Made with Love

18:04 Karen 9 Comments

It all started after a fabulous day spent together crafting.

Deb, Carrie, Alison, Deb K, Denise and I were in a pub and the talk turned to Cate and her impending baby. At the time I didn't know Cate and had never followed her blog but was instantly sucked in at the prospect of a blog hop (especially if everyone else was going to be doing it)!

We chatted through several ideas and settled on making pages for a scrapbook for her to use after the birth of her expected daughter.

So here are the pages I made. They have lots of purple, as that is Cate's favourite colour and as we agreed, are on a white 8 x 8 base with space for six by four photos. I made print and cut titles on my Silhouette (yes I know I say it every time but I just love that machine) and delved into my stash for suitable bits and bobs. As luck would have it, I had made a wedding album for my neice a couple of years ago and that was all purples so had lots to choose from.

I don't often make double pages and when I do make them by sticking the two pieces of cardstock down to my cutting mat and then running pieces of paper, ribbon and in this case a heart shaped doily across the two. I then add embellishments and anything else I want until I am happy that they sit together nicely and then finally slice through the middle to get my two pages.

It was also suggested that we might like to give Cate some little nugget of advice regarding motherhood but what advice could the mother of an only child give to the mother of five only to say enjoy every minute because as you will certainly not need to be told those little precious bundles grow up so quickly. My mum advised me that I should always make the most of every minute and not waste time doing things that didn't need doing. She said that the cleaning will still be there long after the baby has grown and left home.

So Cate I hope your little one has a long and happy life and that she fits snugly into your family as though she has always been there x

Reasons to be cheerful:

1. Baby Girls.

2. Online friendships that transfer into real ones.

3. Purple scrapping (it happens to be my favourite colour too).

Cutting Your Cloth Accordingly!

07:34 Karen 23 Comments

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.