THE CARDS ARE ON THE TABLE

Hello everyone

Well, not on the table rather they are in a magazine, but 'the cards are in the magazine' didn't have the same ring to it as my chosen post title and there is a reason for the title.  In October 2011 the Popular Crafts magazine featured my Blog in one of the regular blog reviews.  As I am sure you read in the post when I mentioned this, I was very pleased and excited to see my Blog 'in print'.  Shortly after the magazine was published, Katherine Jewitt (the Editor) contacted me to ask if I would be interested in reviewing a card-making kit.  Even better was that the version recommended for me to 'test drive' was about cats!  A double whammy and as you can imagine I said yes very quickly.

The pack arrived not long before we were due to go on holiday in November and I knew that I would have problems completing it before then, so I took it with me.  Along with holiday gear went laptop, camera, cables, paper, crafting kit and the kitchen sink.  Once or twice while Richard was out climbing the million and one steps in and around Valletta, I was back at the apartment drawing and colouring while sitting on the balcony sipping something nice and fizzy.  Who had the better deal?  Me - those steps were many and steep.

Despite creating greetings cards, I haven't actually drawn anything for many, many years and this review required me to do that.  Initially I had some pretty strange shapes to the cats I drew and did think I would have been better taking photographs of Jazz and Daisy that I could have drawn from.  After some trial runs, I managed to get two cat-shape outlines onto card and off I went with the fun bit of drawing the patterns in and colouring - oh boy colouring-in is such fun and made me feel about 5 again.  OK, I know that is a looong time ago, but I can just about remember it and know it was great fun.

All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed myself and was very, very pleased when I had completed the project - particularly as we had a few hiccups with the Wifi in the apartment and I had visions of whizzing around Malta try to find an Internet cafe from which to send my final pictures.  The magazine is due out at the end of this week and apart from my review it is packed with lots of other great projects and articles, and I am really honoured to be in such great crafting company.  I really recommend you buy a copy of the magazine and once it has been published, I will put a couple of pics in my next blog - have you ever seen red, orange, green, yellow and blue cats?  Well, you are in for a treat.

I have been working on my new ranges this week, as well as building my website - takes a long while as have to photograph everything I make, change the size, make other alternations and ensure it looks good on the site, add information, and also think about the various pages that require setting up.  The hardest part so far has been the About Me page - I am sure this is the same for all website designers.  Too much detail about the things I do might not be interesting, but then again too little may make the site uninteresting.  Progress is slow but sure - although it has taken me absolute ages to get to this stage, I am still working slowly as I want to ensure the website is good when it first goes live.  No 'going live' date decided up on yet.

One of the areas I want to move into are card-making workshops and I prepared some handouts which I distributed at events prior to Christmas.  I have two people who want to sign up but really will need more to make it worth while and enjoyable for everyone involved.  If you know of anyone who wants to spend a fun couple of hours creating cards in or around the Guildford area, please ask them to get in touch with me.  With Valentine's Day and Mother's Day fast approaching, now is a good time to start making cards. I hope to have a Stampin Up demonstrator taking part as well.

It's Handmade Monday and for the second week running I don't have anything to actually 'show' as my makes this week have been for my website, and not yet ready for posting on my Blog.  Plus, having had a painful left arm for a couple of weeks, I went to the doc's and discovered it was the return of the tennis elbow that I had suffered from not so long ago!  It hadn't occurred to me that it had come back again, but it's very painful and the only consolation is that it is in my left arm and I am right-handed.  Rest, medication and some pain-relieving gel prescribed - the first one is very hard to manage though.  However, I am taking part in Handmade Monday this week as it is a great way to find out what other crafters are doing, so why not join me in checking out the other contributors' blogs and read what they have been up to during last week.  Believe me, you will see some pretty amazing work and read some great posts.

Have a great week - I will be back on Wednesday.

Jill