Wednesday 31 October 2007

A new toy!

OK, so I normally talk about work and family first before moving onto all things crafting, but I had to share this straight away…Tim has given me a Crop-a-dile. It is bright pink and is very solid and chunky and works like a dream. It has a lovely smooth action both for cutting holes (it is supposed to be able to cut chipboard and tin etc, but I have only tried card so far) and for setting eyelets. I love it and am now looking for any excuse to use eyelets on projects at the moment.
Work has gone well so far this week and I have now submitted the two grants and the studentship that I have been working on for the past few weeks. I have also acted as a referee for a journal called ‘Expert Opinions on Drug Development’ and read through a review article that was submitted to them and given my comments on it. On the whole it was a good article, it just needed a bit more detail in places. It is very strange to be considered an ‘expert’ in anything, but good fun! The rest of today has been spent doing some admin and desk tidying ready for the next lot of work to come my way. In fact I have been so on top of things that I decided to leave work early yesterday and go for a gentle stroll through the woods with Tim and Alex…the autumn colours were wonderful and the weather was perfect, the only sadness was that I went straight from work and didn’t have my camera with me.
Alex has had a slight cough to go alongside his cold in these last few days, but to add to that he has worked out how to do a fake cough which is so cute and so funny. We have had some lovely times together this week playing different games to make him laugh. Bouncing up and down is still his favourite and this morning before work I held him in my arms and then jumped up and down with him which made him laugh out loud. Like me he suffers from huge bouts of hic-ups and today we both had very loud ones at the same time which completely cracked him up, making me laugh and hic-up even louder! This cute photo of him was taken just before I put him to bed tonight.
It is my Gran’s 83rd birthday next week and so I made her a card this week. She loves gardening and therefore I wanted to do a card with flowers on it. In the end I used the stipple brush background effect that Kay showed me on a textured white card background and then mounted a watercolour effect rose stamp onto a pink piece of card onto the background card. This pink card had eyelets (set using the Crop-a-dile) and ribbon on it and the whole thing was finished with a happy birthday stamp in the same colour ink. Tim’s birthday is also next week, the day before Gran’s, and one of his presents this year is a computer game called Crysis. Sadly the game isn’t out until after Tim’s birthday so I made him this surprise waterfall card as a taster of what is to come, a sort of IOU if you like, using screen shots of the game taken from the net. I haven’t tried to make a waterfall card yet and I was thrilled with how well this slightly different surprise version worked.
More soon,
Love,
Caro
x

2 comments:

Momiji said...

great cards!..that cropodile thing looks good! ...and that idea for tim's card is super..I'm sure he will love that as a taster of whats to come.

Bubbles said...

Lovely cards, the waterfall you made Tim is fab what a great idea! The photo of Alex sucking his thumb is adorable.