New addition to the family!

Big news of a new arrival later, but the journal page above is something I did a few weeks ago, but it turned out to be strangely prophetic. The quotation is from Dyans Downloads and the image is, I think from Crowabout (I often spend my evenings watching tv with a pile of download sheets and a pair of scissors, so that I just have to delve in my box of images when the creative mood strikes which makes it easy to create, but not necessarily easy to attribute the images to their source). The quotation refers to a kind of pleasure/pain process I have been through this past few weeks. All my life I have wanted my own horse, because although I have ridden almost my whole life, and never been short of horses to exercise, it's a bit like borrowing someone else's car - convenient and cheap but ultimately not what you really want! Anyway, I have been looking off and on for the past two years, but I never found anything I liked enough to make myself cash and time poor for the forseeable future! Until now. Meet Mary:

Now, whilst Mary is not only beautiful by nature and looks, her owner was a nightmare to deal with! So, whilst the overall outcome was positive, I feel a bit about horse-buying the way some people feel about house-buying.

And this is how a horse looks when it is let out for the first time in at least a month:

Tomorrow we are off to get fitted for some tack, and on Saturday we shall be venturing out on our first ride together! There might be a bit of lull in the creative flow whilst we both get used to each other and get fit!

happy days

This is one of the pages I started last week when we were away. I love orange on the page - it is so vibrant and happy. It's a colour I would never wear, but I can't get enough of it when I am sitting at my desk, it's just one of the paints I reach for first - that and pink.



This is a page I did yesterday. My Mum wants to start journaling too, so we spent yesterday splashing paint about, drinking tea and chatting. Not only was it fun, but while I was out today, she delivered a giant Toblerone as a thank you - not great for the post Christmas, pre-skiing abstinence, but who can resist Toblerone!

Thanks to everyone for the good wishes - I feel like a big fraud, I've only had the flu bug that everyone else has had, but cheers guys, nice to know you care!

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year everyone! We just got back from five days in the rural idyll that is the cottage in the Lake District. Fully restored to health, I not only managed to reach my feet (no mean feat given the amount of eating and drinking I have done since I gave up running in favour of being ill) for long enough to tie my laces and do two little runs, but I also managed to do four (yes FOUR) journal pages! So here for starters is my January page for Kate's calendar challenge. I always find the letters for the month a bit challenging to come up with, so this time I borrowed Kate's idea as seen in last months Craft Stamper Magazine. The past few years, the weather here has been very cold and snowy in January, so I decided to make my page cool in colour and with a background of snowflakes. The bird images are from Dyans Downloads and they are singing the song that we traditionally make a total hash of on New Year's Eve in the UK.

This is another page in my tiny journal. The background is painted with Dylusions paints and then oversprayed with Dylusions spray inks. The image is from Divas D'este and the caption from Dyan's Downloads again. A conversation this weekend about New Year's resolutions made me think about how we are always looking at our negative points rather than emphasising the positive, so this is to act as a little reminder about self-confidence.

Hope you all had a great Christmas and New Year and look forward to a creative time ahead!