Months of preparation and the weekend is finally here …

I thought I ought to let you know, we are having a very short sale on the Graphicus website. From now until next Thursday (12th November 2009) we have a massive 30% off all Elusive Images unmounted themeplates. I sent out an email to all our email newsletter subscribers today with details, and all the sale prices are now on the website. Just look at these themeplate prices

• A4 – £17.49 (was £24.99)
• A5 – £10.49 (was £14.99)
• A6 – £6.29 (was £8.99)
• DL – £8.75 (was £12.50)

The sale applies just to unmounted themeplates, not the version with EZ Mount, but we do have a multi-buy offer on that – just £13.99 for four sheets.

Not only that, but we are continuing to offer a free upgrade to our courier 24 hour service on orders over £40 (mainland UK addresses) AND if you spend £50 or more between now and next Thursday, we are including a FREE pack of 20 sheets of gorgeous Hambly 12×12 papers and overlays. Feel free to spread the word, tell your crafting friends and forum buddies – there’s no shortage of stamps, but there’s only a little time to take advantage of these prices – they will be going back up next Friday.

happy shopping!

{Note: if you are coming on our Paradise Weekend Retreat next weekend, we are quite happy to hold your order so you have it at the weekend – just put a note in the comments box on the checkout page.}

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!

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.

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 …

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!

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.

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 …

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.

Last week we had our new boiler installed as you know.  Well Basil (Lord High Imperator of this Realm, etc, etc) was not impressed with having his peace so rudely shattered, yet he couldn’t just abandon his territory to these wrench-wielding marauders, but had to keep a sharp eye on proceedings to make sure they were doing the job right.

We will apparently be receiving various certificates at some point to say that the work has been done to the correct OFTEC and Worcester Bosch standards.  Means nothing!  Nope, the only seal of approval worth having is that of the Black One himself.

His self-designated vantage point became the top of the bookcase where he could watch proceedings from on high, often without anyone even realising he was there.  Oh, except for the tell tale little black tail hanging over the edge. He has grown very fond of this new resting place and can often be found up there.

And now that the work is finished and we have a very toasty warm house, how does the Lord Sir Basil feel?

I approve.  Now feed me!

I hear and obey my noble furry Master …