Something a little different...

Will you marry me?

So thought it was about time I blogged this...

Now I can't claim to have made this little beauty, but I can claim the honour of designing it :D

It all began when the other half and I began discussing the whole marriage thing. I'm not sure how other folks do it, but for us we knew we were going to get married, and had even started planning to some degree, before we were officially engaged. As part of the planning thing we decided to go jewellery shopping. Danny and I wanted to choose my engagement ring together rather than it being a surprise... We were spending money and we wanted to make sure I was gonna love the ring forever!

So off we headed to Birmingham's jewellery quarter to peruse the many sparkly offerings. Foolishly we thought it would be easy, I already had an idea in my head of what I wanted; Solitaire diamond, marquise cut, and both white and yellow gold. Easy right? Wrong!!

We went in every single shop and found nothing!

Well, thats not strictly true, we did find that some of the jewellery stores would actually handcraft customers designs... 

Well that just got the ball rolling, before I knew it I'd sketched the ring of my dreams and we were heading back to the jewellery stores, with a different idea in my head!

The shop we chose was ironically one of the first, if not the first shop we visited on our first trip to Birmingham. The shop was Platinum Jewellers, not sure what it was about them that we liked, but something just clicked and it had to be them... We've never regretted choosing them, although they may wish they had said no!

The twisted design I had imagined, proved to be rather tricky and it took them a few attempts to get it right. Months after the process began we finally got the finished ring, we were so happy with it. The only sad bit was, it then went to live with Danny for a few more months till he decided to pop the question.

On 23rd August, 2002 that day finally arrived. 

What a romantic :)

Surrounded by flowers and candles, Danny got down on one knee, retrieved my ring from the lily it was sitting in and said many wonderful things that I could never remember, followed by "Will you marry me?" I said a very teary, squeaky yes and finally got my beautiful ring on my finger :')

On 23rd August 2005, at Lipan point on the south rim of the Grand Canyon, my second ring design joined the first. And so as not to be left out Danny got his own handmade ring, also designed my me.

Just Married!

The ring designing was just the beginning, to be continued...! 

For Movie Nights!

... or days

... or to make the kids an entertaining snack

... or just because you love it!

POPCORN!!! :9

I've been searching for the perfect cinema style popcorn recipe for some time. I've found so many recipe's but none of them gave the taste that I was after, that of the sweet popcorn available at Cineworld... excluding Nottingham Cineworld, I don't know what they do different there, but the popcorn is not good and definitely not a snack I want to recreate!

Anyway, all the recipe's have been good, but just not what I was after... Until one day I entered the words "cineworld sweet popcorn recipe" into google.

*** I know what you're thinking, kind of obvious really isn't it! I have no idea why it's taken ***

me however many years to try putting these words into the search engine, oh well!

The first result is another person searching for the same recipe as me, with someone named Clare providing the following recipe:

• 1/2 cup popcorn kernels
• 1/4 cup vegetable oil
• 1/4 cup white sugar

Put all the ingredients into a large pot and shake over a medium heat until the popping slows. Pour into a bowl and enjoy!!! 

So quick and easy, and more importantly, exactly what I was after! I now sleep peacefully at night... well  not really, but it is one quest completed!

Now go! 

Try it for yourselves... you know you want to!

Happy Birthday Jacob

In honour of my godson's 1st birthday, I thought I'd share the card I made for him when he was born.

I had taken the photos ready to blog and never got round to it, but better late than never right? This is one of my favourite cards I've made to date. Completely original, personally handcrafting each element.

The background was created using perfect pearls in a spritzer bottle, then I sketched out the letters, baby and planets and added definition and shading with water colour paints. Then they were simply stuck onto the background. To add a bit of dimension I used sticky foam pads on the star, the baby and on the planets ring.

Simple but effective I think :D

Day 9

I'm hanging in there... Almost!!

