Yay!  I got time to craft last night and apart from stamping a sentiment upside down on a really nice tag, I am quite pleased with my output.  Inspired by Lesley’s class last week, I made these scrunchy flowers with a nestabilities die, ecoline watercolours and three different embossing powders.

Then I looked around for something to put one on and found a tag I started a while ago with Wendy Vecchi stamps – coloured with Ranger’s Clover pigment ink.  I stamped an Elusive Images sentiment on from one of the bird sets.

There’s a bit of shadow on all my images today – I forgot to change the settings on the camera when I took these photos this morning.

Then I felt quite inspired to dig out the Wendy Vecchi stamps and they’re in the same place as my Tim Holtz stamps so some of those came out to play as well.

The result was another couple of tags.

And yes, another scrunchy flower – I’m just addicted to making these.  This one is made with a sheet of paper from Decadent Brocade, crumpled and sanded, then inked with Rusty Hinge distress ink.  The finished result is almost like worn leather.

This tag is my favourite.

It’s a little fuzzy (note to self, don’t leave Aperture priority set on the camera), so it might not be obvious that the patterned bit under the words at the bottom is a gorgeous printed paisley ribbon that I found in Target or Walmart last time I was in the states.  The sentiment is Crafty Individuals and the butterfly sticker is by K&Co – I’ve had them kicking around for a while and just spotted them in a box.

It was so nice to just have some pottering, non pressured play time.  I left things in pieces before I went to bed and actually got up early and stuck things down and finished these off this morning.  I also made another card, but I’ll save that for tomorrow.  I also still have my Regal album to share once I’ve finished editing the photos for that.

While I was finishing off this morning, the garden filled up with rabbits.  With no cats to scare them off, they’re getting pretty cheeky and this morning we watched a big bully chasing all the tiny baby bunnies around and around the trees.  We both got a bit choked up at the one little black baby – I’m still trying to get a photo of him, but he’s managed to elude the camera so far.  One of my nicknames for Sesame was Rabbit because of his mottled, brindle colouring.

As you can see, even early this morning, the sunshine was glorious.  We all got rather overheated upstairs at work today – our unit has a metal roof with skylights in and the upstairs does get very hot in sunny weather.  Adrian and I had a meeting in town today so on the way back we got ice lollies for everyone – I was very virtuous and had a frozen raspberry smoothie.  Just as well as we finished our day with fish and chips on the way back from the hospital!

Medically there’s not much change in Derrick, but he was very fed up and down tonight.  He is determined though to fight through this and get home – the will, the drive and the fight is there – you can see it in him.  He is grateful for all the well wishes coming his way from you guys, though (like many of his generation) he doesn’t really understand the community spirit that can build up on a blog or  how people he has never met can be interested in his welfare.  But he appreciates the kindness of the comments that people leave and the way people are always asking after him.

We appreciate it too and know that this is likely to be one of the most difficult times in our life, but we can’t put our lives on hold.  We have to make a conscious effort to seize moments, pockets of happiness where we can.

As Max Ehrmann said, “With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.”

So I shall leave you with a couple of pictures showing the view we enjoyed while having our fish and chip supper tonight.

It is a beautiful world, you can’t ever forget that.