Off On Monday

Well, I´ve just about finished packing. At least with the baggage restrictions I won´t have to even consider taking the kitchen sink with me this time. With the 20 kilo allowance it´s difficult enough already to decide what´s essential and what I can reluctantly leave behind.

I´m really looking forward to being in Scotland again for a few weeks and visiting all my old haunts in Glasgow, or at least those that still remain. I know the art school is still standing and our beautiful Kelvingrove Park with its Victorian museum and art galleries hasn´t changed much. Neither has Sauchiehall Street, my favourite shopping centre. With all the places I have to revisit I´ll need to have my shoes resoled when I get back.

And that reminds me that I have something else to look forward to shortly after my return which will take the edge off my homesickness.

Here´s a clue.

I won´t have to take much with me for THAT. Just my camera and maybe a pair of ripped fishnet stockings...for my husband.

See you soon.

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.

Paisley Doodles

All the doodling that´s been going on around the blogs lately, initiated by Deb and continued by Jean, reminded me that I used to do quite a bit of doodling myself a while ago. Not in pen and ink and not on paper but in embroidery thread and on canvas. It wasn´t random doodling but was restricted to variations on the Paisley pattern. I didn´t exactly make it up as I went along but drew out rough guides to follow – or not as the mood took me – as you can see from the main photo, well, scan actually. That one is in cross stitch and is unfinished and still without the backstitched details but the one on the left hand page of the book is a part of an embroidered cushion I completed.

I created this page using Pretty Shabby which includes its own little Paisley doodle. For those of you who missed the freebies first time around, I´ll be posting them before I leave for Scotland later this month. One of my friends lives in Paisley. Maybe I´ll drop by and get enough inspiration from the town the pattern was named after to actually complete my picture.

Tea And Sympathy

You´ll probably think that the changes I´ve made to my room are a little premature. I mean who needs a fire and a comfortable old armchair and a hot cup of tea in August? ME, that´s who! It may still be August and technically summer but hereabouts it´s more like October. As if that wasn´t bad enough, I´ve got a rotten cold. It started in my head and during the past week it´s done the grand tour of my body and has finally settled in my chest. I´ve lost my voice entirely but with the barking cough I have I can at least still communicate with Dora. Goodness knows what she thinks I´m trying to say though as she´s just flashed me an indignant look and stalked out of the room so I think I´d better have another dose of cough syrup before I offend her any further.

Why am I telling you all this? Well, a little sympathy would be nice. A cup of tea would be even nicer though so I´m off now to unceremoniously tip the doll out of the armchair, put my feet up in front of that blazing fire and hope that the cup contains something a lot more appetising than the foul herbal brew I´ve been forcing down for the past week. Then, after that, I´ll blow out the candle and toddle off to bed.

See you all soon...I hope.

Floral Gold

With summer already waning and autumn fast approaching, I thought you might like a little freebie which combines the flowers of summer with the textured gold of autumn. Let´s hope it´ll keep the chilly silver of winter at bay for a few months.

You´ll find this golden freebie HERE.

Simply Serene

At Lajuana´s suggestion, I´d originally intended to name this new kit after the first page I posted using it. But, as is so often the case with my kits, it soon took on a life of its own and changed from being a kit you could sink your teeth into to something a little more brittle than juicy. I mean just imagine biting into the diamond glitter or that crunchy sapphire and you´ll see what I mean! Then I remembered a comment that Jean made about my succulent page, namely that it looked serene. So Jean, who said of herself, “I'm dreadful with naming, so have to leave that to others.” actually helped to name this kit.

Still, what´s in a name? Is it succulent or serene or something else entirely? Judge for yourself.

Click on images for larger previews

In A Victorian Garden

This photo courtesy of my fourth cousin, Kathy, shows her great-great grandfather, John Inglis (brother of my own great-great grandfather) and his wife, Agnes, in formal pose in their equally formal Victorian garden.

Click on image to enlarge

I´ve noticed that many photos from that era show the husband standing behind his seated wife and it´s repeated in the photo of the same couple which I´ve tucked behind the frame. I can think of several possible reasons for this. Perhaps to show the ascendancy of the husband over his wife? After all, women had few rights during that period and the man was definitely the boss in every respect. Or maybe, more kindly, to show protectiveness towards feminine frailty? My own personal theory is that poor Agnes, constricted by her stays and whalebone corset, would have been unable to stand still for long enough to have her photo taken without collapsing with a fit of the vapours and having to be revived by smelling salts.

Under the circumstances, I know I would!

Dandegolds And Marilions

Deb´s recent tongue-in-cheek (I hope!) depiction of a marigold eating monster reminded me of my own personal marigold monster.

When we moved house a few years ago, one look at the garden was enough to tell me that if I couldn´t see down to the bottom of it without binoculars there was no way my back would bear up if I had to do the weeding. I had some reservations about delegating that task to Herbert who could just about tell the difference between a daffodil and a rose and only then with the help of a gardening book, so before entrusting the tools of destruction to him, I said, “DON´T PULL UP ANYTHING YOU CAN´T IDENTIFY!” and left him to it. Some time later I started to notice that the very minute my beloved marigolds began to bloom they mysteriously disappeared. I imagined a huge battalion of snails munching their way through them every night so I liberally sprinkled snail pellets around those that remained. And still they diminished. Then, by sheer chance I happened to look in the compost bin one day and was horrified to find a sad wilting heap of marigolds right on top. Confronted with the evidence, the Marigold Murderer looked shocked, shifty and uncertain then rallied quickly and said it must have been Dora. Now, Dora as a puppy was a keen little gardener but she was never quite clever enough to hide the results of her work in any compost bin and she certainly never left anything with its roots still attached. The MM´s second line of defence was to insist that he´d never ever weeded out anything he couldn´t identify and that even he knew a dandelion when he saw one. AHA! Case for the prosecution solved but not quite closed...Time passed and just as the MM thought that all was forgiven and forgotten he received this birthday card.

Click image for a larger view

Would you believe he had the brass neck to actually find it amusing? Even the fact that I´d added years to him by depicting him as a crazed and leering demented senile senior citizen didn´t bother him at all and he even hung it triumphantly inside the door of the garden shed as if it had been his finest hour! I wonder what it would take to make him feel humbled and guilty.

Hmmm.

This page maybe?

Dora In Action

I was sorting through the photos I took in Domburg recently when it occurred to me that, apart from the video, I´d also taken several consecutive photos of Dora in hot pursuit of her cork toy. Taken singly they don´t look that interesting but blended into one I think they give quite a good impression of Dora in action.

Click on image for a larger view

I used the Marbled Blue background from Jewelled Sea on top of a few grungy layers, blended in the 3 photos and then, once I´d flattened the image, I lowered the saturation quite a bit. As you can see there was a LOT of splashing going on there – one good reason to stand well back when Dora takes off! - and I´ve heightened the effect by using the Paint Daubs filter. It was a lot of work and entailed a great deal of trial and error but I´m quite pleased with the way this composite has turned out.

Afterthought

Sorry it´s taken such a long time to get around to posting the Nouveau Summer freebies. Here they are at last.

As you can see, there´s a poppy, an anemone and a hibiscus. The ladybird (Am. ladybug) was an afterthought inspired by Lajuana´s own little dancing ladybird which you can see among her CT layouts or HERE on her blog.