For my Day 9 layout I kind of cheated a little bit. The photo's were actually taken on the eighth, but I really wanted Day 8 to be about Danny starting his Christmas holiday. We did go shopping on day 9 (not to the mall in the pics though :/ ) and the Starbucks cup is from the ninth... so all in all not too much cheating... I think?

Day 9

I know a lot of people are using their Starbucks packaging in their layouts... and yes I guess I'm jumping on the bandwagon... But when the seasons coffee's start being sold, it is one of the huge signs for me that Christmas is getting near. I've had a number of gingerbread latte's from other coffee sellers over the last few weeks, but this day was the first time we went to Starbucks (non of the others did festive cups... Shame on you all! lol) I really liked the cup design and couldn't decided which side to show, so I went with a double page layout and cut the cup down the middle. I quite like the way it worked out :D

If anyone's interested, I had the Eggnog latte and Danny had the Peppermint Mocha :9

Page 1

Don't know if you can see, but I cut the number 9 out of the cup sleeve. It's not perfect I know, but I kinda liked the shabby look to it... Also if you look closely, I did my journaling by writing directly onto the cup. It's more obvious in some areas than others.

Page 2

I decided to use black paper as a background as I felt it really made the cup design stand out. I wrote all the names from our shopping list on the background paper in metallic silver. Some you can read, the majority are hidden. I was thinking of using my real list as a background, but that also documents what each person will receive. For that reason I decided not to put it  on this page... although, I might still use it at a later date and maybe keep it hidden in an envelope or something...? We'll see!

Well that's all for now... 10, 11, 12 & 13 next :/

Days 6, 7 & 8

Oh NOOOOO! I'm falling behind :/

Today I've been desperately trying to get back on track! The past week we've been suffering with colds, not really bad colds... just the ones that are just lurking enough to make you want to sit around doing nothing... maybe that's just me??

Well anyway... instead of doing my DD when the kids are tucked up in bed, I've been crashing on the sofa, too tired to do anything!

Although I hadn't physically done the layouts, I'd done most of the work in my head... just needed to put it onto paper!

Finally... Here is Day 6, 7 & 8 for your viewing pleasure :D

Day 6

Most of my previous pages were quite photo orientated, but these ones were more about the story of the day. As I mentioned above, I've had a cold the past week, as have my kids... All good fun! :/ My story for Day 6 was about us all sitting to watch Elf. Was really great, the kids really enjoyed it, we all had a good laugh :D

Page 1

I used a candy cane stamp as my boarder, stamped in black and then coloured in with gel pens... not sure why candy canes.... maybe it was to do with the candy cane forest?? I tried out my festive papers, but nothing was working, so here we are! I like it anyhow! As I was doing the stamping I realised the canes actually looked rather like little number sixes... So I ended up drawing out a candy cane number six :D

Page 2

Page 2 shows my feeble attempts at  capturing the three of us snuggled under our blanket watching the movie... Poor Wiyot, just couldn't seem to get his head in the pic :/ We had a laugh trying though, which is why I wanted to include them in my page. Shoshone sat there saying "CHEEEEEESSSEEEE" the whole time I was taking the pics! lol

Day 7 & 8

Decided to keep days 7 & 8 to a page each. Day 7 was fairly slow and so was struggling to fill a two page spread.

Day 7

Managed to capture this rare scene and had to put it in my DD. Shoshone was following Wiyot around and giving him big cuddles. They were loving it, as you can see in their faces :D The boarder is a stamp from the same set as the candy canes. I used two different inks, trying to get a similar colour to the green in the glass tile. The tile came from a Christmas card Danny gave me 6 years ago (I knew it would come in useful one day!!)

Day 8

And finally Day 8! Danny's Christmas holiday begins!! Woo Hoo!

We opened a jar of champagne to celebrate... champagne and strawberry jam! Very nice too with our lovely fresh, warm croissants :9

Few mistakes on this page... I can't be bothered to do the whole page again, so will just have to live with them!

