I had a birthday!

So this is what 36 looks like.... Well, okay - so it's 36 years and 4 days, because I only got round to doing a self-portrait today ;)


I had a fab birthday. Adam baked a delicious cheesecake, and this year the girls even enjoyed eating it. Good and bad - it meant I had to share more!



I just wanted to share these pics of Holly I took the other day. She was sculpting a horse out of a cheesey biscuit. I had to laugh - she was concentrating so hard, and then played with her 'horse' a wee while, until she couldn't wait any longer to gobble it up!

Angel Food Cake & September GoGo

So, it was Adam's birthday this week.

I normally make my foolproof American-style chocolate cake for such events (see layout further down the page), but this year I let him select anything he fancied from the baking book, and Angel food Cake was the winner. Fine, I said. How hard could it be? It's just a cake....
So, as I was checking the ingredients list, I noticed that a special 'Angel Food Cake Tin' was required. I didn't have one, so I Googled it to find out what sort of tin was - seems it's one with a tube in the middle. I also noted that it should never be greased, and that non-stick tins are really not a good choice. And then off I went into town to buy one. No such tin exists in Plymouth. The closest I could find was a non-stick Bundt tin, which DOES have a tube, but doesn't have the non-non-stick surface that the cake needs to 'climb' up.

I bought it anyway, and thought I'd take a chance. Wow! What a lovely fluffy batter I made, after whipping loads of eggwhites. Popped it in the oven - all looked well, and I thought I was getting away with it. Then OOPS - I forgot to allow for the fact I was using the fan oven, and when the timer buzzed it had all gone wrong. Flopped, singed AFC. Ick.

So I tried again - hoping it was the oven/time and not the tin. Not so. This time it wasn't singed, but it wasn't three feet high like an AFC ought to be. Obviously this non-stick tin was no good. But I now had 15 spare egg yolks in the fridge, so I called it a day, and iced the short and stumpy AFC. Fortunately, it tasted great - although the raw eggwhite-based frosting played havoc with my tum, and I won't be making that again, delicious or not...

And I've found a 'proper' AFC tin on Ebay, so next time I'll know for sure if it's the tin or my baking skills to blame!

Righto - moving swiftly on - I hadn't realised how many cards and layouts I'd done with September's GoGo kits!! The gorgeous colours were so inspiring and I just couldn;t leave the kit alone LOL.

Back to school

The very lovely Jakey has given me a blog award!! And I have to say that it has made my day because I didn't think anyone but close family and friends popped over here these days :) I adore Jakey's scrapbooking designs, and I regularly read her ramblings, so it's really lovely to hear that she reads mine sometimes too. Thanks Jakey!!

I'm having a thunk about who to pass the award on to, because I think most of the blogs I read already have one LOL. But I will be back soooon.

In the meantime, it's been back-to-school for the girls. As I was taking new start-of-year photos, I realised I had not yet scrapped last year's... So I threw together this double layout of Yarrow's first day and last day in Year 1, with a list of some of her achievements. I very rarely do double pages, so this was quite fun.

I then found I had the bug for digging back through some older photos. For once, it seemed that I had some free time between other commitments, so I have done some totally not-for-DT-just-for-me scrapping, which is something I have gotten out of the habit of. Some of the photos below are not technically great, and to be brutally honest, the page designs are very simple and not all that exciting, but these are stories I wanted to tell before I forgot any more details in the mists of time. These are just plain old pages for the album!


I've done a couple more too, but they have other people's children on them, so I'm not comfortable posting them on my blog.
And here are a handful or recent cards - again very simple - I was just in a 'get them done' kind of mood.

August GoGo

August was lots of fun in GoGo land! We've joined the Create and Greetings DTs together, so that we all have the chance to design with both kits if we want to, and can even have a go at some crossover projects. I am continually amazed by the talent of the DT girls, and this month I was particularly impressed by the way the team used the same set of stamps to create so many different effects. I just wish I could show other people's work on my blog!

Anyway, between my GoGo designs and some other things I've been working on, I think I made more cards this month than ever before (not all uploaded)!

Back from Hols

We've just got home after a fabulous fortnight in the Isle of Man. That's 'home' to me, of course, so we were visiting family and friends, and also showing the girls some of the sights. Actually, LOTS of the sights, because they've managed to make Manx history/culture much more interesting for kids than it seemed when I was their age... I am a huge fan of the modern tendency towards 'living history', where people dress up and act out parts around historical sites. I especially like it when they let you taste authentic bakery products, such as the Manx Bonnag at Cregneash, which was still warm from cooking on the griddle over the open fire. When I think of how much I hated history as a child, thinking it dull and irrelevant, I am delighted to see Yarrow genuinely enjoying herself when we visit these places. And she actually learns quite a lot too, without really noticing that it's happening.

So a big cheer for The Story of Mann, for doing history really really well, and coordinating the various historical sites brilliantly :)

We stayed with Leanna, one of my best friends in the whole world. It was so lovely to catch up with her and her hubby and to meet her gorgeous boys for the first time (it has been too long since I went home...). I also caught up with my eldest brother and family and, in a bizarre series of events that are too complicated to go into on my blog, met two of my other brother's children, and saw him very briefly as i dropped them off in Liverpool... The girls were thrilled to get to know four cousins they've never properly met before, and to gain two honorary cousins in Lea's boys.

I think our best day out was a picnic at Peel Castle. We kept waiting for good weather (rare in the British Isles this summer...), and we finally got a perfect day. The girls loved running around in the open spaces, rolling down grassy banks, and taking in a bit of history at the same time. My mum and dad spent the day with us, telling us stories about their childhood in that part of the Island (mum used to play in the castle all summer long, in the days before it was paid-entry). Later that day we went to Peel promenade for delicious Davision's Ice cream. Yum!

So we've had a marvelous time, with far too many stories and photos to put on my blog, so I will share them once they get turned into scrapbook pages!!

Anyway - before we went away I had a busy week, including a scrapbooking demo at my local scrapping shop - Totally Crafty in Plymouth. I just wanted to share some of the layouts I did for the demo, mainly using Basic Grey Euphoria, but also a spot of Prima Paintables, which were lots of fun to play with :)

Hello - it's me....!

It's been a rough few weeks, what with one thing and another, so blogging has been bottom of my list once more.

That said, in between all the downers, there's been lots of fun stuff - school trips, sports days, visits from distant friends and family - so even when life throws you a pile of crap, there are things to smile about. And today it's been SUNNY, which is a huge mood-booster :)

Anyway - this is just a post-and-run, to share July's GoGo layouts. This month's kit had lots of variety, and the layouts I produced are all really different from one another - and given my low boredom threshold, this is good!!

Some Cards

I don't normally consider myself to be a card maker, but for some reason I seem to have been making lots of them lately!

Well, I say *some reason*, but of course, there have been lots of new babies born to friends this spring, so that's the reason for four of this lot LOL.

When Adam sees me struggling to think of something different to do for the next card, he asks me why I can't just do one of the designs I've been happy with previously. And he has a good point... But I suppose I treat card-making like scrapping-in-miniature, and I'd hate to have two identical layouts in my albums, so I can't bear to make two identical cards... (The scrapping-in-miniature things is probably also the reason I tend to do sqaure cards - other shapes make my brain go into meltdown...).

Oh yeah - AND I get bored very easily....

That's not to say that I don't take design elements that are 'working' for me at the time and use them on several cards in succession - I'm a big fan of small-square-on-square-card designs, and I also use lots of circles :)

Anyway - just thought I'd share a few of my recent creations.