WOYWW

Good Morning all, so what is on my worktop this Wednesday morning, a White and splash of colour card. But unfortunately not an ATC. I was planning to take part in this swap but somehow life got in the way as usual.
We have been away over the Bank holiday weekend to the boat show at Crick, we had wonderful weather, wonderful fellowship with other Christians and just enjoyed ourselves immensly, but only got back late last night and as usual there are the essentials of life to attend to. Feeding the brute and the cat, doing the washing, it is amazing how much washing one can accumulate in five days, and today we have a very dear friend coming to lunch so she must take priority.

So what is on the desk. In the foreground is a white ans splash of colour card, assembled but not glued. I saw something similar on a website somewhere and thought that I would have a go at it, and am really pleased. On the left is my trusty Big Shot and one the right is the beginnings of the plans for my ATC. I was so determined to do one, but it is clearly not going to be finished by the end of today so I can't really put an asterisk after my name for a swap.
If by any chance I do get it finished after my friend has gone I will put up another post.

Now we have just had a phone call I do not think anything will finished today. The hospital has rung and my husband has a date for extremely major surgery, in Papworth, the other side of the country, so I think this better get posted as there are many other things to plan.

For those who are so minded, please pray that everything goes well.

Well, what a frustrating day.
We started off OK. The man wanted to do some concreting around the greenhouse in an attempt to prevent the weeds growing up between the greenhouse and the fence. Yesterday we spent several hours removing all the glass from one side so that we could pull out all the ivy and brambles that were stopping the light from getting it. It has been an annual event since we got the greehouse, however in the process about half the strawberry plants were mangled and I don't know if they will recover so we wanted to reduce the weed recurrence if we possibley could. So by 9.30 I had shovelled about half a ton of sand and ballast in and out of the wheel barrow and the a corresponding amount came out of the mixer and had to be carried into the greehouse, while he did the laying.
So then he went out and I started on my cards. I had one particular one to do for a friend who was flooded out of her house in November and is moving back in tomorrow. Apart from the trawling through large amounts of stash to find the right colours, (how many shades of pinky mauve can there be?) that went fairly well.

Then I moved onto the card for my Son in law. Well, does anyone remember the Britannia dies I raved over on Wednesday? Nightmare! How do you attach them? I ended up looking and feeling like a three year old after a first attempts at 'sticking' in playschool. I had glue on both sides of the die cuts, glue on my glass mat, glue all over me and everything in reach. I had tried to use spray glue but intead of a spray it came out in a jet and covered everything. Decided to finsh a card I had started a few days earlier, on th right on my WOYWW and finished that without any problems.

I then had another go at his card, still without success, so decided to take pictures of the two I had finished. First attempt was awful, light all wrong, deleted those, second ones looked great on the camera so I connected it up to the computer which showed me the first lot I had taken, couldn't access the second lot at all. Deleted the first ones again, went back for the third time, took one picture and the batteries are flat in the camera!!!
Will have to work on Sil's card tomorrow, now I have to go and serve lasagne to a horde of kids at church.

WOYWW

This should actually be called worktop Tuesday because the pictures were taken before I went to bed on Tuesday, knowing I would not be able to do much on Wednesday before I go out.
I haven't had much time for craft as real work has got in the way. As landlords we have to sort out our properties when tenants leave and the last few days have been spent scrubbing one house from top to bottom ready for another tenant to come in. I wouldn't mind but we did this property thoroughly only eight months ago and the tenant assured us that she had cleaned before she left. All I can say is 'Gosh haven't the spiders been busy over the weekend'. So I have vacuuming ceilings and scrubbing floors and kitchen cupboards until I can hardly move, so when we get home in the evening making cards is the last thing on my mind.I wouldn't mind if she just accepted that it needed more cleaning, but to insist that it was spotless when she left it annoys me.

Anyway to my worktop.

The cards on the desk are ones I have been struggling to get finished for days, I do so much and then can't work out what else to do with them so they gather dust on a pile until I determine that I will finish them, then I get dragged away to do cleaning and they sit there for another week until I put them away again to do something urgent.The blue one with the butterfly has been around for at least two months and I just can't decide what to do with it.
On the right of the picture are some Britannia dies I fell for when I saw them advertised in a magazine. 

They ones that caught my eye were the words 'Happy', 'Birthday' and 'Christmas' which I thought would be most useful, on the cream and green and orange card I felt that doing the greeting in the same colour really finished the card well. Of course, having bought those three I felt I just couldn't live without 'Thank you' and 'Get Well' and 'Thinking of you' so those are on order too.

 



On the left are some crocheted squares to make a blanket to go in the caravan. Those of you who know British caravans will be aware that they are so often furnished in rather insipid pink and beige upholstery so I have to try to bring more positive colours in without clashing with the background colours. I hope to start assembling the blanket before we go away for the Bank holiday weekend and will try to post a picture next week.

Home again

Well it's been a while since I blogged, life seems to get in the way. We had a super time with my sister in Netherlands for her 70th birthday and have returned to life that moved on while we were away, so we have to catch up. 
If I can beat Google+ into submission I will put a couple of photos on here, otherwise I will just curse the techies who constantly change things just when I think I have cracked them.

Max found a sunny place whilst we were unloading the van after our holiday. He didn't want to let us out of his sight again, and we had several disturbed nights as he kept coming up and schecking that we were still there and hadn't managed to slip away when he wasn't looking..












And this is one of the ships we  saw while in the Netherlands. It just seemed to go on for ever. Part of the Rhine delta reaches the sea in Rotterdam, a few miles west of Dordrecht where this picture was taken, so much of the Rhine shipping passes this point. This was going upstream so could be going anywhere between Dordrecht and Switzerland. Something I learn while we were there is that the Rhine has lost its name way before this picture and here is now the Oude Maas. Other branches become the Ijssel, Niuewe Maas, the Lek, the Noord, Het Scheur and Hollansche Diep to name but a few. Good pub quiz question, where does the Rhine flow into the sea? The answers of course is that it doesn't.

Well I'm stopping now, might get some cards made and start thinking about ATC's. Never made any so if I want to take part in the swap for WOYWW I'd better find out.