I left my laptop open and now I can't find my mouse......

 Hi blogging friends,

Sorry I haven't been around for almost 2 weeks.  My loved one has been unwell so I haven't had time for crafting - and then on Sunday night, after having a lovely Mother's Day, something I ate didn't agree with me and I was sick all night and only just started eating properly again today.  Not quite what I needed when I was caring for my loved one at the same time!

Anyway, I thought I would share a little photo of Ruby I took a couple of weeks ago.  I had put my laptop down to do something and when I returned, this is what I saw:

I had a great deal of difficulty getting her off too because she didn't want to move - it was warm and that's where she wanted to be!  I am very careful now what website I leave open in case Ruby buys something on EBay LOL!

I am taking my loved one to hospital tomorrow (Friday) for some tests which are just routine and on Saturday, I will be going to the Picture to Page Scrapbook Show at East Burwood.  It will be wonderful to have some "me time" - a whole day to myself - which hasn't happened for ages:  I can't wait!!  Hopefully I will get some time in my craft room soon

Have a great weekend!

Jocelyn

Glittery Snowflake Christmas card

Hi blogging friends

Here is my last Christmas card from 2012.  I am sure many of you will be very tired of seeing Christmas cards and moving onto something else.  I know that I am uber-keen to pack away the Christmas decorations which I will be doing tomorrow and I shall be quite happy to remove the Christmas pine tree as it is madly decorating my carpet with pine needles.  Mind you, our cat Ruby has helped that process as she sits there and chews the pine needles - ick - they must taste horrible - but she loves to chew just about anything and I wonder sometimes if she is part dog!

Again, like my previous post, I CASED one of my cards from last year because I knew the layout worked.  It is an easy layout if you want to make quite a few cards and you just change the main image to make each card look a little different:  

The gorgeous glittery snowflake was diecut from aqua glitter cardstock using my Big Shot and Spellbinder Snowflake die.  So much easier than diecutting plain cardstock and adding glitter afterwards - makes it super-quick with no drying time unlike glitter glue, and far less messy too!

The white centre on the snowflake is one of the dies from the Snowflake die set and was diecut from plain white cardstock.  Hmmmm, in hindsight, I think I should have added glitter to it or diecut it from white glitter cardstock - oh well!  I added a red rhinestone to the centre which mimics the dots in the designer paper then popped the snowflake up on dimensionals.

The sentiment was stamped onto the Little Yellow Bicycle blue lace designer paper with Sapphire Silk pigment ink and heat-set with satin pearl embossing powder.

Challenges:

I am entering my card in the following challenges -

Craftyhazelnut's Christmas Challenge - CHNC #105 - Anything Goes - show any Christmas card that we haven't seen before or make a start on your cards for next Christmas.

Splitcoaststampers - Ways to Use It WT407 - New Year's Resolutions from 2012 - what was yours?   One of my Resolutions from 2012 was to use more of my designer paper stash and to use what Christmas stamps I have rather than buying a whole lot more.  I am pleased to say that (even though I didn't make alot of cards in 2012), I did really well on both counts - and everything on today's card is old stash.

So what are YOUR resolutions for 2013? 

I want to have a whole lot less 'stuff' in my house and, in fact, I have been doing a massive purge these past few months and got rid of lots of things; it has made me feel so much better.  By this time next year, I would like to be able to say how much more space I have in my house and in my cupboards - and already, I am seeing the results.  It is hard work and everything looks worse to begin with - quite frankly, a great, BIG MESS - but when a truck leaves with a pile of stuff, you feel so liberated.

Currently, I am going through my late father's LP collection.  Dad passed away in 1996 and I inherited his record collection.  I don't play any of them - they are not my taste - but it has taken until now, some 16 years later, to feel that I can happily donate them to charity.  A few LP's I will sell to a 2nd hand dealer and donate the money to one of the charities who has supported us through caring for our loved one.  I am now wanting to remember Dad in terms of what a wonderful Dad he was - not by keeping a whole lot of 'stuff' that belonged to him.  Grieving is a process and in my experience you go through different phases as time goes by.  16 years ago, Dad's 'things' reminded me of him; now I am ready to part with many of those 'things' and move on.  I think perhaps I was afraid I would forget him if I parted with those 'things' - now I realise that nothing can ever take away my memories of him as they will forever be in my heart.

My other resolution is to continue to use up my crafty stash of papers rather than buying a whole lot more, do more sewing and in particular, sew some little felt kits that I recently purchased.  I also hope to make Christmas cards all year round instead of starting them so late in the year. 

I would also love to be able to get through the day WITHOUT spilling some food on myself - it's a running joke in my family - tee hee!  I am soooooo clumsy and ridiculously unco-ordinated!  Always tripping over something or bumping myself or knocking something over.  A few months ago, I broke 3 of our mugs in the course of a week!  Last month, I superglued my finger to the kitchen bench and took off a layer off skin in trying to get it off - ouch!  Yes, I know that you use nail polish remover to dissolve the superglue but hello, I was glued to the bench and was the only one home - and the nail polish remover was in the bathroom cupboard...sigh....so I just yanked my finger off instead....   

Currently, I am sitting on my couch with my left hand covered in bandaids because I managed to prune my hand as well as the bush I was pruning!  I thought I would try out the new secateurs that we were given for Christmas.  Yep:  they work and they are really sharp!  But somehow I don't think making a resolution about my clumsiness will make much difference!  And just think of the colourful anecdotes I wouldn't otherwise be able to entertain my friends and family with!
Thanks for stopping by.  Happy New Year May it be everything you would want it to be!

