Please vote for Basil

Well it has taken a long time to go through all the wonderful captions submitted for Basil’s photo.  There were lots of great ones, but in the end I settled on the caption provided by Chris F, modified very slightly.

Basil would be very appreciative if you could click on the image below and vote for his LOL by clicking on the cheezeburgers.  It’s his ambition to make it to the Cheezburger home page one day!

moar funny pictures

Thank you to Chris and love your new blog look by the way – nice header, I seem to recognise it!  (It’s a Stampbord block that Chris made on a mixed media workshop with me earlier this year – click here to go take a look at Chris’s blog).  Chris, you win a new themeplate – I have your details so expect it in the post sometime soon.

Oh, and I’ve had a mini makeover on the blog here.  I just thought it could do with a little extra colour here and there.

 

Wow, what an amazing weekend!

Well as promised, more pictures from the Paradise Weekend Retreat.

There are 40 tired, but hopefully happy crafters out there who we pushed through some challenging projects this weekend.  We worked them hard, but I think they all had fun along the way.

This is just a small selection of the hundreds of photos we took.  CLICK HERE to see the full album.

If you are one of the retreat attendees and you have a photo album online or a blog, please feel free to share a link in the comments for everyone to see.

For those who couldn’t make it, we are busy working on the April event – provisional date is the weekend of 16th April.  We are going to repeat the same classes then do another next autumn with new classes.  As soon as we know dates, we’ll let you know.  We need to find out when all the shows are on next year so we don’t clash with them.  Plus I’ve promised Lesley that the next one won’t be the weekend after the NEC – Annette and Lesley will be relieved to hear that I think.

I can’t even begin to say what a wonderful weekend it was.  We really worked hard to make the classes fun, but challenging and I know a lot of you have still got things to finish off.  I also have to say a big thank you to Jean and Malcolm from Crafty Individuals who taught a wonderful mini shrine class on Sunday morning.

The biggest thanks (I feel like I’m doing an acceptance speech for the Oscars here!) has to go to the tireless helpers, Annette, Lesley, Kath, David and of course Lynn.  The room was a bit small for the number of people (note to self for future discussions with hotels: crafters need a lot more space than wedding guests!) so the team were tirelessly running around helping everyone out, changing water pots, finding missing stamps and they were unfailingly cheerful throughout, despite having worked their socks off the week before to get everything ready.  I hope they all know that I couldn’t have done it without them.

So, it’s full steam ahead with preparation for our Christmas Party now.  Just in case you don’t know, that’s on Friday December 4th and Saturday December 5th and Joanna Sheen will be demonstrating her CDs for us!  Lots of people have already booked their lunch and are looking forward to it, so it should be a really buzzing atmosphere.  Meanwhile, I’m busy playing with some of our new spring release stamps (yes, tease time), doing some cards for Craft Stamper (we have a cover mount stamp coming up in the New Year) and trying to decide on a caption competition winner to receive the new Patchwork Butterfly stamp that we let the retreat attendees play with!  You might catch a glimpse of it in some of the photographs.

This is why I’ve been quiet

Months of preparation and the weekend is finally here …

 

Caption Competition

It’s almost a year since Basil lost his brother and he’s definitely a changed cat.  He stays indoors more than he used to, he cries a lot more and over the last few months he has been permanently demanding food.  We found out why this week – he has an overactive thyroid.  Ironically, I have had the same thing myself in the past, so if it affects cats like it does humans, then I know exactly what he’s going through.  Over production of the thyroid hormone stimulates your metabolism, making you burn off the food you eat quicker, often resulting in weight loss (Basil is down from 6.5kg to 4kg).  That might sound like a medical condition you wouldn’t mind having, but there’s too many downsides to make it pleasant.  Increased metabolism means your heart rate speeds up, you are anxious and nervous, overreacting to the slightest little thing.  It can make you very lethargic as your calories are all burnt off so quickly you have no energy and it can play havoc with your concentration and emotions.  Nope, not a pleasant thing at all.

I had this throughout my teenage years, then I was recommended to have an operation to remove part of the thyroid gland.  I still remember the doctor telling me not to worry as if they took too much out, I would then have an underactive thyroid and that was much easier to treat!!  Er, no thanks!  I took matters into my own hands at that point and went for traditional Chinese acupuncture.  It was so effective that six months later (after nine years of constant medication) my thyroid was completely back to normal and I was off the medication altogether.  Apart from one brief flare up, I have had a normal thyroid ever since.

Trouble is, I’m finding it hard to find a cat acupuncturist!  There is a rather expensive operation for the thyroid involving radioactive iodine and there is a vets practice in Ripon which could do it, but I’m not sure I want to subject Basil to that.  He would have to stay there for several weeks as he would be doing radioactive poo for a while (nice) so all his waste has to be disposed of safely and he’d need to be monitored.  I haven’t gone into all the details, but I have visions of the vets in big white protective suits, so I imagine he would be completely starved of cuddles during that time and I don’t think Basil would survive that long without cuddles.

