Violin card and the last two weeks

Hi all,

Such a crazy two weeks it's been.  My eldest daughter turns 10 tomorrow (Monday) and so we had her birthday party today - ice skating (the first time she's done it - a huge OMG moment on my part, as I could see either her or any number of the guests collapsing in heaps to the sounds of broken bones and sprained whatevers!).  Fortunately for her guests and my nerves, the 2 hours passed without major mishap, with only the shivering one associates with ice skating and 14 under-dressed, prepubescent girls (what is it about girls and the need to dress in the most impractical wardrobe imaginable?)  I have no idea where they get their ideas from - I'm an army brat and DH is a country boy - we were raised that when you go somewhere, you wear clothes that are practical to the situation and which save you from being injured - sunburn, frostbite, skinned knees, wind chapping etc.  My girls both rocked up with about 5 layers of tops, jeans, scarves and gloves, so they were fine - but one of the little pretties showed up in shorts and a t-shirt (so did dad and big brother, who were dropping her off - and admittedly it was a shorts and t-shirt kind of day - but for 2 hours of ice skating!?!)

Still, we made it through, and no one went home in tears, vowing never to return, which is the main thing.

I have bought tickets to the Miley Cyrus concert in June.  Both daughters are getting their tickets as birthday presents from DH and I - eldest as a late present, and youngest as an early one (her birthday is in November, so it works out nicely).  DH has opted out of coming with us, so it's going to be a girls weekend with just the three of us - and our seats are absolutely awesome.  Section 2, row A - why couldn't that have been at the Bon Jovi concert in December, or the Pink concert before that?!  Anyway, regardless of who we are going to see, the seats are awesome and the girls are stoked, so it was well worth it.

Now onto the craft :)  I have a lovely stamp by Stamps Happen called "Overture" #90285 which is beautiful to look at and fun to colour.  The colour indexing on the stamp is fairly dark, to my mind, so I've lifted it a little with the colours I used.  I think it makes a fairly unisex card for a music lover :

I stamped it on watercolour paper with Versafine in Black and coloured it with Derwent watercolour pencils.

Then I made it into a card by mounting it onto a piece of cut down sheet music (real, not a printout), and layering it onto a piece of midnight blue cardstock.  The sentiment is StampWorld's "Happy Birthday" A559, on a scrap of the same watercolour paper:

Other news is that I've had some concreting done in my studio.  If you can imagine a horseshoe shape, that used to be the layout of our house.  Then, many years ago, I got the open part of the horseshoe walled and roofed in and that room became my studio.  However, when I had the workmen come in to lay the concrete slab, I had them leave me an almost 2m x 1.5 m area unconcreted.  The grandiose and not well thought out plan (no natural light whatsoever gets into that corner) was to have an inside atrium, allowing me to grow "things".  It had wonderful drainage, was planted up, over time, with hundreds of dollars worth of plants guaranteed to survive even the blackest of black thumbs (they didn't make allowances for me and my no natural light floorplan) and it became the bane of my creative space - a complete waste of an area which ended up housing nothing but dessicated (but previously gorgeous, dark and rich) soil, the odd pot and a garden gnome.  So I have had it concreted over in it's entirety (barring the grate for the drain, which is fabulous for when the creative urge gets messy and I have to hose stuff off - or maybe when I'm having a Dexter moment and need to do clean up) and next weekend will be the laying of the lino and the installing of the workstation for tools (die cutting machine, guillotine etc) and the bookshelf/cupboard for "stuff".  Yayyyy!

Lastly, and not crafting related, is that I am thinking fairly seriously about signing up for the Oxfam Trailwalk at the end of August this year.  The challenge is to walk 100km in 48 hours (that's 62.14 miles, for those of you still working in imperial).  And it's hiking on a trail, not walking on footpaths.  So I've got to start training, if I'm going to do it.  Of course, someone could just put me out of my misery and have a Dexter moment of their own before I have to take part (it would help me save face in front of the other girls on the team).  I keep talking myself into it, and then I do 2 hours on my treadmill and talk myself out of it again.  Still, 19 weeks before the actual weekend we do it, so I've got time to get into some kind of shape.  At the moment, the shape is kind of squishy and nowhere near ready for 13+ hours of walking per day for two days, but in 19 weeks, I can probably get it to the point where I don't start whimpering until...oh, I don't know.... two or three kilometres down the track!  One of the things we have to commit to is raising $1000 in donations, so I will be advertising this pretty hard, the closer I come to doing it.  Just thought I'd warn you.

Until next time,
Happy crafting!
Bron