Freebie Friday #1

So here we are, at the first of my Freebie Fridays and here is the first freebie:

As I said in this post I started to design this Holly Berry kit with the intention of creating my first full kit but it never materialised. I'm not sure why. I think partly because I wasn't confident of my skills as a designer, partly because I thought what will I do with it once it's done and partly because work just took off and I didn't find time to go back to it. If you like it please just click on the 'Download Now' link above and it should take you straight to the download page. This is the first time I've tried anything like this so if you have any problems please say as I have plans for more stuff like this so want to get it right.

If you do download it please let me know what you think of it and if you actually create something with it I would love to see it so please post a link in the comments. Thank you and hope you like it.

Kissing For Cash

I had a job interview last week. The company I was working for went in to liquidation over the summer and I've been looking for another job ever since. We need me to get a job. The job interview last Friday was for the post of  school auditor for the local council and I really, really wanted it. It sounded so interesting and would be a great opportunity for me. Plus it was school hours and term time only - and we mothers know those are like gold dust!

I heard today that I wasn't successful. It's frustrating and not a little deflating but I have to take comfort in the fact that I have sor far applied for 2 jobs and have got called for interviews for both of them so that's something.

After I told Noah he told me how sorry he was and then went off to do whatever it is 7 year old boys do. After 5 minutes or so he came back and we have a conversation that went like this:

N: Mum, I have a job for you. Every day if you give me 5 kisses and 5 hugs - I'll pay you. That can be your job!
He then proceeded to 'collect' his kisses and hugs and then comes back a few minutes later with a handful of coins from his money box (around £1.50 or so - I definitely spotted a 50p and a £1 coin plus some coppers).

Me: Noah, I don't need or want to be paid for kissing and hugging you as they are my pleasure and I would in fact pay you for hugs and kisses.
He becomes insistent that he pays me and we argue/haggle over this finally settling on my just keeping 1p.

N: Just think mum if you do this every day for the next year you will get £3.65, £3.66 in a leap year. And you can do shifts if you'd like!

THIS is what being a parent is all about. Better than any paid employment.

Need I Say Anything?

This Day In History

Time flies by so fast which is one of the reasons I love blogging. It records all those things, the little things, the big things, that you would otherwise forget. I've been blogging since August 2005. I started for a variety of reasons. As a way to try and keep in touch with my friends and family back home in the UK whilst I was living in Nova Scotia, Canada. For therapeutic reasons, enabling me to 'get things of my chest', to be able unload some of the stuff I was working through (the homesickness, the struggle of living in a different country, missing proper bacon!). At a basic level as a diary, a record of the little things the children said, a record of our day to day.

So what does this day, month, season look like over the past 4 years? What was I doing on, or around, 18th November?

• November 2005 - Stumbled at the first hurdle here as there are NO entries at all for the month of November 2005. I couldn't understand why? I was at the top of my blogging high and enthusiasm - hey I'd only been blogging 3 months! But once I looked at the first entry of December I realised why - we moved countries in November! Aha! Now I understand why I may have been a little too busy to blog. So November 2005 saw our leaving Nova Scotia and returning to England.


• November 2006 - No actual blog entry for the 18th but one for the 23rd. It's funny to read this one as I am still struggling with some of the same thoughts and ideas, scrapbooking related, now as I was then. I always seem to put myself under so much pressure to create 'the' layout rather than just letting go, relaxing and just having fun. Although I seem to be making some headway in this department as I did actually scrapbook recently and didn't procrastinate. I just did it.


• November 2007 - LOL, I have no idea whether I blogged in the month of November, or even in December or January (2008) for that matter as this is around the time I got my first iMac and I made the, in hindsight, bad decision to move my, then Typepad, blog to iWeb (an iMac application). I talked about my move to iWeb here and then just a few months later about my return to Typepad here. It's interesting to see that I'd been wanting to move away from Typepad for longer than I realised. Incidentally iWeb obviously didn't work for me as I only made 2 blog entries over 3 months and they were so boring that I didn't even bother to import them back into Typepad!


• November 2008 - Again nothing for the 18th but a blog entry on the 19th and interestingly it's about another blog move this time from Typepad to a self-hosted Wordpress. Which means that tomorrow is my 1 year Wordpress blog anniversary!

