Okay guess where I'm going!?

Any ideas?

Well the beautiful harbour in the picture is Honfleur in Normandy, France and the photo below is one of Rouen where we are staying. I'm really excited to be going there for the weekend with my youngest daughter.

We are going to have such a great time.

Obviously I won't be around either blogging myself or visiting anybody's blogs, but I will be back early next week and have already scheduled my post for The Pink Elephant challenge on Monday.

Sunday sees the release of Joanna Sheen's new range of Christmas Messy Rabbit stamps and Joanna will be on Create and Craft on Sunday with these stamps and her new CD. She may even be showing some of the samples I made for her if the Post Office find the parcel I sent.

At this point I feel I should say I am remaining calm - I am counting to 100 - I have not gone white and I refuse to worry that the 12 days I spent on these samples might be lost in a sorting office somewhere in Exeter (last known location of the parcel). So much for Special Delivery services at a cost of £8.90!!!

Then on Monday she will be releasing a whole new set of Lofty stamps too - my samples for these did arrive safely. Both stamp ranges are absolutely gorgeous and were so much fun to work with.

They will be available to buy shortly and you can preview them right now on her website. I only recently found out that she does free postage for any where in the world - how cool is that?

I will be showing my sample cards next week - oh it has been sooooooooooo hard to keep them secret all this time!!! I do hope everyone likes what I've done, but most of all I hope the Post Office find them fast!!!

Lori's first digi...

A very quick card today, but a very important one as it has been made using a friend's very first digi image. Lori Boyd at By Lori Designs is an extremely talented artist and is considering going into designing and selling her own digi images. This cute mouse is her first design and is a tentative first step. As she says herself it's a trial run with some rough edges and obviously she has things to learn. It is super cute though isn't it. My daughter thought it was really cool and she is quite tough to please.

Just for three days (today is the last day methinks - get there and snag it fast) Lori has this mouse image available free on her blog. She would like people to snag it, use it and leave her comments about what they liked or didn't like about it. Lori would love to hear what everyone would like to see in digis too. I want a digi of the Pink Elephant Ellie and have done for ages - hope you're reading this Lori.

Important Note: I've just heard that Lori has had such lovely comments and been so overwhelmed by people's kind remarks she is extending the period of the freebie to give people more time to snag it and make a card.

As a basis for my card I used the sketch at Sketch and Stash - I love their sketches. I don't always get chance to join in, but I do save the sketches as they are just so great to use. I actually left the flowers out of this design due it being such a small card, but I'm sure they won't mind. My new stash is the new digi by the fantastic new digi artist - LORI BOYD!

If you are interested in knowing the reasons why Lori is considering starting up on her own do read this post about Stampin Up - well worth knowing about. I can't believe a company would ask this of people. I will not be buying anymore of their products as I think restricting artists so badly is horrendous. I will also not be naming their products in any postings on my blog. Restrictive advertising works both ways!

Pink Elephant Day...

Yeah it's...

at The Pink Elephant and the colours are Black, White, Red and Yellow!

A great combination - check out what my super talented team mates have created. My card is a tiny 4" x 4", which was a real change to the huge cards I have been working on lately. Sometimes it's great to work on a small scale.

I was looking through my paper collection when a I spotted a really dramatic black and white floral paper that was shouting out 'Use me - Use me'! So I decided to take one flower from the paper and using Promarkers colour it in this week's colour scheme. To add dimension I coloured 4 flowers and layered them up like a mandela.

Actually I stuck each flower on black card before cutting out as I felt the paper would be too floppy to be used on it's own. I hate decoupage that is fragile!

The sketch I used for the card is from this week's challenge at Crazy 4 Challenges. It's a fantastic sketch to work with and you should see the cards the DT have come up with - amazing.

This was such a super easy card to make - think I need to look at more patterned papers to see what else I can create with them.

Have a great day everyone.