A day off at last!

Hello folks, well, I was writing this yesterday, had uploaded some photos and had nearly finished, when I was interrupted and, forgetting to save what I'd written, I lost the lot! Hence the wrong date at the top of the post - it is now Tuesday! I was a little peeved, but never mind.....so...here goes again....yesterday was a total relaxation day with my feet up on the sofa and just catchingup with emails and phone calls. It was my first proper day off in three weeks, so I didn't have the usual twinges of guilt that come with a "lazy" day!

There has been plenty going on, which is why I have been absent from here, and apologies to those of you who I have not been corresponding with as often as I normally do. On Saturday I was teaching a Cake Cards workshop at Dawn's Design Studio and the ladies all made fabulous cards....hello especially to Jilly and her lovely husband, as well as Margaret and Serena of course, Mary, Karen and the new ladies that I hadn't met before. We made a simple little card first, using a template that I had drawn out and decorating it with glitter, Que Sera Sera paper and adhesive borders....this is a useful little idea as it can be the card itself, or scaled down to decorate the front of a card or scrapbook page.

Next came a Wedding Cake Pop Up card using the lace and glitter technque to decorate the tiers. This was a fairly small version, but if made on a larger scale, this pop up is a real eye catcher. Everyone used different colours of glitter so we had quite an array of yummy looking cakes! Lastly we made a really fun card (either a dog or cat version - I'm posting the kitty one) using my "grab" stamps and a template that I drew to represent a cake with a big slice out of it. Just a silly, fun card, but everyone seemed to like it. That's my finger at the bottom of the picture by the way....the card refused to lie flat for me!

I shall be at Dawn's again in two weeks time, when I'll be demonstrating on both Saturday and Sunday mornings and doing workshops each afternoon (Beautiful Butterflies and Box of Delights)....see demonstration dates list for details.....and there are still a few places available on both of them, so do contact Topaz if you fancy joining me for some creative time with a lot of fun thrown in. Hope to see you then!

On Sunday I was at Burnside Garden Centre in Thornton, Blackpool at what used to be Craft Central. Hello to all the ladies (and men!) who came along, it was great to see you all and especially Joanne - we swapped four ATC's! I shall endeavour to post some piccies of them asap. I hope that you all remembered which pens were which and what you could do with them all!?!

Last week my sister, Heather, and I were down in St Ives, in Cambridgeshire, as we were doing a whole set of photographs (well we weren't doing the photos, we were posing with our hands!) for the projects that we and two colleagues are working on at the moment...more about that in a few weeks, but we are almost there I am pleased to say, as it has been a lot of work. The photography sessions were very hot and took forever to do but were very interesting and Brett (the photographer) was incredibly patient with us! I was also designing some new stamps, on another tight deadline, which will be out in few weeks, so, again, I will tell more when I am allowed to. There is always a lot of secrecy around new things as you may imagine!

As Dawn has already mentioned it on air, then I can now say that I'll be going onto QVC in July, as a guest on one of the shows, so will tell you more as I know it.

Today I have been preparing cards and ATC's for the weekend event at the Craft Barn in Lingfield, Surrey. I'll be travelling down there on friday and demonstrating there along with eighteen (yes eighteen!) other designers, including Francoise Read, Paula Pascual and Sue Roddis. So it will be a brilliant event with lots to see and learn about if you are anywhere in that vicinity. I'm looking forward to it and hoping that I get chance to see what everyone else is up to at some point too! My hands are quite oddly coloured now as I have been using Ranger inks for the samples and I have more on me than on the cards as usual!!!

Well, I shall sign off for now and hope that I post this before it disappears into a black hole in the lap top! Lindsay