall card containing images of different types of clock. This is the first waterfall card I have received and it is wonderful, a really effective technique. Needless to say I am thrilled with all of these.

More tomorrow,

Love,
Caro

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