Faster, Easier Downloads!

As many of you will know, for years I´ve been storing my kits and freebies at 4shared. It wasn´t the ideal solution as it was pretty slow but it worked well enough and I never had any complaints...until just a few months ago when 4shared altered my settings without informing me and then things started to get difficult. First of all I discovered that if someone wanted to download any of my recent freebies she had to ask my permission so I had to keep checking to make sure that my settings remained as I´d set them and not as 4shared would have them. Then things got out of hand when suddenly 4shared refused to allow anyone to download anything, including kits, without opening a free account. That´s when I started to look elsewhere for alternative storage ...and by that I mean free storage. As I´m sure most of you know, I don´t have a large commercial store. I only sell my own kits and don´t invite other designers to contribute. Designing digital scrapbook kits is, and always will be, just a hobby and not a money making concern. By that I don´t mean that it isn´t thrilling when someone likes my kits enough to take the trouble to purchase and download them. However, if I had to pay for storage there would then be the worry that the store wouldn´t earn enough to make it worthwhile, and anxiety and creativity don´t mix well. I spent hours searching for a suitable website and came up with absolutely nothing. It began to look as if I´d have to close my store. Then I did what I should have done right at the start and told Lajuana who had set up my store in the first place and is still very much involved with it. She immediately offered enough storage space on her own website to accommodate my entire collection including any future kits. I shouldn´t have been amazed by her generosity as she´s always been a good friend but I thought – and still think – that this kind offer went well beyond the bounds of friendship. To cut a long story short we decided to start with the freebies so for the past week I´ve been hard at work uploading all the zip files to the FTP for Lajuana to retrieve and create download links. In other words I just did the easy donkey work and Lajuana all the difficult stuff and I must say she made it really difficult for herself by creating not just simple links but the most beautiful and original download pages. Here are a few screen shots so that you can see for yourselves how creatively she designed them.

Don´t they look great?

By doing all this work on my behalf Lajuana has had to neglect her other duties so while she catches up on her other work we´ll be leaving the kit links for later. For the time being all my kits are still at 4shared and still available but sometime in the near future we´ll also be making these downloads faster and easier.

In the meantime, I hope you´ll enjoy downloading my freebies and taking a little time in the process to enjoy Lajuana´s unique download pages.

Thank you, Lajuana!

Back Again...In More Ways Than One.

Well, I´m back from my holiday in Domburg and it´s taken me a couple of weeks to recover from it. To begin at the beginning...The first half of it was sunny and warm. In fact there was one memorable day when the sand was so hot it practically raised blisters on the soles of my feet. That really was too unrelentingly hot to be called a perfect day but it was preferable to some of the days during the second half when it rained almost non-stop and kept Dora and me confined to our little house most of the time with just short outings in between showers. That would have been bearable if the house had been well insulated but you can hardly expect that to be the case in a converted outhouse and it felt really damp indoors when it rained. I´ve suffered from back problems for years and they´re always worse during cold and damp weather. If I´d been able to turn on the central heating I´d have been OK but it was only shortly before I left that I finally discovered how to do that! So for the last week of my holiday I was creaking about like a superannuated robot in need of an overhaul. I´ve more or less recovered from the worst of it now but after I get back from Scotland I´ll have to see about getting more treatment in the orthopaedic clinic. It only only works for 5 years and my last course of treatment was in 2003 so it´s well overdue. 

Still, all isn´t doom and gloom and I wouldn´t want to give you the impression that I didn´t enjoy my stay in Domburg because I did and, of course, so did Dora. She spent most of her time rearranging the beach and creating mantraps for the unwary or plunging into the sea after her favourite toy. I sometimes think that dogs are like little children. You can buy them the most expensive toy but they often end up playing with the box it came in. In Dora´s case it isn´t actually a box but it´s the same principle. This particular toy I made myself from a piece of sacking roughly sewn together, filled with corks from wine bottles and tied with an old shoelace. It replaces the fancy floating toy I bought her which is a sort of fish shaped loofah which she shuns, much preferring the tatty old sack. Here it is in all its enchanting splendour. Ha! 

  

One thing I did buy her on holiday was a new and very smart red collar to replace her old disreputable one which had faded to a dirty pink from too much exposure to salt water and her penchant for rolling in mud. I´m sure she´d take it off and put on the old one again if she only had thumbs and could work out how it opens.

Well, I could go on about my holiday for ages but I won´t. The summer isn´t over yet and while I sit here chattering the sun is shining and the garden is calling my name so I´ll get off now. Before I do though, I´d just like to mention that Lajuana, as always, has done a great job updating the store. Not surprisingly, this month´s featured kit is Jewelled Sea which is one of my favourites as it perfectly expresses the joy I feel when I´m on the coast. In good weather or bad, it´s always been my favourite place. 

 

You´ll find larger previews of this kit HERE along with a couple of freebies. Thanks for looking!

