An Altered sick bowl!!!!

Some of you may know that I recently had a small op from which I am all recovered now, but on the way home I felt a bit queasy so brought home several of these papier mache sick bowls.

Needless to say I didn't use them but couldn't bring myself to throw them away! Jess has asked me several times for a bowl to put her bits and pieces of jewellery in when she takes it off at night so this seemed like the ideal thing to alter!

First I trimmed off that rim then I found the scraps of fabric left over from her cushion and chopped them into bits before glueing them all over the bowl. I covered the whole lot with lots of PVA.

It took ages to dry but once it was, it set really hard and she has now taken it off to Uni with her!

Creations of an edible kind!

April is a month of birthdays and celebrations for me. On the 3rd Jess was 19, and on the 4th Ken was 45, then Easter and on 28th it will be our 22nd wedding anniversary. So the begining of the month is just full of cakes! Eliza made Jess's; a three tier lemon cake which we ate before I took a pic.

For Ken, who rarely gets his own cake, I decided to make a cake from the rather luscious Hummingbird Bakery book. I came out HUGE, it is three layers of cake which is a bit like carrot cake only with banana, pineapple and walnuts in.

The icing is a cream cheese frosting and not only does it go all over the outside, it "glues" it all together too!
Sadly with six of us in the house these things do not last long so this is just a memory now and we are onto the Simnel Cake!!

Scavenger Hunt Sunday

This is the 3rd week I have taken part and it was a bit trickier this week! To add to the fun my camera has also decided not to work so I need to tackle that after the weekend. I therefore resorted to my trusty little pocket Canon instead of the Eos.
First this week is "Life". What more can I say; we saw this chap being born and this is one of the least yucky photos!

Next is "Obvious". This was a hard one but there, all of a sudden, outside the back door, was this HUGE moon. Can't get more obvious than that!

"Pink" is this one; I was trying to be all clever and find something that wasn't flowers but in the end I plumped for this Vibernum Bodnantense Dawn that is about the only thing in my garden to survive the ravages of the hens!

"Fragrant" was quite an easy one this week. I have made 2 birthday cakes, a Simnel cake and this batch of Hot Cross Buns. Sadly they weren't made in time for Good Friday but we are going to eat them in a minute for our Easter breakfast! They were certainly deliciously fragrant when I opened the oven door.

Last of all for this week is "New". I wanted to show a picture of my newly decorated kitchen and utility room but just could not compose it into an attractive picture. So instead I took my camera this morning as I walked the dogs and snapped this tiny new bluebell that is just a hint of the blue carpet to follow in a week or so.

I am still loving the challenges and thank you for looking at my efforts!

The last page of that CJ....

You remember I was doing a CJ with friends? Yeah you do, the one where one went off to South Africa? Well this is my entry for the last one. Sharon had included a stamp of Allium and we had to use Queen songs as our inspiration.

I didn't pick one from her list but decided to use The Bicycle Song so included some lyrics on the first page.

So then I wrote my memories of learning to ride a bike,

Between the two I added an extra acetate with a photo my daughter took of bikes in a rack in Brighton. This CJ had me scratching my head many a night but when it finally came to it, it came together rather well!

My new CJ

And we are off again with another CJ! I DO love a CJ and this one is on UKStampers and is an Art Journal CJ. Not sure how you define an Art Journal but I'm going with the "anything goes" idea!

This is my opening page and as you can see my theme is "Queen and Country". As it is Jubilee year and we are surrounded by all things red, white and blue I felt everyone would have something to say on this theme! I am happy for people to be as "outside the box" as they like; crowns, country music or Queen the rock band would all be fine! My only rule is that I would like people to use at least TWO out of those three colours in their LO. For this page I used a paper napkin left over from the Royal Wedding last year and painted the Queen's profile on it.

This is my LO. More paper napkin but this time I used gesso over it, image transfers of the Queen, embossed  crowns (I discovered embossing goes all bumpy if you do it over an image transfer!) and some journalling.

This is the sign in page; well there had to be bunting somewhere didn't there?

And here is the front cover, all ready to go. You can't see it very well but there is a really cute piece of ribbon with little guardsmen on it tied to the ring! I have posted it off on it's way and I hope to see it's safe return in 9 months or so!

Birthday card for Jess.

A super quick and short entry today as this is my mad week of birthdays. Jess was 19 yesterday and hubby is older than that today!
So this is the quick card I made for Jess. She has these HUGE long DM's that go right up to her knees so I thought this girl's boots would fit the bill.

Scavenger Hunt Sunday

Yes I KNOW it's late but my laptop had a wobbly and the charger packed in so having done all the photos and carefully saved them I couldn't post them! So now I have a new cable and I am just in time!

We have been having unseasonably hot weather here in the UK so you would not believe just how hard it has been to find clouds! Luckily I suddely saw these as I was driving along, pulled over and quickly snapped them, hence the quality of the pic!

Just a teeny sun flare but this is the one and only tree in my garden, early in the morning, with a very fat little sparrow in it!

I'm thinking this will be an unusual one for "seven".This is a photo of The Seven Sisters, a range of seven peaks on the coast near where I live. These are very special chalk cliffs and I took a special trip to take the picture.....and forgot to use my zoom lens!

This little chap took rather a fancy to Jess's finger so he is my High Angle shot!

Lastly is Low Angle. I lay on the floor for this one and I think the daffodil looks rather like he is singing to the sky!