Anniversary Wols and pets galore....

Oonagh and Bill are Luvbug's parents, and it's their wedding anniversary today (52 years, I think.) Luvbug is over in Ireland visiting them at the moment, and he took this card with him to give to them. I'm not sure how he felt about seeing his mum and dad represented in "wol" form though :)The stamp came free with "Craft Stamper" magazine. I love bird stamps.
I stamped the letters of "anniversary" onto patterned paper, then punched out each letter with a flower punch, finishing by outlining each flower with a Sakura Soufle white pen and going over the letters with a clear Sakura glitter pen.

-2 wols inside. This time without the 3D eyes or the glossy glaze. Note that the girl wol has a red beak, as she has lipstick on (obviously haha).

Hey ho! So what do I do when Luvbug is out of town? Um, well there's this lot, to start....

OK, this isn't my usual style, never done this kind of decoupage before, but a pack of 4 sheets, mostly cats??? Couldn't resist. Besides, I like a change. It was relaxing, and fun!


Lorianna, the one on the left is on its way to you. The purple one is going to my mum....

(Why do dog pictures look so sad???)

The black lab is why I bought them, really. My friend Donna, in Missouri, has a black lab called Boston who hasn't been well lately. So this one is off to them!

Is it me, or is that kitten's head way too big???

I love this gold ribbon. Wish I could remember where I got it from. Ms Peach, the one on the right is coming your way :)

I keep hearing/reading that the fashion is moving towards really big cards, but I'm moving in the opposite direction! I like little cards. I think it's because they are easily held. I also love the way these cats sit up above the height of the card.

I like this one. I like the way the blue card picks up the blue of the cat's eyes.

OK now this one's just silly. Why would anyone have a dog the size of a cat when they could just have a cat???

Ah well, they were fun to do as I could sit and do them on a lap-tray- I haven't been feeling too well this week. With stamping I need to be at a table and press down on a hard surface. This is far more sitting-in-front-of-the-telly friendly.

More pootling....

...So I cropped that picture thingy I did the other day, and made it into a card:Watcha think?
Certainly looks better smaller, I think.
I punched the flowers out of some of the remaining paper. I only did 6 as this punch is INCREDIBLY hard to press down! I hate punches like that! I think you should be able to try them out in the shop. LOL!

Looking out the window, I spotted this wee fella on the rosemary. Wasn't sure if he was nimbling seeds or insects. Cute, isn't he? Wouldn't pose properly for me though :)...that little distraction got me to dig out this, which I bought about a month ago and still hadn't done anything with. It's a big sheet of gift wrap from Paperchase. Decent weight paper, too, and tons of it for £1:OK £1 is a lot for a piece of wrapping paper that will end up torn up and ignored, but not if you use it in other ways. I've seen craft stamps around with similar bird cage designs on, and this is a much cheaper option to those! Here's the card I made with some of it this afternoon. I used bird stamps from my growing collection of stamps received free with magazines :)I quite like it :) Here's the inside:
Next, here is one I put together as an anniversary card for someone. Can't say who in case they come here and see it. Ha.I had the topper ready a few weeks ago, so it was just a case of deciding on a background. In the end I thought just using a plain brown card was enough.Some swirls inside and a 'congratulations' stuck onto it:
It was nice to do a bit of crafty pootling. I am feeling EXTREMELY hormonal (horMOANal?) right now and I needed calming down. LOL!

Finally, I had run out of blank ATCs. Rather than buy some I thought I'd just cut up some card. They have to be 3.5 x 2.5 inches. Yeah, I know, if I have lined them up I'd have got more out of a sheet of card. But where's the fun in that?I coloured them all with ProMarkers and cut them out. Now I have a wee pile of multi-coloured blank ATCs. Far less frightening than a blank white canvas. You never know, I might even produce some completed ones some time.
Wouldn't it be nice to get a swap going?
Hmmm... I wonder if we could so that... any ideas?

Cat Therapy

Things are smoothing out, gradually, I think....
Big thanks, everyone who has emailed and left messages.
It really helps y'know :)

*** *** *** *** ***

I've done a little pootling in my favourite subjects, namely cats and doodling. This time I've produced smaller cards. And I seem to be veering towards the simpler look at the moment, which I'm finding really appealing right now. Maybe because my head is so jumbled I need the page to be blanker!!

Anyway, as these are smaller (89mm -or about 3.5- inches square)I have put them in my online shop in packs of two. Here are a few examples. If you click this link you can see more pic's at the shop.Meanwhile here is Fluffy:Even though her kidneys are registering as OK now, the vet has recommeneded we stick to the Renal Formula diet because of her age (16). But she isn't eating very much at all. She has a few mouthfuls then just walks away. We even try to feed her from our hands, coaxing her and encouraging her. But after a few mouthfuls she just isn't interested. I've ordered a different brand of food for her, which should arrive today. It's still a premium renal formula but it's meant to be extra tasty for cats who aren't eating. I hope it works. She has lost LOTS of weight.In this photo (above) you can see how thin some of her fur is. This is where it had become matted and they had to thin it out and even did a little shaving!
(I love it when cats sleep on their brains like this. Did you know there is a tradition that this means it's going to rain?)