Nostalgic Scrapbook Freebies

Sorry about the delay in posting these freebies but the recent ice age has finally past and I´ve spent most of my time in the garden recently.
Here they are at last.

If you´d like to have these frames, you´ll find them here.
As for me, I´m off to the garden again...

Vintage Whimsy Is Now In The Store.

Here´s the preview of my latest kit, Vintage Whimsy. As with all my heritage kits it´s a mixture of old and new, vintage and modern and, as always, with a sprinkling of bling and precious stones.

Click on image for a larger view. Click back to return here.

I´ve just released Vintage Whimsy and it´s now available in my store. You´ll find more info about it and other kits plus a new kit freebie HERE.

And talking of bling, I´ve also released a favourite of mine, Floral Bling. Any of these flowers would add an eye-catching accent to any heritage or floral page.

Thank you for looking.

Sweetness And Light Escapees

I´ve just remembered a couple of jewelled elements which narrowly avoided being included in Sweetness And Light. I think they´d coordinate beautifully with it and also with its companion kit, Simply Serene, which will be my next new featured kit so I tracked them down, rounded them up and decided to offer them as freebies.

If you like them, you´ll find them HERE

Hearse And Horses

You´ll probably have guessed by now that I love prowling around art galleries and museums. One of my favourites has always been The Transport Museum. It used to be situated directly across the road from the Glasgow Art Galleries but has recently been renamed The Riverside Museum and moved to a new and much grander building in Clydebank, an aptly named suburb of Glasgow situated on the banks of the River Clyde.

One of the new attractions isn´t in the museum itself but floating on the river right next to it. This is The Glenlee, the so-called Tall Ship, a sailing ship built in Port Glasgow in 1896 and restored over a 6 year period to its former glory. If you´re interested, you can read about it HERE.

My favourite attraction in the old museum was the indoor reconstruction of a 1930´s Glasgow street complete with a painted night sky which gave it an amazingly realistic appearance. Looking into the lighted shop windows was like stepping back in time. It also included a cinema where you could watch films about the town in that era, and when you walked past the old pub you could hear laughter and fragments of conversation from inside. The new museum also has a street from the same era but, unlike its predecessor, unfortunately it leaves very little to the imagination as you can actually enter the “buildings” and view all the goods on display inside. Gone is the painted sky along with the magic. The fact that it leads directly into a brightly lit exhibition hall destroys any sense of reality the street used to have. On the day Eileen and I visited it the street was absolutely packed with tourists and probably an entire bus party or two which made it incredibly difficult to take any photos which didn´t include someone wearing a tee shirt and jeans. However, I found this photo on the Web which shows it under ideal conditions. See what I mean about the sky? Or lack of it?

It may have lost a lot of its magic for those of us who used to love its former – and much less frequented - self. However, what it does now have is a variety of vehicles parked at its kerbs, including a baker´s van, a car which Al Capone would have been proud of...

...and, rather surprisingly, a horse drawn hearse.

Now this is just a little bit spooky but I´m sure you´ll agree that, with Halloween approaching, it´s quite appropriate. And how about that sinister headless dummy in the dress shop window behind it!

The photo really ought to speak for itself so I´ve just used a few elements from Golden Memories to pick out the gold in it.

And for those of you who missed the kit freebies first time around, you´ll find them HERE.

Which reminds me, I´ll soon - probably some time in November - be making some radical changes to my blog which I´m afraid will entail removing many of my out-of-date freebies to make way for something I´d rather surprise you with than divulge (!) so if there´s anything among them which you´d like to have, please take it now while it´s still available.

Words Of Wisdom...And Otherwise

I don´t know about you but I can relate to many of these:

Before you marry Mr Right be sure that his first name isn´t Always.

If at first you don´t succeed, do it the way your wife told you to.

Men are like chocolates. Wait too long and only the weird or nutty ones are left.

A balanced diet is a cookie in each hand.

Chocolate will make your clothes shrink.

If God had wanted me to touch my toes, he´d have put them on my knees.

If crafts became illegal my house would be the tidiest in the world.

See any dust? Then I´ll give you a duster.

Never make the same mistake twice or you´ll never get round to all of them.

Of course I don´t look busy. I did it right first time.

A perfect summer day is when the sun´s shining, the birds are singing and the lawnmower is broken.

And finally...

The above is a picture I stitched for a friend. If you´d like the rusty clip I used, you´ll find it and some other pretty shabby freebies HERE.

PS This is more a definition than a saying but I couldn´t resist including it: onomatopoeia – first sign of a weak bladder.

Golden Evening

I was looking through my holiday photos recently when I came upon this golden North Sea scene captured a couple of years ago in Domburg, a small Dutch town on the Zeeland peninsula.

During the long sunny days of summer the beach throngs with sun bathers and joggers while children splash and shout in the shallows, but as the sun goes down and the beach is left mainly to the seagulls, it takes on a serene magical beauty.

I created this page using Jewelled Sea which you´ll find HERE along with a couple of kit freebies.