Lack of Activity!

 I seem to have spent most of this past week sitting at a desk (my day job desk and my craft desk alternately) so my rear end is probably enlarging to the size of Jupiter with the lack of physical activity! However, most of it hasn't felt like work really, not when the result of so much sitting is things like this:

I love making embellishments!

I also discovered some foil printed card in my stash which was too nice to cover up with lots of embellishment, so I made some simple thank you notecards with it:

And, thinking about my parents' upcoming ruby wedding anniversary, I decided there was a lack of cards for such occasions in my shop, so I made one!

This evening, I'm, you've guessed it, sitting at a desk again, but when you're having fun like this, what's the problem?? :)

Vacuum Cleaner Traumas!

This week I've had a sick old cat to deal with, extra hours at the day job keeping me busy and an anniversary meal to commemorate the five years that Himself and I have been together.  On the actual day of our anniversary, H offered to fix my vacuum cleaner as the motor had gone, and we thought it would be a fairly easy job to replace it with a new one rather than have me fork out for another cleaner.  An instructional video on YouTube showed a man replacing the motor in eight minutes, and the parts "slid out" here and "eased off" there - easy job!

Five hours later, and the job was finally finished. So, nearly, were we! None of the bits came off or prised apart as smoothly as they were supposed to and when H had put it all back together, the vac didn't have any suction so he had to take it apart and start all over again! It was very stressful. But I admired his persistence and determination to get it fixed for me. And fix it he did. It is now working like a new machine!

I was so grateful to him that I made him a card featuring the situation and hoped he'd see the funny side.

Luckily he did!!!

I also made a card for a friend who has reached the big 3-0; she has pets so it was easy to work out what to put on the card!

And finally, a card for my Dad, who has always been a great support to me in everything I have done in life; of course, it just had to feature cats on it!

Hope you're all having a lovely weekend!

Loving This Weather!

I don't like to speak too soon but it must be about a week since any rain fell from the sky here!  I've been out watering my pots religiously and I've even taken the chance to do some outdoor tasks like sprucing up my decking and cleaning my driveway! And the other day I got to have my first al fresco lunch of the year:

I really hope it won't be the only one - last year I managed to do it once and that was it!

Yesterday I felt inspired to do some baking and some juice-making, with pleasing results.

Chocolate brownies and pink lemonade (recipe for the drink here - it uses fresh raspberries - yumm!)

Very refreshing and yummy for an afternoon snack!

And craft-wise, I had lots of paper scraps to use up so I made these patchwork-style cards:

The tree stamp used is from this store:

https://www.etsy.com/shop/LillysDigitalGarden

She has a fab range and they're great stamps to work with so please take a look!

Enjoy the rest of the week, hope you're getting great weather too!