Traumatic times and a special treat!

My main trauma was having a filling replaced yesterday. I hate going to the dentist and really dread fillings at the best of times, but this was the worst ever - it took over an hour to have the old filling removed and a new one replaced and then my jaw and tooth ached for the rest of the day. To top it off I now have tonsillitis and my throat feels revolting! The second difficulty was running a PhD viva this morning where the external examiner insisted on major revisions and a re-viva. I really feel for the poor student, but did agree with the decision. My special treat made me feel a whole load better about everything...my darling husband bought me a Cuttlebug machine and a few embossing folders for it. I am so thrilled as I have wanted one of these for ages and asked for one for Christmas...he decided that I didn’t need to wait that long! I have now had the greatest of fun playing with it and it is so easy to use. Talking about crafting, I have had a fair bit of success recently with having a letter and photo of one of my scrapbook layouts published in Scrapbook Inspirations, two of my wedding layouts published on-line (here) and my inchie article has finally been published on-line at Papercraft Junkies as well (here). I would love to know what you think of any of these! Poor Alex is in a complete state still, his cough is still horribly bad, he has a reduced appetite and only a little energy. He alternates between sitting in a heap and gently playing with his toys and lying down and going to sleep. Last night he was too tired to have his tea and only wanted to sit on my lap and have stories read to him before going to bed much earlier than usual. I hope that he will get rid of this nasty cough soon and regain some of his usual bounce. My main crafting project over the past couple of days has been to make Tim’s birthday card. I always make him something romantic and containing green as it is his favourite colour, but this time decided to take a slight slant away from the usual theme with this cute decoupage dragon. Tim loves dragons and I thought this would be nice with the Cuttlebug embossed hearts background. However, I can officially say that I really do not like doing decoupage...cutting out all those fiddly bits drove me slightly mad. I would love to know what you think of the final result though! I have also been playing with my Cuttlebug to make some more Christmas cards. These two use CraftyIndividuals images and three different Cuttlebug embossed card (the spots were a kind gift from Gill). I coloured the birds using chalks. I thought that the chalk coloured birds looked so good by themselves that I gave them little red breasts and used them as the main image on these two cards and added the CraftyIndividuals message stamped onto K&Co paper. That’s all for now so have a good weekend everyone.
Love,
Caro
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