So we’re having to give him a little pink pill every morning and night.  Those of you with cats know what that means.  Those of you who have never tried giving a cat a pill, they simply will not take pills in their food, period. If you crush the pill into their food, they just won’t touch it.  If you hide it inside a chunk of meat, they’ll eat the rest of the bowl and leave that one chunk.  If you push it inside a cat treat, they will spit it back out at you with a hurt look.

These particular tablets are actually toxic if crushed, so it has to be done the hard way, which means I have an ever increasing collection of scratches and a rapidly growing repetoire of tricks to get him ‘in hold’ so I can force the jaws open and pop the pill down.  As you can from the picture below, he’s not impressed.

It’s not been a good week for pets actually.  Derrick and Alma’s 14 year old dog, Shep is in a much worse state than Basil.  He has two massive tumours on his liver and there’s nothing they can do for him, it’s just a matter of time.  He is ok at the moment, he’s not in pain and he’s still eating.  At some point he will stop eating and we’ve been warned he will go downhill rapidly at that point.  Naturally Derrick is distraught.  Alma’s illness means she can’t really express emotions, so we don’t really know if she is feeling it or not.  Shep spends a lot of his time sleeping at her feet during the day, so I am sure she will miss him when he’s gone.

Meanwhile, Basil is feeling a bit sorry for himself.  His trip to the vet was a little traumatic all round and as they couldn’t get blood from his leg vein, they actually had to get it from the jugular vein.  Naturally he’s been milking this for all it’s worth and demanding extra treats, bed priv and lots of cuddles.  He has also expressed a desire to join the ranks of the lolcats featured on the I Can Has Cheezburger website, so I am going through my photo collection looking for photos which I think lend themselves to lolcat style captions.

This one jumped out at me, so I thought we’d have a little caption competition.

If you’re familiar with lolspeak, go right ahead and give it a go. If not, don’t worry, just make a suggestion for a caption that you think would go with this photo.  Leave a comment with your suggestions and if I can’t decide on a winner, we’ll put it to a vote.  To sweeten the deal, I have a prize to give out to the author of the winning caption.  I can’t show you a picture just yet, but I will give out a gorgeous set of brand new stamps that are being released in December.

Have fun!

Free Halloween Digi Kit

The usual rules apply.  This is a copyrighted image so you can use it yourself, but you can’t use it commercially, which means you can’t pass it on or sell the image.  You can show items you make with it on your blogs or photo sites, that’s fine.  You can even grab the thumbnail image below and put it on your blog to tell your friends that there’s a free download on offer, but they need to come here to download it for themselves.

Copyright 2009 Glenda Waterworth. All rights reserved.

This is an 8×8 inch jpg file, so to grab it, simply right click, then left click on ’save target as’ and you should be asked where you want to save it on your computer.  You will need a graphics program to open and print the file.  Mac users: ctrl click on the image and choose ’save image as’.  Note, the paper doesn’t have the words on it.  They were done using the word art below.

These word art files are png files which is a format which allows a transparent background.  Again, you will need some kind of graphics package to use these, but the transparent background means you can lay them over the background and you won’t have a white box around the text.

You can grab each of these images in the same way as above.

I’d love to see what people do with it, so if you use it, please let me know, either by leaving a comment below or you can drop me an email.

Halloween Download

At some point between now and the end of the month, I’ll be making this download available on the blog as a little Halloween freebie for you.

Catch it while you can – like a will o the wisp, it will appear and disappear at random times …

Pumpkin Glow

I did hope that I would get this done for the Copic Creations pumpkins challenge, but I missed the boat, so thought I’d share it here anyway.

The stamps are from a set in the October Graphicus Guild newsletter and the paper is one of my own from the Simple Elegance collection.  I coloured the pumpkin with three shades of orange and I used the colourless blender a lot over the smoke plumes to give it that really feathered edge.

Has anyone else been drawn to Halloween this year?  I know that a lot of our Halloween products have sold out at Graphicus, so some of you are obviously enjoying it as much as I am at the moment.

I’m just starting to get little frissons of Christmas spirit now and again.  While we were away this weekend, we indulged in a little retail therapy (as you do) and Joanna took us to a very nice place (Darts?) where they have Fired Earth and Aga, plus an amazing food hall and lots of gorgeous household stuff, including Christmas decorations.  There was a definite hand crafted look to many of their items – distressed wood, stuffed hearts, shaker style kind of stuff.  Right up my street and I came home with a lovely wooden Christmas hanging and teatowels for the Aga.  In fact I was doing a happy dance because I found a matching Aga pad to one I bought recently (they sit on the chrome lids and stop them getting scratched).

This lovely little hanging decoration is crying out to be altered, but I might make it subtle with just a touch of glitter.  I’m not known for subtle as I get carried away by my love of colour, but this year I’m fancying an understated look.  I have a secret longing to live in an iWorld where everything is white and streamlined,  super tidy and clean … yeah, it’s not happening in this house any time soon, but Basil is all in favour as it would make such a stunning foil for him.

