Cutting Your Cloth Accordingly!

I can remember my Nana telling me to 'cut your cloth accordingly' frequently when I was younger and my story today is about how we put this into practice.

 My precious, for May, is my wedding ring. It reminds me of so many things, but most of all it reminds me of how we have grown together over the past 29 years. You see, when we married we had very little money to spare and in fact I can remember having to keep our food bill at £15.00 per week. As money was tight we bought a wedding ring for me costing just £12.00 from the infamous Ratners and David didn't have a ring. 

As we have been for the past 27 years, we were renovating a house when we got married (not the same one we live in now - that has only been for the last 21 years), we moved in with only a two ring camping stove to cook on, a dining room table, 1 dining room chair and a stool and our bed was a Victorian bedstead with the springs removed and the mattress on the floor!  

We only bought what we could afford and saved up for things we wanted, in fact I went for the first year without a fridge and kept things cool in a bucket of water until one Easter when the chicken I had bought went bad and I ended up throwing it at David but that is a tale for another day.

Back to my wedding ring - once things got a little easier we took my ring to a jeweler and and had him set it into a thicker wedding band.  

So my ring is a symbol of how we passed through the hard times and have worked together to make a good life together.

This post was brought to you courtesy of Sian's Story Telling Sunday.  If you pop on over to her blog you will be able to read about other people's precious things. 

Reasons to be cheerful:-

1.  We can look back at our early marriage with great affection.

2.  Through working together to get the things we want we appreciate them more.

3. We still derive the greatest pleasure from doing the simple inexpensive things that formed the backbone of our early marriage.

A Little Advice Please

Ok. I have migrated my blog reading list to both Bloglovin and Feedly and I have issues with both. I love the layout and ease of use of Bloglovin, I love that it tells me how many posts I have to read and gives me the opportunity to decide whether I have enough time or need to leave it until later to read the posts but I hate that it won't let me comment on certain blogs. To comment I have to open the blog in a new page because when I am in Bloglovin and try to comment it will just pull up a blank page! Hence, why I have been a little lax with commenting on certain blogs as by the time I have read all the posts in my blog list I have forgotten who I need to specifically comment on.  Apologies to DebTurtle,  Denise & Sian  and several others, what do you all  have in common that Bloglovin doesn't like?

 As for Feedly, I like the layout and how you are able to choose how you see the list of posts but I would like to be able to just click a button, like you can in Google Reader or Bloglovin to get to the next blog post and not have to open each one individually. Maybe you can do this and I haven't investigated it enough.

 So my question is what are you going to use with the imminent demise of Google Reader on the horizon.

 Reason to be cheerful

 Blog friends who will always step up to the mark with advice.

Exciting Times Post 1 (A long time in the coming)

Well Hello!

I bet you didn't expect to see me back so soon :o)

I have had such an exciting few weeks and I thought it was about time I shared some of it with you.  If you are one of the people who follow the blogs of Team Teal you will know that the most exciting thing ever happened at the end of March - Deb and Carrie came over from Arizona.  Although I count Deb as a friend and Carrie as the daughter of a friend we have never met only chatted through blogs, email and Skype (which we must do more often).

I need to quickly give you a little background about our friendship.  Several years ago I took an online class called Blogging for Scrapbookers.  Several of us kept up our blog friendship after the class had finished and Deb was on of them.  Sadly, Deb's mum was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and we all rallied round to give Deb support.  She sent us teal wristbands and we became part of TeamTeal  - praying and wishing for Marti's recovery.  

 Devastatingly for Deb our prayers were not answered and she lost her mum.  Marti left Deb some funds to enable her and Carrie to visit her Team Teal friends in the UK and that is just what she did.

We met for the first time at Deb  K's (not the same Deb  I would add) house when, with Alison who had travelled over from Spain, the six of us (with Denise of course) spent some time cropping and chatting.  

 

 Deb had asked her niece to make everyone a little bag with our names on and she had filled it with goodies.

Deb had always said she would love to come over to one of my crops and sample a cupcake or two and we made it as much like a mini crop as possible.

So Deb K's lovely hubby took a photo of us all, Deb K printed it out

 Carrie took this one so is not in it :0(

and we all had a kit, supplied by Denise and myself, to play with.  

It was really lovely to see how everyone's style of scrapbooking differed and how everyone used the kits in different ways.

 My layout - a little more lumpy and 'full on' than others!

It was a fantastic day, finished off by a trip to the pub for supper.

Reasons to be cheerful:-

1.  That I liked Deb as much as I knew I would.

2.  Strangers who instantly become friends - Alison & Carrie.

3.  The warm glow I get in my heart when I think about that day.

Hello - I am still here but a tad on the busy side! 

Having given up the chance of spending the day with the Enfield girls crafting after looking at the state of my house, this seemed so appropriate - found on Pinterest whilst wasting time instead of cleaning!

Will be back soon with a more interesting post!

Feb DT Part 2

A quick show and tell of the remainder of my Feb DT projects for ATDML. We were given papers from various My Mind's Eye ranges.

A little bit of paint splattering on this one.  Made using the left over scraps and a little bit of paint splattering.

