Making Christmas Cards

For the past few weeks I´ve been making Christmas cards, something which would normally take only a couple of days, but these are a little more complicated than most because they´re stitched rather than printed. Well, the motif is stitched but the layout is printed. Stitching is the fun part as I can plug myself into my iPod and lean back and relax during the day without that nagging guilty feeling that I´m neglecting other more important tasks. But all good things eventually come to an end and once all the stitching´s done I reluctantly unplug myself from my iPod and get on with the more tedious parts of the project. First the motifs have to be washed and pressed then stiffened by the addition of an ironed on backing. After that comes the part I enjoy least, namely designing the layout which entails some very precise measuring...not my strong point. The following screen shot may give you an idea of what´s involved.

 

As you can see, the layout is in 3 equally sized parts, (designed to fit onto an A4 sheet of card) the back of the card, the aperture and the flap which covers the back of the motif. By the way, the little corners within the frame are my guidelines for cutting out the aperture. For that I use a steel ruler and a sharp knife. The 4 vertical lines are for scoring the card in order to fold the flaps neatly and the large rectangle is the actual size of the card. If I´m feeling lazy I only print the card once and write the greeting by hand after the card is folded, otherwise I have to create a new layout with a printed greeting on the right side which will be on the inside once I´ve turned the card accordingly and printed it. Does this sound complicated? Believe me, it IS! However, it only has to be done once as I can alter the layout and change the aperture and the greeting for any similar cards. After printing I score the folded parts, cut the card down to size using – thank goodness – my trusty paper cutter, then all I have to do is cut out the aperture and stick on the motif using double sided sticky tape. I also use the tape for sticking down the flap to cover the back of the motif. TADA! One card down, a whole pile more to do...No, not really as I only make these cards for a chosen few.

Having said all that, here are some I´ve already finished. 

I enjoyed stitching this Christmas pudding so much I made a batch of them, some on cream linen and some on green. I think I prefer the contrast of the green but I like both variations. It´s just a pity that the glittering thread and the shine on the beads don´t show up on these scanned images.

I forgot to say that although the second pudding is smaller than the first, it´s only because it was stitched on finer material.

This angel is very glittery because I used lots of sparkling threads. Again, the effect is lost when it´s scanned.

 

The following 2 motifs were really intended by the designer of the chart to be stitched using black thread on white linen but I think they look more effective and dramatic the other way round. By the way, I stitched the house motif before I realised that it was too wide to fit into a landscape layout and I had to create a portrait layout especially for it. You can imagine how I enjoyed doing that!

I´m off now to start a new project using this chart.

I stitched this motif many years ago and gave it to a friend. This time I´m going to keep it and frame it and hang it in my living room so if I´m not around for quite some time, you´ll know where to find me. I´ll be sitting comfortably in my workroom plugged into my iPod....with a Do Not Disturb sign on the door.

Things That Go Bump In The Night

Today is the ancient festival of Samhain which marks the last day of the Celtic year and the beginning of winter. The Celts and Druids believed that in the night before the New Year, the wall between the living and the dead was open, allowing spirits of the dead, both good and bad, to mingle among the living. Some of these spirits were thought to possess living people, cause trouble, ruin crops, or to search for passage to the afterlife and many of the rituals performed in order to placate these evil spirits are best left shrouded in the mists of time. Halloween, as it´s now called, is a sanitized child-friendly version of that pagan festival, now mostly practised in the USA. We would certainly rest uneasily in our beds if we knew exactly what the Celts regarded as suitable tricks and treats. I know I wouldn´t like to spend this evening, or any evening, in THIS room! (although it was fun putting it together.)

To quote an an ancient Scottish prayer,

From ghoulies and ghosties

And long-legged beasties

And things that go bump in the night

Good Lord, deliver us.

Amen to that.

Nature Notes Freebie

Here´s a set of 5 grungy elements which coordinate with my recently released Nature Notes.

If you like them, you´ll find them here.

And if you´d also like a quick page created from the same kit, watch this space...

Season Of What?

John Keats called it the “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” but to me it´s always been the season of colds and chills and cough syrup and a plentiful supply of Kleenex. In case you haven´t already guessed, we both mean autumn but either Keats was immune to the dreaded virus or he was using poetic licence. As for me, only the first line of verse 3 rings true, namely “Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?” I know exactly where they are. They´re six months into the future, that´s where, and the way I feel at present they can´t come fast enough!

Still, all isn´t doom and gloom. At least I´ve got my autumn blog header to cheer me up while I write this though that open fire and cup of tea look so inviting I could nod off in the process. But not until I´ve announced the release of Nature Notes which, with it´s subtle greens and browns, seems to me to reflect the more appealing side of autumn with a few glittering little reminders of summer thrown in. The sight of it gives me hope that once I´ve recovered from this beastly cold I may again take pleasure from walking through the forest crunching autumn leaves beneath my feet “While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue.” 