I'm generally not one for looking back, preferring to look forwards to the future, but it is interesting to see how far you've come or how your life has changed over a set period of time. In the process of looking back on some of my earlier posts it was funny to find references to my eldest daughter as a 9 year old - she is now 13 - and to just take a moment to see how she has grown and changed and matured.

So what about you? What were you doing this time last year? Or the year before? Or even the year before that?

The 'C' Word

By which I mean christmas!

Yes, I know, it feels too early to mention this upcoming holiday but it is looming really fast. I always feel like christmas is like the dinosaur in the side mirror of the Jurassic Park movie and should come with the warning 'objects in the mirror are closer than they appear'. Christmas still seems to be ages away but it is in fact only 5 weeks and 4 days away!

So why am I talking about christmas? Because, for those of you so inclined, there are a couple of really great classes out there to help you record your christmas memories, traditions etc. And for the discerning shopper amongst you they are great value for money.

First up there is a free, yes totally free, class being offered by Jessica Sprague, Holidays In Hand. This class will help you to focus on what matters most to YOU during the holiday season, no matter how you celebrate. Instructions on how to sign up for this class can be found when you click on the Holidays In Hand link above. Jessica's classes are really great, especially for digital scrapbookers and you can access the class content FOREVER. I love her classes, in fact Jessica Sprague was instrumental in my quest for digital scrapbooking know-how and got me started in the first place.

The other class I would highly recommend is Shimelle's Journal Your Christmas class which works for both digital and traditional scrapbookers. Yes, there is a small charge ($32 US dollars or £20 UK pounds) but you get to automatically do the class every year for free for however long you want to join in. I first signed up for this class in 2007, then tagged along again in 2008 and will now be doing it again this year. You have to agree that that is great value for money!

My plan is to try and incorporate ideas from both classes in to one journal or album. So far I've not completed a full christmas journal but am hopeful, as always, that this year will be THE year.

Watch this space...

Freebie Fridays

I've got my blogging mojo back! And along with it my scrapbooking and digital designing mojos.

So to celebrate this I am going to start Freebie Friday where I will either give away something I have designed myself (dependent on time, although I'm good for a few weeks as I've been playing for a long time) or point you to someone else who is giving away a freebie that I like the look of. Sound good?

This Friday I will be giving away a set of papers I made as part of a kit I started designing called Holly Berry (gold star for guessing a christmassy theme). I never did finish the kit, only getting as far as the papers but if people like the papers enough then maybe I'll be persuaded to design the other stuff to go with it?

So don't forget to check my blog entry for Friday and pick up a set of digital papers at the same time.

A Whale Of A Time

Yes, quite literally, I've been having a whale of a time. A 7ft 6in, according to Richard, who is a man and obviously needs to know these things precisely, whale of a time.


Why (and yes, I've asked myself this many times over the last 2 weeks)? The crêche at church are currently telling the story of Jonah and they asked, as they have this idea from somewhere that I'm 'crafty', if I had any ideas? Well, I always have ideas I'm just not sure if I should in future tell people what they are because before you know it you've volunteered to make a HUGE papier maché whale! And I've never done any papier maché before!

So where to start? Obviously first step was to search the web for 'papier maché whale'. Results? None, unless you wanted to make a little 12" 2D whale to put on the wall. The other end of the search fell in to the 'I want to make a whale as big as a house for my museum' category. Not helpful. So it was back to having to use my creativity and come up with a way to do this. The main problem was creating the framework for the papier maché to be laid onto. I briefly went down the route of 'can I find balloons big enough to support my whale sized proportions' but quickly discarded this as no, I probably couldn't. Chicken wire saved the day - and I have the scars to prove it!

After that the rest was easy, if not time consuming. The most frustrating part was waiting for it to dry between applying layers and the fact that it was a 3D object which meant covering all sides of it.

So my life this last week or so has consisted of: papier maché, dry, turn, papier maché, dry, turn, papier maché, dry ... I'm sure you get the picture.

He went down a treat though. And yes, I do mean he. It's definitely not a she - just ask Noah. He complained when I once referred to it as a she, "but mum, I'm surrounded by girls, there are already 4 in this house and only 2 boys, can it be please be a boy whale?".

Who's the 4th girl? Well that's a post for another time but I will tell you it's a hamster named Ruby.