And here is her brother Scooter!
HE is doing SO well. He is her littermate, so also 16. He was diagnosed with FiV a few years ago. This is the feline version of HIV and spread by scratches and cuts in fights with infected cats.

When he was diagnosed the vet told me to have him put to sleep, if only, he said, to save Fluffy from the risk of infection. But I couldn't. How can I sacrifice one cat for another? Well it is years since and she is still free of it. And he is great despite having about 4 teeth and arthrititis. He has a limp at the moment: it comes and goes. But he is an enormous, butch fella, really strong.
He will cuddle only when HE wants to, and he isn't a lapcat. He prefers to sit alongside you.
He loves to be stroked, especially around the ears. When he has had enough he will push your hand away. But if you stop too soon he will "Tap tap tap" at you to carry on. Somtimes this may involve tapping your head or your face, if you are asleep in bed. And if that doesn't work the claws come out. He's very cheeky. I love them both.

A card for Gill, and memories of working in London...

A quicky for Gill, someone I worked with in the early 1990's. She commuted to London all the way to Worthing. Actually, she still does it! We keep in touch via Xmas and birthday cards, and the odd email. Some of them very odd indeed :)

Inside...

....and the envelope:

We were at an investment bank called CIBC, near London Bridge.
We were in the stockbroking bit, doing settlements. This section had previously been an independent broker, but like many other small firms, it swallowed by a big bank.

There was an enormous gap between how broker staff worked and how bank staff worked. For example, we had always done unpaid overtime- if you needed to get it done, you stayed and did it. It was expected, in fact, it was written into your contract. It lead to a 'work ethic', if you like, but even under pressure the cameraderie was second to none :)

To the bank, though, if you did overtime this meant that you had messed about all day. Overtime meant you were doing something wrong. Having outlooks that were poles apart like this meant that brokers dreaded being taken over by banks, as we had very little respect for them! The saying was, that 'banker' was Cockney rhyming slang ;)

Some of us rode in the London to Brighton Bike Ride each year. The bank insisted that T-Shirts with 'CIBC' on them were worn. So we told people that it stood for "Canvey Island Bike Club" (rather than Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce).

On the ride to Brighton our team took the train from London Bridge and were on the beach setting up a barbecue long before anyone else arrived :)

When the Stock Exchange arranged for a rounders league, our team turned up in jeans with a crate of Becks Beer, while the banking section came along in team-liveried shorts and tops, doing group warm-ups. Ugh! They make me gringe just to think of it. LOL!!!!

It was fun for a while but once CIBC had our business and our training and procedures, the entire department was made redundant en masse.
-A pattern repeated many times.

In 1992 I had three redundancies. I had 5 over the course of my time in the city, 1986-1997. Hence I feel for those being affected this time around. Kind of ironic that it's the big banks who are feeling it bad this time. I can't say 'good!' because some of the brokers swallowed up are still in there, somewhere.

It's a shame that the big banks were ever allowed to take over the small brokers. One that I had worked for, Kitkat & Aitken, had been trading since the early 19th century. Then along came the Royal Bank of Canada and snapped us up..... within 4 years no sign of Kitkat remained. No notice was ever given for redundancy. I began work on a Friday as normal, and got my P45 at lunchtime. Some people found their redundancy notices on the doormat when they got home from holiday.

Banks got too big and therefore too powerful. A lot of people suffered along the way, and look what it led to.....

Thanks to people like Gill though, I still have good memories of those days :)

Birthday card for a brother.

I came across this cat stamp when I was re-organising my craft space the other week! I bought it last year from an Ebay shop; it was only a couple of pounds. I had never used it as it arrived as just plain red rubber and I didn't have enough mounting foam left for it, so it just go put by for another day.....

Hmm.... then it suddenly occurred to me this week to just stick it to an acrylic block with Pritt Stick glue :) et voila!!!! I just cleaned both with a 'baby-wipe' afterwards.

I'll see if I can find the Ebay shop again, if any of you would like to go and browse there....

****UPDATE: The Ebay shop is Nella's Corner- click the link, write 'cat' in her search box and it goes straight to this stamp. It costs £2.99 :) ****

• I stamped onto beige card with black India ink, then tore the edges and rubbed with a brown chalk inkpad.
• There is a slight wavy pattern in the background to the cat, this was me doodling with a clear SakuraGlaze pen :)
• The lovely background paper is from a Papermania 50 sheet 6x6 pack, called Oriental Spice.
• I've gone over some of the pattern in the green paper with a Sakura Stardust pen in clear, so in the sun this is quite glittery.
  
• The ribbon is from a local haberdashery, who always have an enormous basket of 10m bundles for 50p each.
  

This card is for my elder brother, David. His birthday isn't till 4th April, but I wanted an excuse to use this stamp, and it just evolved into something I thought he would like :)