slight improvement :-)

having a really good nights sleep helped :-) and even though i'm still coughing and wheezing i actually look a bit more human today LOL

today......

we should have been on a land rover safari around balmoral estate, instead i am sitting on the sofa coughing merrily :-( i did at least manage a trip to argos to go and buy some more storage for my craft room, am building upwards now so i can save floor space for more stash LOL and i'm going to have a nice spend on pretty stuff to make up for not buying myself anything nice whilst on holiday LOL

calamity debs

that's what it feels like at the mo, we went on our holidays on saturday staying up in the middle of nowhere near alyth in angus in scotland, the first calamity occurred when we pulls up at the caravan site and i goes to check in, turns out i had the wrong dates and we should have been there the week before :-O i couldn't believe it and i have no idea how it happened :-O very kindly they said that since the van we were booked in was vacant that week we could stay :-) so we got all settled, i started feeling really poorly mid afternoon, lots of coughing and feeling very breathless but just got on with things but by the sunday morning i was really feeling ill, we went out for the day but by mid afternoon i was in hospital in blairgowrie having been sent by nhs direct to be checked out, came away with some antibiotics and instructions to take my inhalers up to 10 puffs four times a day and whenever necessary as well as taking paracetemol to reduce my temperature and take away the pains in my head, back and sides, monday dawned and i was knackered as i'd spent the night sitting up trying to stop the coughing and the wheezing but i soldiered on and we drove along to stirling to go and see the newly refurbished palace at stirling castle, hadn't even got out of the car and i started feeling breathless so took my inhalers and off we went, i was okay going round the inside but once we were outside my breathing got worse and worse until i was gasping for breath, my inhalers weren't touching it so went to hospital were they put me on a nebuliser which got me sorted, by then though i just wanted to come home and be poorly at home, so when they let me out of hospital we drove back to the caravan site, packed up and left early this morning :-( along the way i managed to drop my camera on the floor in stirling castle and it broke open, i clipped it back together but it's not focusing properly so that'll have to go into the shop to be mended too :-( but at least i'm home and only 5 minutes from a hospital if my chest flares up again rather than the 45 minutes from a hospital we were up in alyth

two of this weeks efforts

the weekly challenge and this weeks play along with scrapfactor :-)

i do love the weekends

had a lush long lie in this morning then a quick breakfast before heading upstairs to scrap the afternoon away, i managed 5 lo's 2 of which finished my march holiday album so i printed out some photos from when we were away in jedburgh and have decided to do an 8x8 album of them so i got another 3 of those done :-)

these two are the only ones i've taken photos of yet, the first one is the weekly challenge the second one is a lo based on one of the classes over on a trip down memory lane, they are having a cyber crop this weekend, so i've done a couple of the classes and saved the rest to do later :-)

am now enjoying a delicious crabbies while watching crap on the telly :-)

today

was one of the days when i remember why i love my job so much, the kids all played beautifully in the yard with not a toy in sight, just some water and soil, a big tray of material and some old milk crates :-) then someone added water to the digging place we have and mud pies were created with lots and lots of mud LOL they did eventually all scrub up to a reasonable amount of cleanliness so that was a result LOL hoping for more of the same tomorrow :-)

a mini a month challenge

i've been taking part in the a mini a month challenge over on karens blog but the past two months there has been no more posts and no news from karen :-( i was really enjoying doing the challenge so i suggested to the rest of the amam group that until karen gets back to us (hoping that is very soon karen) we should keep it going with one of us being a guest designer each month......... so i volunteered to be guest designer for this month so here we go..........................

we are going to make a 6x6 mini book with apertures in the pages and a fold over flap closure :-) just like the one above ^^^^^^^^^ :-)

you will need 2 pieces of cardboard 1 at 6x6 inches (all my measurements will be in inches, i don't do this cm malarkey LOL) and 1 at 6x12 for your covers, to cover your covers you will need 2 pieces of 6x6 for the front and 2 pieces of 6x12 for the back, and for the inner pages as many pieces of 6x6 double sided paper you want. i started off by making my pages, i stuck 6x6 pieces of pp together to make them stronger and ended up with 7 pages, then using my craft knife and some square punches i made various sized apertures in each page, arranging them so you get a little sneaky peak of the page underneath through each aperture :-) i then turned my attention to the covers stick you cover pp to the outside of the front cover and put to one side, taking the 12x12 piece of cardboard cut it to 1 6x6 piece, 1 6x1.5 piece and 1 6x2.5 piece and stick them to the outer 12x12 pp like this when you have done this trim off the excess pp. next choose two buttons you would like to use as your closure and sew them onto your front cover and the flap of your back cover like this, leave a long tail on the button on the flap, you will be using this to tie the two buttons together to close the book, i stuck the thread to the inside of the covers with lots of double sided tape, to make sure it stayed put, then put your inner cover pp's on, bend the back cover at the gaps in the pp's using a bone folder to get a nice crisp fold :-) the next step is to place the photos on each page, i tried to arrange mine so there was a little view of the photo on the next page on the page in front, i then decorated and journalled in it before using my bind it all to bind the pages together, if you don't have a bia you could always use book rings, ribbon or string to bind your book. so here it is the finished book, i hope you like it and fancy giving it a go, i've never wrote instructions on how to do something before so i hope you understand them, let's me see your books when they are finished as i'd love to see them :-)