Photo is of Gracia's birthday trip to the beach last April.

Love this photo of Gracia, Hannah and Sophie when they went to Malta last summer. 

Gracia and Megan fooling around and pulling faces!  I love that Gracia has so much fun with her friends.

Doilies cut with Silhouette, punched butterflies and stickers from coordinating sticker sheet.

Reasons to be cheerful:-

1.  Gracia is home for Easter.

2. So looking forward to next weekend.

3. Off to bed with a nice cup of tea, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest (on my tablet) to read and a hot water bottle.

Happy scrapping :-)

Spending a fabulous evening with Eileen. Designing and cutting with the silhouette, punching and doodling, cutting and sticking.  Sheer bliss x

Reasons to be cheerful:

1. Happy scrapping

2. Friends with similar interests

3.  A husband who goes out with the boys leaving me at home to play to my hearts content.

Out of the mouths of babes.

I was going to write about a completely different 'precious' this month but yesterday, whilst tidying my desk found a little book that is very precious to me. 

 

You see, when Gracia was small, I mean three or four, we used to ask her to sum up her day and we then wrote it down in little books. This one is from when she was three and I love the way everyday life is observed from her point of view, from the time Rosie (our naughtiest dog ever ) 'eated' her tea to the time she had new shoes and Mummy said 'no skipping or jumping in them'. 

These little books really are so precious to me because they sum up a happy carefree childhood filled love and laughter where the simplest of deeds is an adventure.  

Reasons to be cheerful:

1. The memories that come flooding back each page I read of these little books.

2. How happy Gracia was and how much she enjoyed life.

3. Keeping these little books for when Gracia's future children are able to read them.

Feb DT Part 1

With some of my DT pieces for ATDML I tried to 'kill two birds with one stone'. I am disappointed that I have been unable to keep up with the Telling Tales prompts as I have been so busy. Disappointed because I was so looking forward to the class and have to admit that many of the prompts have been dragged straight from my inbox into the relevant folder to be perused later.



I did manage to make a page that had hidden journaling - telling the story of how I thought this self-portrait of Gracia looked as though it had come straight out of a magazine.

 



I also managed to get a page done showing a sequence of photos



- the lovely Saturday afternoon we spent baking when Gracia last came home for the weekend.



I made a page showing the height difference between Josh and me -



with a cheeky little quote I found on Pinterest!

Must dash now as I have David's suppliers to pay.

Reasons to be cheerful:

1.  Only just over three weeks until our girl is home.

2.  Only just over three weeks until Deb is over for her Spring Fling.

 

3.  Only one more day until the EK crop and a day spent with my best girl friends.


 

Happy Anniversary Darling Boy xxx

This was the class at the February EK crop taught by the uber talented Debbie Jewell. 

 

 I saved it to blog because we have been married 27 years today. 

Happy Anniversary my Darling Boy xxx 

Reason to be cheerful:- 

 I have this wonderful man in my life.

 

The Good, The Bad and The Utgly!

THE GOOD
Our darling girl came home for the weekend. This is always a labour of love as she has to catch the 5:15am train and doesn't get into the station where I pick her up until 9:30am and we then have a 20 minute drive home. We had a fabulous weekend, going for a huge cooked breakfast and shopping on Saturday morning and then we spent the afternoon making Valentine's cards together 

and baking cakes for her to take back to Newcastle for her friend's cake sale. 

On Sunday, as I had already made arrangements to go for a craft day with friends (organised prior to Gracia deciding to come home last weekend) Gracia and David spent the day together. We both have an app called Whats App which enables you to send texts and photos for free so all day I had a running text/photo commentary of what they were doing. It looked to me that the day comprised mostly of drinking hot chocolate in various places and eating cake.  She did take a fabulous photo of David walking the dog.

David and Gracia picked me up from the village hall where the craft event was and we went for a Pizza for tea.  All too soon it was time to put her on the train back to Newcastle.  We had a fabulous weekend - spending most of it laughing at together at so many things.

THE BAD
Last Thursday Gracia went out clubbing with some friends.  She usually wears stack heels as being of deminuitve height she feels less volnerable.  This time she didn't and as the result of some over zealous dancing by one of the clubbers (not her friends) she sustained a black eye.  Fortunataly, she was out with her Med friends and they administered ice and tlc.  She has a lovely shiner.

THE UGLY
As she caught the 7:45pm train back to Newcastle, she didn't get back until after 2:30am and went straight to bed.  When she unpacked her case in the morning she realised that at some point someone had stolen her laptop out of her suit case! She is not sure when but they had unpacked a pair of trousers that had been wrapped around it, taken the laptop and put the trousers back!

Reasons to be cheerful

1. Our Girl makes so much effort to come home to see us.

2. I bought her a hard drive to back her laptop up on just after Christmas so the only thing she has lost is the laptop, all photos and work are saved.  We were sensible enough to take out insurance for her so she will have a new laptop soon.  Rosie had a spare laptop for her to use.

3. The most important reason to be cheerful - we had a wonderful weekend together and although her laptop was stolen she got home safely.