Joy And Sorrow

August has been a month of joy and sadness, joy because I´ve finally found a doctor who hasn´t just named but is also able to treat the severe daily headaches I´ve suffered since 2012. After numerous consultations with various specialists and an equal number of misdiagnoses my last hope was the pain specialist, Dr Hein, who within minutes diagnosed my condition as “coin headaches” so-called because the area of the pain is the size of a coin. This, he told me was not only a very rare type of headache but was also his speciality. Coincidence? I don´t think so. To cut a long story short, as I´ve always maintained myself, he thinks that the pain originates in my neck and I´ve been prescribed capsules which prevent the headaches from starting. He also gave me a prescription for manual therapy which entails a very gentle form of chiropractic manipulation. So far after 3 sessions my neck has twice made a noise like a twig breaking as misaligned vertebrae have slipped back into place and I can move my head more freely at long last. Even if this treatment doesn´t cure my headaches there are various others which may do so including, as a last resort, Botox injections. For the first time in almost 2 years I´m feeling optimistic which in itself is a cause for joy.

On the other hand, August has in other ways been a cause for sadness. All summer long I´ve seen only about half a dozen butterflies in my garden, by which I mean gaily coloured butterflies and not the destructive cabbage white. This is I think mostly due to a heatwave in April followed closely by a cold spell which killed all the less hardy butterflies which had been fooled into thinking that spring had arrived. During June and July I waited in vain for the usual brightly coloured fluttering around the Buddleia, commonly known as the butterfly bush. Only the cabbage whites appeared and I hardly saw so much as a hover fly or a bumble bee. August was my last hope but again I waited in vain. August is almost over and it´s rained practically every day. Many of my roses were struck by mildew as were the few lupins which had dared to bloom again out of season. Ditto my beautiful gerberas which spend the summer in pots on my patio. During the few sunny spells when I wasn´t busy spraying everything in sight with an anti-fungal mixture, I was lucky enough to manage to take several photos of, if not a butterfly, at least a few of my other favourite insects. This close up of a little hover fly feasting on a sunflower was a lucky shot. To me it gives an insect´s view of a beautiful alien world.

On an optimistic note, a rainy August hereabouts is often followed by a glorious Indian Summer. It certainly was last year though I couldn´t enjoy it when all the time I was just waiting for the painkiller to stop working and the headache to start tormenting me. The fact that it won´t happen this year is in itself a cause for joy.

An Exuberance Of Lilies

I don´t know what the collective noun for lilies is but for my so-called black - though in reality dark purple – calla I feel it ought to be “an exuberance”. After it´s spent the entire dreary winter dormant and invisible in a sunless sub-basement, as soon as the first tiny green shoots force their way out of the dry earth and I carry it upstairs, water it and place it on a sunny window ledge there´s simply no holding it. It seems as if suddenly overnight its little shoots magically transform themselves into rampant foliage followed rapidly by an amazing number of flower buds which can hardly wait to burst open to greet the sun. No other temporary resident on my patio exudes such vitality.

I´ll be off to Domburg with Dora shortly and I only wish I could take my calla with me because its flowers are already beginning to fade and will probably be entirely gone by the time I return in mid-July and it´ll soon be time to carry it back down to the basement again for its winter hibernation.

Still, I won´t dwell on that but rather on my preparations for my holiday and the anticipation of a few weeks of sun, sea and sand. I know for sure that I´ll get the last two but the Zeeland peninsula juts into the North Sea so it isn´t exactly what you´d call tropical so just wish me lots of the first!

New Kits In The Store

Lajuana´s been busy recently adding more kits to the store for me, one completely new and two from my collection. If you have a look in the store I think you´ll agree that, as always, she´s done a wonderful job. This month the new featured kit is Summer Past which I designed last year and previewed here on the blog in February.

Flight Of Fancy is a kit I particularly enjoyed designing because I love bling and this kit is full of bright sparkling elements to welcome in the spring.

And on the subject of spring bling, Garden Treasures is an elements pack which I couldn´t resist adding on as it goes so well with Flight Of Fancy. In fact any of the glittering creatures in it would add an eye catching accent to any floral or garden page. By the way, it includes the only snail I´d welcome into my garden!

You can see the kits in the store HERE. As usual I´m offering some kit freebies. If you´d like them, you´ll find them HERE along with more info about the kits.

A Fanfare Of Trumpets

When I bought my angel´s trumpet plant last summer it was only about 12” tall and had 5 leaves which it shed during its winter hibernation on my bedroom window sill and regained in the spring. This summer, after having been transplanted into a larger pot, it grew to an amazing 8 feet and produced masses of leaves but only 2 flowers. That was in mid-September and so late in the flowering season that I assumed that this was its swan song before dying back for the winter. When I got back from Scotland I was astonished to see that it was laden down with flowers and courgette-like buds which you can see in the larger photo. In the smaller one you can see a bud which is just about to open.

Click on image to enlarge

Today on a damp, dark and dreary October morning, when I look out onto my rain-washed patio and see those bright splashes of colour, I can almost hear a fanfare of trumpets.

