HS:MS wild

Today on HS:MS: 'wild: living in a state of nature; not tamed or domesticated.'

As it's still raining, I'm not venturing far, so I popped my head outside the back door - to the left there is a part of the garden that gets pretty unruly at times because there's a hotch-botch of plants growing there quite wildly. There's an area more wild than that at the top end of the garden, but there's no way I was going up there in the rain, so this 'wild' will have to do:

Not much crafting

A couple of days ago I bought four new Magenta stamps and yesterday started to do some images for the swap on CBC, but a couple of the stamps were giving poor results (well, was it the stamps or 'operator error'?). Anyway, I gave up in the end and decided to come back to it fresh today. I didn't try one of the ones that were playing up yesterday, but the other one was fine today - just think I was heavy handed on inking up yesterday.

So, suddenly realising that it is the last day in April today I got on with the images this morning, thinking they should have got to Carolyn by today. When I logged on to CBC I couldn't find the thread for an April swap and discovered that this is a May swap - so I'm not late with them - phew! The brief for this swap is to use new stamps.

Anyway, in the absence of anything else much atm, these are the images:



The green leafy circle is a Magenta stamp. Jemima Puddle-duck was free with a mag I bought the other day (one of those where you need to cut away the excess rubber, but not a bad little stamp for a freebie). The funky plum flower shape is another new Magenta stamp (one of the ones that caused problems yesterday - kept getting ink in the middle of the 'petals'). The brown flower is a Papermania one that I bought at Easter and didn't use. The little black one in the bottom corner is a Basic Grey journalling stamp from a lovely set I got recently.

There has been chat recently on CBC about triple embossing and sinking a stamp into it while it's hot, so I thought this would be an appropriate card to send to Carolyn (I admit I made it quite a long while ago, but have never shown it before):



Perhaps soon I'll be back with some proper crafting - need to do some cards very soon and there are so many challenges I'd like to do, including LOs.

At least I feel a bit virtuous this morning, because I've cleaned the stamps I used (and have to confess that quite often I leave them to do them later ...)

And yesterday I did some die cuts for a swap on CBC using my cricut expression - some swirls from the Wedding cart and some flowers from the Walk in my garden - should have taken some pictures, but wanted to get them into the post quickly so I didn't.

So I suppose, although I headed this 'not much crafting' I have been doing some, but none that's got a finished result.

HS:MS dairy

HS:MS today: 'dairy: Milk or milk products. Find some in your space today.'

I was up this morning at silly o'clock because I had to go to the hospital for a fasting lipids blood test. So no cup of tea or anything else - and I was at the hospital even before the department opened at 7.30, only a few others before me. I was back at about 8.15 and I was then ready for my breakfast. So, here is my dairy - skimmed milk with my Oats & More cereal - skimmed milk as parr of my low animal fat diet because of high cholesterol - hence the blood test because of years on statins to try to bring the level down.

HS:MS weekend catch up & 'long'

For SPS for Saturday I've chosen a picture of Mum, taken last summer:



For this week's SOS, I've chosen a beach scene from our holiday in Bognor Regis last year, not because it's a good photo, but because it brings back memories of windy, cool walks by the beach:



And for today's prompt 'long: 'To measure a great distance from end to end. Find something long in your space today.' I've chosen a picture of one of our granddaughters (it's actually been shown before as part of a LO), because it shows her long hair cascading down as her dad turns her upside down - I like the plait going down the middle. I admit it's a cheat, because it's not in my space today, but it was taken in our garden last summer (and I don't often cheat!):

Re-assurance

For those who have made comments about the tidyness (and thank you all for your kind comments, not just on my craft room, but generally) - it's not that tidy now! But having a good storage system does help (although some of those boxes have 'things to be sorted' in them!

My craft room

At long last I've taken photos of my craft room. We had the room fitted out way back at the end of June (gosh, ten months ago!) and I've often thought about taking pictures. To be fair, it took a while to get the room as it is now - we didn't actually have it decorated until towards the end of the year, so we didn't have these curtains till after then.

So, because I wanted to include a photo in the new CJ for the group of Bumbleberries, I decided this morning to have a tidy up and a photo session. Straight after that I had to get on with the CJ, so the worktop began to look quite different!

The large cupboard on the left goes almost up to the ceiling, so houses quite a bit of stuff. (To the left of that is an old built-in cupboard that was already here, where we keep our coats - and it does have quite a big shelf at the top for extra boxes, but they're not that accessible - and not worthy of a photo!)



The cupboard to the left of the drawers goes into the corner underneath the bookcase - it houses a big craft hold-all on wheels (Christmas stuff in there atm) and also my 12 x 12 scrapbooks etc.



Inside the tall cupboard I have quite a few (!) really useful boxes and also quite a few of the clear plastic type. The black cabinet of drawers on the left used to be freestanding in the room before we had the fitments done, so I especially asked for a built in bit to house this - so handy to be able to shut the big doors on it all.







The worktop is nice and deep (about 30") so there's plenty of space to put things at the back and work at the front - and it stretches all the way from the bookcase that's built in to the right of the tall cupboard to the window the other end.



To the left of where I sit there are four drawers.