Ah. I´m beginning to feel better already.

Here´s Nature Notes.

 

There will be a few freebies to go with it once I´ve fully recovered.

Thanks for looking.

PS If you´re interested, you´ll find Ode To Autumn here. 

At It Again!

I was sorting through my summer garden photos and I came across one that made me smile because I see they´ve been at it again. Yes, I know I´ve shown them at it already several times but this year they´ve really outdone themselves. Well, one of them has. He seems to have managed to paint quite a few of the white roses red before Her Royal Frightfulness came to investigate. Too bad she caught the wrong one!

I created this page using Nature Notes which I´ll be releasing soon.

Snailiens

If I haven´t been around for a while it´s because I´ve been making the most of the summer by spending my days in the garden. While the good weather lasts, being outside is preferable to scrapping, designing, keeping up my blog and just about anything else you can think of which requires a computer. I did spend two weeks in Scotland though. No, not in my mothers´garden. Judging by the changeable weather, summer seems to have lasted until around mid-June this year and I came back with less of a tan than I had when I left Germany. I also came back with less of my luggage than I had when I left Germany but that´s another story. Thanks to UPS it was delivered a week later. How nice it is to have a hair brush again. I missed that most of all. (Since the only alternatives were Dora´s brush and the lavatory brush, I wisely made do with a comb.) Despite the weather I also miss Scotland, especially my home town, Glasgow, where I met up with my friend, Eileen, a couple of times. We visited the Art Galleries, Glasgow University´s Huntarian Museum, Kelvingrove Park and the wonderful Victorian glasshouses in the Botanical Gardens, the last of these being the best place I know to heat up in on a chilly day.

I said earlier that I hadn´t done any designing recently. Well, that´s not strictly true. Eileen looks after a little boy twice a week and often reads to him. Somehow we got onto the subject of bookmarks and I said I could make one for him and asked what kind of motif he´d like on it. Since the current book is a harmless children´s fantasy by Enid Blyton, I was surprised when she said “Aliens”. Apparently he´s also interested in finding creepy crawlies in the garden, bringing them indoors and examining them before releasing them again. Somehow that rang distant bells which came closer the more I thought about that, to me alien, hobby. You may remember my preoccupation with combating the snails in my garden this year. Well, I think I may have been influenced by that when I designed this alien-themed bookmark . 

I hope he also likes slithery slimies...which is more than I can say for myself.

Painted Seashells Freebie

Here´s a little set of 3 painted seashells to celebrate my recent holiday on the coast. If you´d like them, you´ll find them HERE. 

Happy shell gathering!

Held To Ransom

Yesterday I left my computer for a while to attend to my laundry and when I came back the entire screen was filled with a message purporting to be from the police. It informed me that I´d been caught visiting illegal websites and that access to my computer was being denied until I´d paid a fine of €100. Even if I hadn´t heard of this nasty malware I´d have realised immediately that it was a scam but it was still quite a shock to suddenly be denied access to my computer. I was totally perplexed about how to deal with it until it occurred to me to simply switch off the computer and immediately switch it on again. This prompted Windows to offer me the option of running it in safe mode in which I had access to all my programmes but no access to the Internet so I was able to run a malware scan. Sure enough, 3 items were detected and deleted and after I´d restarted Windows things were back to normal again. I´m no computer expert and there´s probably another way of dealing with this pest but it worked for me. If you don´t already have Malwarebytes I suggest you install it immediately. You can download a free version here: www.malwarebytes.org/

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!

A Perfect Day

Perfect days in life are few and far between and for me today certainly isn´t one of them. It´s dull and rainy and seems more like October than June. All the more reason to look forward to my summer holiday when good weather is forecast.

I love the sea and most of my perfect days have been spent on the coast. One of my favourite North Sea resorts is Domburg on the Dutch Zeeland peninsula where I rent a small cottage near the shore every summer, mostly just for Dora and myself as Herbert´s too busy to spend more than a few days with us. I get up early every morning as I particularly love the beach at that time when it´s abandoned by everyone except Dora and me and the seagulls. It doesn´t take much to keep us happy for the rest of the day. When I´ve had enough of lounging around reading I´ll go off to the high tide line to see what new shells the sea has washed up overnight and Dora will follow me carrying either her ball or the cork toy I made for her, and being Dora, sometimes both! 

  Click on image for a larger view.

I know that this isn´t everyone´s idea of a perfect day so, while we´re away, I wish you whatever makes you happy this summer. Hope you´ll have lots of perfect days.