Forever Friends Christmas

I have made so many Christmas cards this year so please bear with me whilst I share a few of them over the next few blog posts. 

Here are some using two lovely Forever Friends stamps from DoCrafts

Happy Christmas Mum

I used one of my favourite Lili of the Valley stamps to make this easel card for my Mum.

I am entering this card into this month's challenge at Penny Black and More @ Allsorts, which is a free choice challenge.  It is also my card for week 48 of the 52 cards challenge which was a colour combination challenge - I chose the traditional red and green.

Supplies -

Holly Paper - Craft Creations
Sentiment - Lili of the Valley
Woodware Holly Punch
Scalloped circle and circle nestability dies
EK Success flower punches

11 on the 11th

I completely forgot that it was the 10th of the month yesterday and so missed doing a blog post for Shimelle's 10 on the 10th, so I am going to do 11 on the 11th.

I was scratching my head what to do and then I remembered this blog post by my friend Jessie where she set her iPod to shuffle and listed the first ten songs - so here are my 11 shuffled songs!!

1.  Marillion - Heart of Lothian (Misplaced Childhood)

2.  Marillion - Ocean Cloud (Marbles)

3.  Muse - Hysteria

4.  Manic Street Preachers - Everything Must Go

5.  Paramore - Decode

6.  Muse - Blackout

7.  Linkin Park - Leave Out All the Rest

8.  Marillion - Garden Party (Script for a Jester's Tear)

9.  Evanescence - Bring Me to Life

10.  Marillion - The King of Sunset Town (Season's End)

11.  The Reasoning - Dark Angel

A Snapshot of Canada

It is the turn of the Dizzy Dots on UKScrappers to set the weekly challenge.

Our challenge is to use either warm or cool colours, to use something new and to choose one of these three sketches from Pagemaps

I chose to use Sketch 2 and warm colours

I used some mini photos from our Canadian Rocky Mountain Rail tour that we did October 2000.  The papers are scraps from a really old Sarah's Cards kit (November 2010) WRMK 'Maple Grove'.  My new element was the corrugated alphabet stickers from Pebbles Inc.  The flowers were punched using a Martha Stewart and Stampin' Up flower punch.  The leaves are a Martha Stewart frond punch and the gemstones are Zva Creative.

Some close ups of the photos -

 

If you fancy taking part in our challenge you can find it on UKScrappers here

My Month in Numbers - November

Whoops I am running in incredibly late with my numbers for November - I would like to say that I had been doing something terribly exciting to keep me away from blogging those very important numbers but sadly it is mundane things like DHW (dreaded house work) and laundry.

So here we go - this is what my November looked like -

The most important numbers of all are how many days to the next convention - only 90 days till the Marillion convention in Port Zelande, The Netherlands.  We now have another addition to our cottage so as well as looking forward to the 3 gigs and other activities, we are also looking forward to meeting our 2 new Dutch friends!!

Nephew no 7 was 18 - he chose to go out for a meal as he is not really a party goer, so we went to a lovely place in the old railway station that is conveniently only a 5 minute walk from our house.

(Not the birthday boy LOL but me with my lovely Dad and niece no 4)

2 musical evenings in 1 weekend -

No 1 with the delightful Kerry Ellis & Brian May on their Born Free acoustic tour, it was a magical candlelit evening for a very worthy cause - it makes my blood boil that there are sick people out there whose idea of holiday entertainment is to go out and kill beautiful Lions and call it sport - I hope karma truly bites them back right on the bum (this is the polite version for my blog of what I would like to happen to them)

I will admit to shedding a few tears when Kerry sang this with this poignant video playing in the background.

No 2 - Paul Carrack

I just love seeing music live and he had a very talented band with him.  You forget how many good bands he has been a part of - Ace, Squeeze, Mike and the Mechanics.

November was also a busy month for fund raising - I open up my home for a whole day to sell my cards, jewellery and the knitted goods that my Mum makes.  I also sell Avon and donate the commission from that order.  So far the total stands at £182 raised and once everybody has paid for their Avon orders there should be at least another £40 to give to Children with Cancer Fund (Polegate)

I sold virtually all my Christmas cards so then had to spend a weekend making another 59 so that I had enough cards to send out.  Because of the Christmas cards most of my other crafting has gone out of the window this month but I still managed to do 5 birthday cards, 3 layouts, 2 bracelets and 15 blog posts.

Right I am off to Julie's blog to confess my lateness for this month - if you fancy joining in yourself next month you can find out all about how to take part right here

Capilano

The November sketch challenge on Scrapology was W for wire and there was this sketch to use as well.

I used a smaller page size and used some photographs from our trip to Canada in 2000, one of the highlights was walking over the suspension bridge at Capilano, Vancouver.

The papers are from a Sarah's Cards kit from March 2010 - Prima 'Blooming Retro'.  I drew through a wire mask with a fine tip pen.

Thanks for a lovely challenge.

Journal Your Christmas 2011

Last year I took part in Shimelle's Journal Your Christmas for the second time.  I only did up to Boxing Day but never shared it on here as it took me until February to get it finished.  So now we are in December I will share my entries from last year as I am not taking part this year.

This is the front page for my entries as I was going to keep my pages in my Document 2011 album.  I used a vellum sheet from Webster's Pages Sweet Season collection handstitched to cream cardstock.

Apart from Christmas Day and Boxing Day, I used a 6 pocket 6x4 page protector so that each day was quick and easy to do.

Day 1 - Christmas Manifesto

To keep things nice and easy Shimelle had provided one that could just be printed off.

Day 2 -comparing the weather on 2nd December - thank goodness we didn't have snow last year!!

Day 3 - about the handmade cards that I make for fundraising each year