I’m just in the middle of making some giant bauble decorations for our Graphicus Christmas Party (Fri 4th and Sat 5th December) which should be a really good couple of days.  We are very privileged to have Joanna Sheen demonstrating her newest CDs – you can read more about the event over on the Graphicus blog.

Well I think the glitter might be dry now on my giant bauble, so I’m off to see about doing some giant snowflakes next!

Devon or Africa?

We’ve just got back from safari …

Yeah, I suspect the grass isn’t quite that green in Africa, but it certainly is in Devon.  Well, Somerset to be precise as these photos were all taken at Longleat this weekend.  I really got the benefit of my long lens with these photos, you can click on them for a larger image.

Remember the vultures in Jungle book?  “What we gonna do today then?  I dunno, what do you wanna do?  I dunno, let’s go to Longleat.”

We stayed with our good friends Joanna and Richard (you may have heard of Joanna, she’s on the telly) and we had a lovely, fun, relaxing weekend with far too much food in it (oh dear, I see a week of fat free cottage cheese coming up).

The tigers were magnificent, though the traffic jams through their enclosure left me feeling quite upset for them.  I’m sure it can’t be good for them to be breathing in all those car fumes every day.  In fact, Adrian did get quite emotional as we listened to the Longleat CD commentary about how these gorgeous creatures have been hunted to the brink of extinction.

I have no plans to head to Africa or India to see the big cats in the wild any time soon, so seeing them in captivity is the only way I am likely to get this close, but I do find it a bittersweet thing.  On the one hand, it looks like breeding in captivity is the only way to ensure the survival of the species, but on the other hand, they really don’t belong in a Capability Brown landscape.

This lioness doesn’t seem to mind too much – and I swear she’s been taking Basil lessons.

Decadent Brocade

I have been quiet lately, haven’t I?   I used to blog nearly every day, but I don’t know how I managed it!  At the moment, I seem to be in planning mode, lots of long term projects on the go and quite a lot of boring IT stuff which has a nasty habit of sapping my creative energy.  I spent over three hours today cursing Microsoft Excel and Access, remembering why I turned my back on a career in computing.  At least this weekend I’ll be doing something much more fun with computers – Lesley and I are teaching our first Photoshop course this weekend and I’m really looking forward to that.

Anyway, I just wanted to draw your attention to a new video on the Elusive Images You Tube channel.  Well it’s not strictly a video, but a slide show of the designs on the Decadent Brocade CD.  You can watch it on You Tube’s website, or just click on the Videos tab above and watch it right here on the blog.  I know some people have had trouble with the You Tube site, but can see them fine from here.  Go figure?

Right, I’m back to my Photoshop preparation.  Adrian’s not looking too good …

Basement Cat turns Thirteen

If you are not a fan of I Can Has Cheezburger, then you might not get the joke here.  Basically, the site has evolved the concept of an enlightened higher being known as Ceiling Cat, who is always a white cat and his evil counterpart, Basement Cat who is nearly always portrayed as a jet black cat.

So naturally, one of Basil’s more recent nicknames is Basement Cat and faced with an abundance of Halloween products this year, I felt compelled to make this rather tongue in cheek album this weekend.

The photos above have been ‘dramatised’ in photoshop, playing up the laser eye effect of the flash and saturating the colours.

Basil is in fact 13 years old, though we don’t know exactly when he was born.  He was one of three born on a farm and discovered by a colleague of mine at the time who made it her mission to find them homes.  We believe his birthday is sometime in March.  He was a rather nervous kitten and it’s a source of some sadness that my wonderful 1960s Zenith camera broke down around that time and I have no photos of the boys as babies.

I cut the pages slightly narrower than the back board so that I could alternate the binding side.

The lettering is a mix of chipboard letters (Heidi Swapp) and various rub-ons.  Once upon a time, the boys were never allowed bed  privilege – it’s not nice being woken up by the sound of a cat throwing up on your cream carpet at four in the morning.  Nowadays we often enjoy a mutually lazy Sunday morning lie in.

The pages are all coloured with Jack O’Lantern Glimmer Mist and decorated with rub-on vines.

This is the back board – it’s grey board sprayed with a Cinder – one of the new Limited Edition colours in our new Pumpkin Spice Glimmer Mist set.  It really is a very dark black with just a hint of silvery blue mica.

The album is made with a pair of gorgeous laser cut chipboard gates from ScrapFX.  They come with holes in, so it was a straightforward matter of cutting some card and a back board to fit, marking the holes and punching them with a Crop-a-Dile.

Behind the gates are two chip tiles from the Halloween Hauntings set – another Tattered Angels product.  These embossed tiles are 7″ x 4″ and make perfect little book covers.  I have sprayed them with a mixture of colours from the Pumpkin Spice set and enhanced the embossed designs with Distress inks and Gold Encore ink.

The gates are sprayed with Raven – a very dark purply blue – and finished with a couple of diamante brads and the number 13.

There is more journalling to do, I want to just get stuff down on paper about Basil so I don’t forget his quirky ways.

And talking of his quirky ways, he is definitely trying to tell me that my lap is missing from his sofa right now.  I’m on my way Basil, on my way.