A printable challenge

OK! It is the last day of Shimelle’s ‘Proud to be a Scrapbooker’ weekend and I’ve only just completed the second challenge! I think (hope!) I’ve got the rest of the week to ramble through the rest!
Thank you Mary Anne for the super printables and for the suggestion about using the circles for a scalloped edge. I opened the pdf in PSE, found a sample of the product I was using for the background and sampled the green and yellow so that the printables matched the paper. ( Toy Box Collection by Crate Paper) I’ve been shadowing Shimelle’s 4×6 photo love and decided the March sketch would be ideal for an lo of GS playing out in the garden. Just right!
Irene x

Shimelle’s Scrapbooking Sketch of the Week.

Shimelle has a ‘Proud to Scrapbook‘ crop going on all weekend and today started with a giveaway which you will find by following the link.

The crop started with a sketch challenge which is also her scrapbooking sketch of the week challenge.

I decided to create an lo of our train ride from Ravenglass to Dalegarth in Cumbria which we enjoyed so much that we travelled twice more to different stations. It is handy when sampling the locally brewed Cumbrian ales and the locally sourced pub menus. You get plenty of fresh air and enjoy walking to the various hostelries, without having to worry about driving! ‘Let the train take the strain’ as they used to say!

Irene x

10 things on the 10th……

These people were marching through the streets of London yesterday. What were they doing……rioting?…..NO! They were trying to do something positive for their community by helping to clear up the mess left by the riots the night before. Some of these groups were organised by Richard Reynolds from Guerilla Gardening. Looking at the positive things that can be done to our streets by organisations such as this one, made me look into things a bit more closely, so my 10 for the 10th of August are connected with this idea. They are in no particular order:-

1. Guerilla Gardening Information site founded by Richard Reynolds.
2. The Eden Project  Seed bombs! 🙂
3. The Pothole Gardener This is bound to put a 🙂 on your face!
4. Farm in my Pocket Some useful information here put very concisely.
5. Irving Park Garden Club  Based in Chicago. A gallery of their garden walk.
6. Wayward Plants Community gardens with unwanted plants on derelict sites.
7. On Guerilla Gardening  A handbook on gardening without boundaries by Richard Reynolds
8. Seedbom by Kabloom. There’s a giveaway on this one! Could be explosive! 🙂
9. Urban Physic Garden Plants with medicinal properties.
10. Allotinabox Boxes of GYO seeds available for urban growers who garden on balconies, window boxes or roofs.

After all the ‘gloom and doom’ of the last few days, it’s good to know that there are so many positive ideas that city dwellers can use to improve their own neighbourhood. Thank you for visiting my blog.
Irene x



A wild rose in the native hedge in my garden.



Journeys, adventure, construction & perfection……

My explorations on the creative journey this week started with writing two experiences on postcards and posting them to myself…cue for a song? Although I posted them on the same day, they arrived back a day apart and one without a postmark! Well, I suppose we’ve all had journeys ourselves like this!

 It was great to follow the scavenger hunt and look at the links. We buy Ordnance Survey maps and tourist maps for all the holidays we go on, so we have quite a large collection of them! None of these can be cut into, so I printed out a few to make the collage and the circle embellishments.

Perfection…..no, I’m NOT a perfectionist! This reminded me of the EMBRACE IMPERFECTION class that I did with Karen Grunberg at Big Pictures. We vowed not to let perfectionism prevent us from recording the memories that our family will find fascinating and made this little book to put on our desks to refer to whenever we suffer from perfection stress.  It is full of quotes about perfection.

I made a list of things that were just about perfect in my life at the moment.

Thinking about all these things, I decided to create an lo of a just about perfect family occasion….my family birthday celebration.

I really enjoyed the first week of Explore, especially the video by Shimelle which helped to make sense of my ham-fisted struggle to make circle embellishments!

Thank you for looking! Irene 🙂 x