Perfect Match

I was taking some photos of the new lilies we planted in the spring, which had just started to bloom, when this little hover fly landed on one and I couldn´t help noticing how well he matched the stamens on the flower.

The moment I viewed this photo I was irresistibly reminded of one of Jean´s recent pages which I´d admired that very morning. Thanks for the inspiration, Jean!

Summer Past

Here are the previews of Summer Past. I´ve posted them here rather than among my other kit previews because the kit won´t be released until either "summer future" or I find a new scrapping home, whichever comes first. I hope you´ll like it as much as I enjoyed creating it but it´s time to move on and I´m currently working on something entirely different. I´ll show you a sample soon.

Tea With The Bedouins

This is another of the photos from our holiday in Tunisia which I converted from a slide. It needed quite a lot of restoration work but it was worth it as I´m unlikely to get another chance to wear a Bedouin wedding costume or to drink tea with these hospitable people, so this will be a memory to cherish. I think the photo still requires a little more editing, especially to bring out the green of the tattoos on the older wife´s face without affecting the rest of the photo. I´ll need to experiment with that as I´ve no idea how to do it.
Tea Tunisian style is unusual to say the least. On this occasion the water was boiled in a can over an open fire - I had to extract the tea set from another photo. A handful of tea is put into the teapot followed by a handful of sugar then the water is added and everything is mixed thoroughly and allowed to infuse for several minutes. The addition of the sugar puzzled me at first until I discovered that no saucers or tea spoons are provided and, since it´s assumed that everyone likes their tea strong and sweet, it seems quite practical to put the sugar directly into the teapot. As you can imagine, the resultant brew is very sweet indeed and an acquired taste for anyone who doesn´t have a sweet tooth! I do, so I enjoyed it and, anyway, making tea this way is no more eccentric than adding milk or lemon to it. I´d say that asking for milk wouldn´t only have been rude but might also have presented a problem since the only animal in sight was Fortuna, the camel we arrived on, and supermarkets are few and far between in the desert...

(click to enlarge)

I used quite a few gold elements from Summer Past to reflect all the gold jewellery adorning the three of us, and I recoloured a floral background to suit. I´ll show a preview of the kit just as soon as I´ve finished converting and editing my slides.
Almost forgot...no prizes for guessing which of the ladies is me.

Desert Beauty

While we were on holiday in Tunisia we hired a local man to take us on a trek through the desert on his camel. When we stopped to take photos we were invited to tea by a Bedouin family consisting of an elderly man and his two wives. The photo shows the younger of the two who had fun dressing me up in her wedding finery. In fact the out of focus part of this photo is one of several long gold chains which were attached to the headdress I was wearing. I´ve got to show you the photo of us three ladies together sometime so that you can guess which one is me! That shouldn´t be too difficult as the older wife had green facial tattoos. I still haven´t plucked up the courage to have that done...


I created this page using Summer Past, the new kit I´ve been working on recently. I hope I´ve done this desert beauty justice.

Pretty Peggy

When I look at this photo I wonder what prompted Peggy to dress up just to go down and sit on the harbour wall unless it was for the sole purpose of having her photo taken to display her new clothes. She´s certainly dressed in the height of late 1940´s fashion and wouldn´t look out of place in Hollywood so she must have looked quite exotic on a small island in the far north of Scotland. Look at those chunky peep toe shoes with the ankle straps! And the lacy gloves. I think her dress is beautiful and couldn´t resist adding a little colour to it and painting her lips to match as I can just imagine that dark red lipstick. (Click on the photo for a larger view.)
I´ve added some gold swirls to give her a little Hollywood bling and I had fun experimenting with the gilt-edged frosted glass frame on various backgrounds. I like the way it changes to mulberry against the dark pink to set off Peggy and her lovely dress. I love this photo of her. She looks so young and carefree and happy on that long ago summer day.

Lerwick Cousin

This is my mother´s cousin, Margaret Peterson aka Peggy, one of the many relatives she used to visit in Lerwick, the capital of the Shetland Isles. I scanned this photo at 2400 dpi because I wanted to get enough detail to create a portrait but I´m also going to scrap the entire photo sometime as it shows so much of the fashion of the era. Even if the date - 1948 - hadn´t been written on the back, just the hair style alone would have given it away. In the full size photo you can see that she´s wearing a dress with a floral pattern which wouldn´t look out of place today.

Again, as in the earlier page of my aunt, I´ve used backgrounds and elements from the kit I´m presently working on. Couldn´t resist playing with the butterfly swirls again! At least I´ve added a bird although he´d have no trees to perch on as they don´t grow in Shetland.

Summer Past

My mother´s older sister, Lucas, had a large collection of family photos. For many years after her death nobody knew what had become of them until my cousin, Neville, discovered them in his brother´s attic. This is one which I restored recently.


I don´t know exactly when it was taken but it must have been in the early 1930s, probably in her home town of Glasgow, and judging by the blouse and sandals my aunt is wearing, it was during the summer. I´ve given the photo an appropriate floral setting using backgrounds designed especially for it plus some jewelled insects and swirls left over from Flight Of Fancy. If they morph into a kit I think Summer Past would be an appropriate name for it.