Artic Roll anyone??

All of the snow came off my roof last night, taking the brackets for my guttering with it.  So now I have water dripping down my house as the gutter has been bent by the snow.  I think if I end up with a whole load of snow on the roof again, the gutter will come down with it.  Mind I got away easy last winter.  My guttering remained in place and only my Sky dish was affected.

The snow makes wonderful shapes out of everything.

Who put the marshmallow cake on top of the bird bath in the garden.  It just looks like you can go out and cut a slice.  Mind I think it'd all collapse if I tried!!

And an artic roll down my car this morning.  The snow is so deep at my car door cos of the snow coming off the roof last night.

I'm getting hungry now.  Time for soup methinks!!

Snow

Well we had a litttle bit of snow last night, as well as a little bit more today.  The sky is still very full so I think there'll be some more tonight.  This is my garden this morning.

I was watching the birds have a good old feed at my new hanging bird feeder this morning and, low and behold, they've emptied it!  So off I went out with my wellies on (no coat of course - we're hard up here don't ya know!) and lifted the feeder down with no snow hitting me and filled it.  Went to put it back up and the caught the clematis on the wall above it and a load of snow fell off hitting me on the head and all down my front and back!!  I was so pleased it was still light and fluffy stuff so no harm done.  If anyone could've seen me they would have thought I was mad.  I'm standing covered in snow, by myself, giggling LOL!!!

Then I trudged off, gingerly, to take some close ups of the plants I put my girls ashes under.

This is the Yukka plant I got for Tara's ashes.  Those spikes on the end of the leaves are what she used to chew on and will spike anyone who gets to close now!

And this is the conifer I got for Martha's ashes.  Is it just me, or is that a smiley face in the snow?!

And finally can anyone guess what made these marks?

No prizes, but in the emortal words of Sir Adrian of W, smug points up for grabs!!

(Oh joy, it's just started snowing again here.)

Journaling weeknd

I spent an amazing weekend last weekend with 8 incredible women.

I attended the Journaling Weekend at Graphicus in Barnard Castle with Jo, Lou, June, Janet, Lillian and Sue as well as Glenda and Lynn.  It was actually 2 workshops, but we all attended both so it seemed like a weekend workshop.

Glenda lead us during the Saturday and we began making a loose-leaf watercolour journal and colouring it with Golden paints.  During this time we each talked about why we wanted to journal.  This lead to very intimate and revealing circumstances for each us.

For the covers for the journal we scrunched copier paper, spritzed it with water and painted it with metallic paint.  The paper ended up extremely wet and had to dry til the afternoon.   We then stuck the paper to grey board using book binding techniques.  The board will eventually be stuck back to back with bookbinding fabric between to make the spine of the journal.

The pages for the inside of the journal were made from hot pressed heavy watercolour paper and coloured with Golden acrylic paints and lots of water!  We used stencils and spritzed the stencilled image with water to make it 'bleed', like the flower in this picture.

On Sunday Lynn lead us through writing in different styles in our journals.  We made another watercolour journal, but this time we folded the pages and stitched together in a very simple style.  We all used this as our practice journal.

Lynn had us draw circles free hand and then draw horizontal lines to make a circle.  We then had to write on these lines and draw circles round the writing in pen, then make some of the words stand out.  I found this exercise quite difficult as I hate my writing.  I used to be able to do calligraphy, but MS but paid to that. 

She then asked us the write in a circles so that the letters filled the whole circle.

Then we started to write in spirals.  Once I'd finished this one, in Lou's words, I found my writing.  I am so chuffed that this worked out so well.  I just want to write in spirals all the time LOL!!!

Next we looked at alphabets and how we could change them for different page layouts.  I chose the draw capital letters with hearts on the end of each line (the top alphabet) and dots on the each line (the bottom alphabet).  Now I am more confident on what I can do I am going to practice other forms of alphabet.

When we'd finished this we started on drawing letter and decorating it.  I chose to do zentangle-ish patterns.  As I've only just started to do zentagles I couldn't remember most of the patterns so I just doodled.

The whole weekend was an amazing experience.  We all became so close.  We laughed, we cried and we encouraged each other.  I doubt I will ever experience another weekend like it.

Thank you to all you lovely ladies.

Another spooky Halloween make

This time Carrie kindly sent me a photo.

This one was made in exactly the same way as the one I made for Janet, but using canvas board as a base.  I used the same colours as they are very Halloween and the stamps were from EI again.

I couldn't resist buying a 'coffin full of bugs' at a local bargain store and glued a large plastic spider onto the canvas too!


This is my second attempt at the Halloween swap for Carrie.  The first one went missing in the post, so I hand delivered this one as she wanted to post them on her blog on Halloween itself.

My windows are still ongoing.  They encountered problems on Friday as one of the frames that had been sent was the wrong size and consequently the glass was too.  Karl managed to get the right size frame made on Friday so that's in but the sealed unit of glass won't be here til today or tomorrow.  The front door is being put on at the moment and at least I've discovered why it was so cold at the bottom of my stairs.  When the old door had been put on, the guy had left a huge void round the frame of the door that he covered with plastic trim.  It was soooo dodgy!!!

Oh and my cold has come out properly now and I feel really rough!!