Jocelyn


Card Recipe:

Stamps:  Sentiment - Hero Arts Snowman Christmas clear set

Ink:   Colorbox Sapphire Silk pigment

Designer paper:   SEI Glitzmas - Frosty the Snowflake, LYB Delighful Collection - Blue Lace D-110

Accessories:  Big Shot, Spellbinder Shapeabilities Create-a-Flake S4-222 dies, Kaisercraft red rhinestone, dimensionals, satin pearl embossing powder, heat-gun, cardstock: white, aqua glitter

Merry Christmas everyone!

Hi blogging friends,

I have a couple of Christmas cards to share but the weather hasn't been kind to me this week - very, VERY windy and awfully hot - 39 deg Celsius or 102 deg Fahrenheit - YUK - and I haven't been able to photograph them yet as I usually photograph outside.  I am sure they would have ended up in my neighbour's pool if I tried! 

Anyway, I am sure you are all very busy with Christmas preparations so I will share them over the coming week or so. 

Thanks for your support over the past year and I look forward to being able to post a little more often as my loved one continues to recover from their medical treatment. 

Hope your Christmas is everything you would wish it to be and may 2013 be a happy and healthy one. 




((hugs))

Jocelyn x

Sorry for my lack of posting + some photos of my garden

Hello blogging friends,

Sorry for my lack of posting - sometimes life gets in the way of blogging and I have been very busy with helping my elderly Mum and of course, life is always busy with a young child - plus I have been plagued with migraines of late which hasn't been fun. Anyway, you didn't come here to hear me moan so I shall stop now ;-) On to more important issues......

The other reason is that I couldn't do any posts!! Every time I tried to do a new post in Blogger, I would just get this non-stop spinning wheel where you would usually type your text. I thought maybe Blogger was having some maintenance done making it go "off-line", however, after some research I have found that the new editor program on Blogger isn't working for my Blog (other Bloggers are having the same issue apparently) so I have had to modify my settings to go to the 'Old Editor". I have never used the Old Editor before so are still finding my way around it. I can't seem to make pictures very big - but it is certainly better than nothing!

I am glad that it is not me - I was thinking that I had messed up my Template modifications and was tearing my hair out thinking that I wouldn't be able to fix it.

Anyway, I hope to resume my regular posting very soon. I am working on some of those hard-to-make masculine cards and finishing off my ribbon dyeing tutorial.

In the meantime, I thought I would share a couple of photos that I took in the past week:

These daisies appeared in my garden bed after digging in some home-made compost. They are so pretty and just keep flowering. I love daisies - they are so cheerful! They are actually really small flowers - probably about half an inch in diameter.

This second photo is the view from my kitchen window. The sun had almost set and this double-rainbow appeared through the misty rain. The colour was so intense in the centre of the first rainbow that I just had to take a photo. It hasn't been enhanced with any photographic editor - this is just how it was.

This last photo is of my pink bottlebrush which has been looking spectacular and keeping the bees very busy - so it wasn't hard to find a flower that had a bee on it for my photo :-)

Since I took these photos, the weather has turned very cold - like mid-Winter - and it was very frosty here this morning - below 0 degrees C (or 32 deg F). Brrrr - I felt like a blimp wearing all my layers of clothes when I took my DD to school. I am wishing for spring already.....

Thanks for visiting - and I hope to resume my regular posts very soon!

Jocelyn

I need to edit some posts on my Blog which will give you email updates.....please read.....

Hi everyone,

Just a quick note to let you know that I need to go back and edit some of my posts over the next few days - I need to add some HTML code but I won't bore you with the details - it is do with preventing my photos from being copied or downloaded.

My understanding about Feedburner is that if you subscribe to my Blog via EMail/Feedburner, when I go back and edit posts, you will then receive an email.  I looked into disabling the Feedburner while I am doing the editing, but you can't do it. 

If you subscribe to my Blog in other ways, you may also find that these older posts that I am editing may appear as the "latest" post when they are in fact, older.

So please accept my apologies in advance if you get a few EMail updates or feed updates that have older dates on them over the Easter break (don't worry - there won't be hundreds) - they are not SPAM and I am not SPAMMING you.  Nothing has gone wrong with your subscription - it is unfortunately in the nature of Feedburner and Blogs in general, that when you edit your posts, people will get the updated post.  Handy for some things - not so for others!!

Update re copyright

If you read my last post (from a few days ago) about Copyright and how someone wanted to use one of my cards in an ad and I had said "no",  well the person concerned chose another card from my on-line Gallery, cropped it so my personal watermark wasn't visible and then used it in the ad with their rubber stamp at a particular website where you can buy/sell (not Ebay)!  I was positively livid and astounded at the cheek!

So I immediately contacted the website who were fantastic!  They sent me a link to a legal form called DMCA Notice of Copyright Infringment  (DMCA stands for Digital Millenium Copyright Act) with instructions on how to fill it in which took me a few hours and all I had to do was email it back to the website.  The listing was pulled straight away.  Some hours later the stamp was re-listed minus the picture.  I hope the Seller has learned their lesson.

I also contacted the Administrators of my on-line gallery from where the card was copied from (I had made the card before I had this blog) and informed them of what had transpired and they are dealing with it.  It is a breach of their Terms of Service to use someone's work in this manner.  I felt it was no use my contacting the person again as they had not complied with my original wishes anyway - the boss pointing the finger will hopefully have more force!

I would urge you to read about the DMCA at Wikipedia - even if you only read a little bit about it as you may find yourself in the same boat as me and not know what to do about it.  Perhaps even Bookmark it so you can go back there if you need to one day (and I hope you don't have to!!).  I know of another Blogger whose cards were used without permission as samples at an on-line store pertaining to a brand of stamps the store were selling!  I am just dumbfounded that people will do these sorts of things!

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Thank you for your patience while I make these little Blog adjustments and I hope they don't cause you too much angst!

Jocelyn