Success!

It has been a very successful few days.. We have spent the time turning our house back into a home, putting away things that have accumulated all over the place, vacuuming from top to bottom, playing with Alex, eating yummy food, going for walks and I have made loads of ATCs. Alex’s cold is finally improving…it hasn’t gone yet, but he has been much more his normal happy self which is wonderful. He still hasn’t learnt to sit up by himself as he thinks that toppling over or throwing himself backwards to be caught by me is the greatest game ever! I introduced him to bubbles yesterday and he thought they were great, if a little puzzling because they kept bursting!
Crafting has been really successful as I have managed to catch up on all my ATCs that I owed people, clearing the decks ready for making Christmas cards. These three have snowmen stamped using the free stamp that came with Papercraft Inspirations, embossed in black on white card and then coloured in using the mica powders to give a nice shimmery effect. The snowmen were mounted on some blue and silver caught in crystal background acetate and then layered onto different backgrounds. I think that although they are similar there are enough differences to make them interesting.

Kerry Knowles, who I have swapped a lot of ATCs with, very sweetly decided to make one using my crafting business card and so as an exchange for that I have made her one out of the thank you card she sent me. I just love this stamp from Simple Expressions flora 5 and think it works really well over the top of the rose. I hope she likes this one.

Angela Clerehugh, who has been organising the alphabet swap asked me if I would do another letter K for someone who has joined in late, so I made this K is for Kangaroo using a photograph of a Kangaroo in mid jump taken from the net. I printed it out with a black background, mounted it on gold textured card, and decoupaged the image of the Kangaroo, before adding the letter K and the word written in gold. A fairly simple but effective ATC.

I wanted to make an extra ATC as a thank you to Lottie Middleton who is organising the bookmark swap and so knowing that she likes Oriental things I made this Oriental butterfly using a similar base to before and an image of a butterfly and a text plaque from a decoupage sheet that I had on computer. I hope she likes it.

Finally I have completed the next three letters (M,N&O) for the Alphabet swap. I was dithering about what to do for M, but in the end had to go for Mickey Mouse as he is a firm favourite of mine. The image was taken from the net, but the background was drawn by me using Whisper marker pens. I like the way this one has turned out.

N is for Nappies was really Tim's idea as I couldn't think of anything and he made the suggestion. I made the background in photoshop using two photographs of branded disposable nappies and layering them over each other. I chose pale blue for the large letter as it went with the picture of the terry nappy that was decoupaged on top.

O is for Owl was the final choice, although it was a close run thing with O is for Octopus. I just love Winnie the Pooh and so decided that Owl had to be the way to go. I wanted to find a good picture of Owls house for the background but failed after spending ages trawling the net so I used the picture of a party inside Owls house instead. I hope whoever gets these cards enjoys them.

I have had a lovely week off work, spending time with Alex and getting things in the house sortedand back to normal, and I have to say that I don't really want to go back to work, but these things happen. Hope all is well with you all. More soon,

Love,

Caro

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