OK... I'm almost caught up! Now on to 9, 10, 11 & 12!!!! ARRRRGGHHH!!! 

Day 4 & 5

I consider myself to be a full time mom...

I'm with the kids 6 days a week, day 7 (Sunday, the day of rest!) I work and DH takes over while I'm away. 

This week I was lucky enough to get to work both Saturday and Sunday! I don't mind as I absolutely love my job, especially at this time of year. However, it didn't leave me many options for the days pages.

Day 4 & 5

The photo's were actually taken the other way round, the store photo on the 5th and the Santa one on the 4th, due to the perspective of the two images, I chose to put them the other way around.

Both of the images were cropped in Photoshop and the journaling added. I used free fonts available on dafont.com The text font is Honey Script and the number is from the Christmas/Flakes font. 

The Front of our store

This is a photo of the front of our store taken before we opened on Sunday. I don't know how, but somehow I failed to notice the person walking past till I came to work on my pages... Doh! The journaling at the top is part of the phone greeting that we all say at this time of year :)

Some of the centre's Christmas decorations

As I mentioned above, this was actually taken on Saturday after I finished for the day. The Christmas decorations have been up since early November, but this was the first time I have walked to the other end of the centre to see Santa. I was hoping to squeeze in a bit of Christmas shopping, unfortunately the store I was in decided it was closing time and turned the lights off on me :(

Oh well, I'm sure we'll fit in a bit of shopping over the next couple of weeks while DH is off work... At least I hope we will as we've hardly done any yet!

Also managed to get some knitting done this weekend. With the weather we have had in the past week, the roads have been rather icy, meaning no petrol has been delivered to the local stations. To save fuel I decided to catch the bus to work this week. This means double the amount of travel time, BOO! But on the plus side it is a great time to do a spot of knitting :D Saturday was great, got quite a bit done. Sunday I forgot to take an extra ball of yarn, I had nothing to do after a couple of rows, resulting in 1 1/2 hours sitting doing nothing...  Major gutted!! I actually considered buying more yarn on my lunch! lol! The roads aren't much better so far this week... in fact our street is possibly worse! So maybe I'll be knitting on the bus again next week?! :)

Day 3

Been at work all day today, so haven't quite finished day 3 yet... but its almost there. I'm really pleased with the way its looking so far, and so I decided to post it anyway :D

Day 3

Page 1

Page 2

I was hoping to follow just one story per day, but both these stories needed telling today! Page one you can already read the journaling for, but basically icicles are fairly rare where I live... in fact the amount of snow that we currently have is pretty much unheard of! I personally have never seen so much snow in my life, which is why it has featured in my DD for the past few days!

The second page is telling the story of our advent calendar. No my children haven't been wearing the same clothes for the past three days. Rather, I only just got round to getting the thing out :/ Don't worry, the kids have their own calendars that they received first thing Wednesday morning! This one is the family one that we have had for the last 5+ years. I was just waiting for the chance to clear some space on the fireplace to get it out... So today the kids got to open 3 doors all in one go!! Wiyot's done it all before obviously, but Shoshone wouldn't remember it from last year, so she was very curious, attempting to get all the little doors open to see what was inside :) I couldn't choose just one picture, so I went for a collage of their discoveries. Some of the pictures were blurry, but I didn't really mind as they are printed quite small and I loved them regardless!

I also wanted to share this:

December Daily's temporary home

I've had this tin lurking around for a couple of years now... No use for it, but still I didn't want to throw it out (I am currently working on my "trash muscle"). I am terrible for holding onto things that I feel one day may serve a purpose. It doesn't help that I usually end up right, even if it is way later! Well, once again my inability to throw things out has proved useful, in that I have found a home for my pages while they are being constructed.

Perfect fit!

 As you can see, its almost as if it was designed for this purpose!

*sigh*

If only it said something more festive on the lid... like Christmas 2010! lol