Coming out of hiding...

Ok, I've been hiding because I'm scared to tempt fate and yet completely unable to keep my mouth shut when I have possible exciting news!! Here goes- our offer got accepted on the house!!!!!!!!!!!!! Yey!!! It's being sold by HUD so we had to bid online and our offer got accepted, but now we have to wait for them to actually sign the contract and send it back to us before the acceptance is official, and then of course we have all the inspections etc. Hence the not wanting to tempt fate by announcing too soon- fate please be kind to us :-)

You may have noticed I changed my blog header a little. There used to be a blurb about keeping positive while dealing with Endometriosis and Infertility, but with the direction I was heading with my posts on my blog it just didn't seem fitting. Plus, Endometriosis doesn't define who I am- there is so much more to me than the health issues I have, so why do I want that to be the first thing people learn about me when they visit my blog?! As for the infertility, well how can you be positive about that if you're labelling yourself as infertile- I'm 28 for goodness sake and with everything else going on with my health in the past 3 years we have probably actually 'tried' for a total of 3 months (TMI, sorry!!). Even 'normal' couples often take longer than that to get pregnant, so I refuse to believe that we have fertility issues yet. For now I need to focus on getting my body as healthy as I can, and then we will start trying for a baby again. I am flying out to England on Saturday (yey!!) and have an appointment with a famous (in endo circles) nutritionist called Dian Shepperson-Mills who works with women like myself who have endo and want to have a baby. I've also been looking into Acupuncture and traditional chinese medicine as an option to try too, as I'm so fed up with being on the meds I take- and I can't be on them forever as there is no way we will get pregnant if I'm on meds that put me in chemical menopause is there!!!

Anyway, enough of all that- moving on to fun stuff.........

I've still been in that distressing groove, and also have been having fun with the Holiday Thinking Inking techniques with Perfect Pearls from last week.

I really loved the combo of Aged Mahogany and Forest Moss that I had used in previous Christmas cards so I had to pull out those inks again to create this card shown above. I inked up a piece of cardstock and then sprayed the Hero Arts Flourish Pine stamp with a mixture of water and gold perfect pearls (mixed in a mini mister) and stamped it onto the inked piece. The water on the stamp created a lovely faded effect on the card, and the perfect pearls added lots of shimmer! When the image was stamped, it picked up the ink from the cardstock, so I put it to good use by stamping it directly onto a white piece of cardstock to make the piece for the sentiment. To make the card base gold, I inked a white card with aged mahogany and then pounced on gold perfect pearls with a paint brush, then sprayed it with a little water to fix the powder. You can't really see it in the picture, but the flower is a little glittery also- I just sprayed the perfect pearl/water mix onto it until it got nice and covered in gold. I finished off the card with some distressing on the edges of the inked piece, and a red gem in the middle of the flower.

 The background of this second card was created by spraying the flourish stamp again with the pp and water, and stamping it directly onto the card. There was still some ink on the stamp from the first card, so it gave the background some nice definition. I found the santa image stamp in the $1 bin at Michaels- score!!! I didn't think it would stamp well, but it was actually really nice. I stamped him onto a piece of tan cardstock using aged mahogany distress ink, and then inked the edges with frayed burlap. While the santa image was still a little wet, I smudged over it a little with the blending tool to give it a softer, more aged look. The brown mat was made by stamping Hero Arts La Lettre onto a piece of ColorCore cardstock with walnut stain distress ink, and then sanding over it liberally to give the faded look. I distressed the edges of the santa image and the mat by running the blade of my scissors up and down (I really should get one of those distressing tools!!). Finished the card off with a flower and a little twine wrapped around the mat, and a bronze pearl in the center of the flower.

 This snowflake was another $1 bin find!! I stamped it twice onto tan cardstock using pumice stone distress ink, and then cut each out to make square pieces. I distressed and inked the edges again and then adhered them to a mat, again made using ColorCore cardstock, stamped with La Lettre and sanded to distress. This time I wrapped the twine around the middle of the mat, tying a little bow in the middle and using Glossy Accents to adhere a green pearl in the middle. I used foam squares to mount the mat to the card, giving some more dimension. I love the colors in this card, I think it's one of my favourites so far!

Lastly, a couple more cards using the same techniques I talked about above. The folded piece on the bottom card was originally going to be a rosette, but it wasn't long enough lol so it became trim instead!! I had seen this on another card on Flickr (don't remember who it was, sorry) so when the rosette didn't work out, I knew exactly what to do with it!! The flowers are by K&Company, I love them!!

Phew, another long post! Can't wait til this house drama is sorted, then maybe I can get myself into a routine of daily posts so I don't take up so much of your valuable time when I post!!

Lynsey x