Just saying hello

David insisted that I take time out to say hello and post a few pictures as well as to thank everyone for their kind words, positive thoughts and cards which are all helping us tremendously. Here are the handmade cards that we've received from Hazel, lots of staff and customers at the Astbury craft shop (where I should have been a couple of weeks ago), Joanne, Sioux and Joanne again. All gorgeous and all much appreciated. I know that I owe emails and thank you's to a fair few people but hope you'll forgive my tardiness in getting back to you all. Everyone's prayers and good wishes have been helping and we did have some good news last weekend, so please keep sending positivity our way and we can hopefully build on that. We really believe in the power of prayer.
Well, I have been given instructions to talk about other things, so I had better do as I'm told-for once! With the fantastic weather I have taken a few piccies of the garden...not quite up to the stage we had expected with everything that's happened of course, but thankfully nature has produced some colour of her own without my meddling! Apart from the mass of Bluebells that we have, interspersed with Aquilegeas, there have been an array of orange and yellow Poppies. This one was a perfect, papery specimen. Unfortunately, as I was so impetuous back in March, most of the seedlings and plug plants have perished in the frosts that we had later in that month, so I'm thinking of getting some more mature plants to get some colour into the garden. The tomato seeds are still waiting for me to sow them but I have been sorting out the peas and beans as well as Sweet Peas which a mysterious cat (not one of our two) has kept uprooting. They are safely under chicken wire now and I've just put up netting for them to climb through.
As you can see, our Cherry tree is coming into fruit so I spent an hour yesterday putting netting over it to keep the birds off. Quite a hilarious sight I'm sure what with me being such a shorthouse! David had already strung some net up across the tree a few weeks ago, so I had the job of forming a sort of see through marquee but I couldn't use the stepladders where the tree is. Still, as my sister calls me the Mighty Midget I got it done!
Talking of Heather, she laughed when she saw the sentiment on this card that I had made as one of the samples for my cancelled demo in Aberdeen a few weeks ago. I used PI coated gloss card and Marion Emberson stamps from PI as well as Glue n Seal. I mentioned this technique in an earlier post and said that I'd try more things with it. So, I dabbed Glue n Seal gently onto the stamps before stamping onto the gloss card and drying with my heat tool. Remember to drop the stamps into water immediately so they don't get gunged up. I then used Distress inks over the gloss card which, as you can see, resist the images. You won't get perfect details using this method, but I'm calling it the "Intaglio technique" as it has a textural quality reminiscent of early wall art. I simply matted the panel and used a white pen to add the dotty borders. The words are from Tim Holtz's Chit Chat pad which is filled with serendipitous word stickers. As I said, Heather laughed when she read the message, but she has been an absolute star over the last few weeks and I love her to bits.
Here's another Glue n Seal card where I've masked the butterfly (from my Arabella stamp set) with the product after I'd coloured it. Once heat set I smooched Distress inks over the background in blue shades. I then stamped the sentiment (from my Creative Thoughts set) and added Glue n Seal randomly over the words as well as raggedy areas around the edge of the panel. Next I went over with brown shades of ink which are resisted where the medium is present. Thanks to Paul for his wonderful paper flower tutorials, so I made a very basic version using white card tinted with blue inks. The paper on the left side is from the Kraft Funday range and I just tore a dotty MME paper to form the stem and leaves. Just a simple card to illustrate a few techniques!
Finally, to show that it always pays to complain about bad service, these cheery beauties turned up this morning from the Royal Bank of Scotland!

Neither Heather or I are customers of theirs, but we had to use them last week for a particular service that they deal with. We had to deal with the most miserable cashier who appeared to want to argue with what we were saying even though it was written in black and white. She seemed to regard us as not worthy of her time or a smile. Hard to explain here, but you know when you've had terrible service that makes you feel almost embarrassed to be in a busy place with other customers listening in. So, I decided to email a complaint and, surprisingly, received a call from the branch manager to say that she had had words with the cashier and that my email had prompted her to do staff training on the particular transaction that they fell down on. That was fine as far as I was concerned and then the flowers arrived today with an apology from the bank. Really cheered us up. As I always say, never judge a company by their errors but rather how they deal with them.
Well, I've touched base as David requested....don't want you all forgetting about me!!! I'll try and find some more things to share with you soon. Until then, heartfelt thanks for your continuing good wishes.