CraftEire ... and other stuff!!

Oh, I had such a fabulous time at CraftEire!! I got to meet so many lovely ladies ... some new faces, some not so new! The hotel was gorgeous and we had a beautiful dinner there on the Friday night. On Saturday, (after some more top nosh for breakfast :) I did four classes and also got to spend plenty of time in the crop room chatting, shopping .... and a bit of crafting too. (I even got to sit at the same table as Jane Dean! ) My first class was at 9am with Eva, but it was well worth the early start. We made a vase of K&Co flowers with a mini lo on one of the stems ... it was just beautiful! I also did both of Elisa's classes ... a very cool wall hanging with mini los in four frames, and a lovely lo with some bright and funky Cherry Arte papers. My last class was with Jane Dean where we made a lo with a very cool popup house. Of course, I didn't finish anything (I'm the slowest scrapper ever!) but I will post photos when I get things finished. I probably wont get to finish them until I'm finished my SA stuff for this month (just got a big package of gorgeous stuff at the end of last week ... lots of ribbons :) but I definitely will finish them coz I love them all:)

I got the new issue of Creativity life today in Inspiring Ideas. Our other los (the ones that didn't appear on the Creativity Life blog) are in there.

I'll leave you with a few cards I made in the crop room at the weekend. I just adore these Japanese doll stamps from hero arts and was inspired to use them after seeing a gorgeous card on Jackies blog. (Jackie did some fabulous make and takes in the crop room at the weekend too!) 

Feeling sneaky!

Oisin and I went to see Bolt (again!) today. It is just sooo funny. Go see it if you need to be cheered up, or would just like a good laugh:) 

I'm so excited about going to CraftEire this Friday. It should be a great couple of days and I can't wait to see everyone and scrap to my hearts content! 

I also have a few sneaks for round four of Scrapbook Apprentice. For this challenge the theme was stitching and the Boho Chic style. 

Love-ly day

Hope you had a nice Valentines day! We decided to go out on Friday night for a meal and a movie thinking it wouldn't be as busy as Saturday night. We had a gorgeous dinner but the movies we wanted to see were both booked out ... maybe everyone else had the same idea as us?? So we decided to rent a few movies, go home, light the fire and cosy up ... just me, Dec, Ben & Jerry :) Then on Saturday evening I had another gorgeous dinner, cooked by my wonderful hubby ... and he even did all the washing up! What more could a girl ask for :)

I only managed to do one card (Valentines) and one lo this week. But I really love how this lo turned out ... it could be that gorgeous map patterned paper from StudioCalico! I also decided to add a little bit of stitching ... now that I've got the bug! 

Snow and stitches

I can't believe it has been a week since my last post. The weeks just seem to be passing by so quickly. The snow has been crazy ... I can't remember so much snow since I was a kid. Last Thursday I decided to go to the Dundrum shopping Centre and thought I'd be fine as the snow seemed light, but when I came out afterwards ... it was like a blizzard. There was deep slush and snow on the roads and everyone was driving at about two miles an hour and I thought I'd never make it to the other end of the M50!

Anyway, I finally finished my los and cards for round 4 of scrapbook apprentice (I'll post a few sneaks next week). They seemed to take me ages this time and even though the papers were pretty, they were totally not my style. What I did love though was that I got to try stitching. I absolutely love the look of stitching on a page but never do it myself as I struggle with a sewing machine (can't use the foot pedal ... though I'm sure if I thought about it hard enough I could find a way around that!) and even though I have one of the mini machines, they are not very versatile and don't reach very far into the page. But I did do lots of hand stitching and used nice new stitching templates from PaperMania and have to say, its definitely something I'll be doing on los in the future.

The lo below is a Christmassy one I did a couple of weeks ago with some lovely BG Wassail. Thought I'd post this one as all the snow makes it feel like it should be Christmas :)

Round three and silver linings...

Firstly, a big thank you to everyone who voted for me in round two of Scrapbook Apprentice. Voting has now begun for round three  and if you would like to have a little looky, just click here! For this round we were not allowed to use any patterned paper which was certainly a challenge, but I think I was pretty happy with how things turned out. 

Thought I'd post a layout I did last week at a crop at the lovely Elisa's house. I'm really looking forward to doing her classes at CraftEire which is in less than 3 weeks!!!!! Yipee!!!

I've had this photo of Oisin for ages but never seemed to have just the right paper, but this kit from StudioCalico was perfect (with the addition of some very cute PaperMania small brown letter stickers). I don't know if you can see it too well in the photo but I outlined the edge of my cloud with some stickles to give it a silver lining!! :)