'Tis the gift to be simple

'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free,
'tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
and when we find ourselves in the place just right,
'twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gained
to bow and to bend we shan't be ashamed,
to turn, turn, will be our delight
till by turning, turning we come round right.

If you want to sing along then the tune is "Lord of the dance" - not the Michael Flately version. Although you can dance to it. But use your arms as well as your feet.

SO why have I started my post with a song? Apart from, obviously, to annoy my children who hate me singing. (Incidentally this comes way before Lord of the Dance, it was a Shaker song. You can find out about them - and see them doing one of their dances here)

Well I think it rather sums up why I love camping. Sure, we as a family don't do it the most basic way - we went for a fixed tent, electricity and a trailer full of stuff that we dragged to the Netherlands. But no tv, no computer and only the most basic of electronic games makes for a life with little clutter, lots of family time and fun together. Mostly. (I don't have pj's that say "grumpy cow" on them for nothing you know)

We stayed at the most fabbest site called Duinrell, home of the adorable (not) Rik de Kikker (if you follow the link you will see what I mean). The site was clean and tidy, the shop open long hours and not toooooo expensive (in the UK I often won't go into the shop at all because they are just icky and v. costly). Best of all you had two hours a day free in the water park and free entry into the Amusement park. Which wasn't Alton Towers but then we are not a thrill seeking family. Well I didn't think we were until we discovered that Carys loves death defying rides. Sadly she is still too small for most of them. But she did go on a loop the loop and fling you around thing - along with her elder bro who didn't want to lose face.

The weather wasn't brilliant until Hywel's birthday when it was scorchio. So know it is back to work and into catch up time. I still have 2 sprogs at home - Hywel because college doesn't start til Tuesday (tho we had to rearrange our hols so he could have an interview last Wednesday) and Emrys because he has an ingrowing toenail. Hmmmm. H did well in his GSCE's. Which is good but also annoying as we have differing accounts of how much work he did and yet he has hit the targets I set for him. Still at college they will be expecting him to be working to A/A* level and will be checking up on him if he slips. So not all bad then.

I shall save holiday photos for when they appear in scrap form - so expect to see them in '09 sometime... but shall share photos of my Daring Cards for this week and the one from two weeks ago. That one was featuring arrows and I have to be honest and say it is one of my all time favourite cards wot I have made. It was for Hywel's birthday and he has a lot of hair. OK so that is one of the holiday pics. Of him seriously opening his presents. I used one of my Starving Artist stamps, Prismacolour Pencils and the new Surprise range of papers from Scenic Route. Which I may just have to get more of as it is soooooooo me!

This week on DCM we got to play with some of the Funky Hand downloadable papers. Shabby Saturday is the collection and it is in lovely shades of soft pink and brown. Although I have downloaded papers in the past I haven't always liked the quality. These are brilliant. I have some photo paper I bought by mistake and that is really good for printing on - it does fray a little at the edges so needed inking - but I like inking! I also found that I can print two patterns on one sheet of A4 which saved paper and the pattern stayed true. Anice you are a genius!

We had a template to use which I think I must have looked at and then thrown away as the two cards that were meant to use it look nothing like it really. The first card I made was this one
using a shape template by Kristina Werner for the swirly bit and I also used Adorn it letters. The smaller flower is punched with a retro flower punch. Until I taught a class at Imagine That recently I had never thought about folding the petals downwards like this until someone did it. I love the effect now!

As lots of the teams cards were v. flowery I thought I would go more subtle with this one - only one flower and another Starving Artist stamp
The monkey was coloured with distress inks. I remember now that watercolour paper is supposed to be best. Yes, the pad I bought speciallyand have forgotten about. Bother. But the ink painting is not too bad on linen card either! The tiny flower is paper pieced. Yes it was fiddly. I used nestability rectangles and a tiny poundland gem, everything else is from the kit.

I then wanted to try out a more masculine card as although pink features in this kit there are a lot of earthy colour tones and anyway men seem more comfy with pink now!
I had the bonzer idea of cutting down the card to the American size - their cards are slightly smaller than ours at 4x51/2" (because Letter size paper is slightly different to A4) this meant that I could use the cuttlebug strip over the whole card! I then covered the gap between the strips with the circles so you can't really see it. And yes, I did over swipe with the Distress ink on some of the dots. But it is not quite as noticeable in real life.

Now I must get back to less fun things - like putting washing away and making sure I am ready for Sunday services! But before I go look at this!

I've been made featured blogger of the week on A Faith Perspective.
I'm well chuffed (for the non UK readers that means I am excited and pleased)
Its a good reason to try and find time to FINALLY sort my blog out.
I quite like the plain heading bits but all my links are sadly out of date
and people very kindly give me awards which never show up on my blog!
But it will be next week before it happens.
I would love to have time to join in more of the Faith Perspective prompts but alas,
time is not on my side. Still I may save them up and use them when I do have time
- there are some great ideas there if you are into faith booking.
Have a great weekend!