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Not sure if I’m succeeding though!  Work is taking up so much of my time right now as we head to our Financial Year End on 31 March, still so much to do, Legal Agreements to renew, Purchase Orders to issue for the next year, licenses to replace so all of our sw and products continues to work come April 1st… and of course all the general day to day tasks I’m expected to perform that don’t respect busy periods or lack of time!  I’ve been pretty much meeting myself coming backwards as they say over here and I’ve been stressed and a bit burnt out.   It got so bad that I turned up at the swimming pool on Saturday sans gear!  No swim suit, no towels, nothing, yet I had packed my own bag and put in in front of the door before leaving home!  I had to physically move the stupid bag in order to get out of the door.  My punishment was to sit on the bleachers and watch Andrew swim up and down in his lane!  I could have done with that swim time as it really calms me and concentrates my mind on what I’m doing rather than the three million things I’ve still got to do.

And who can fail to have been affected by the pictures of loss and devastation coming out of Japan right now?  The disaster is on a scale many of us just can’t comprehend too, it’s unimaginable.  Working for a Japanese company, the largest car manufacturer in the world, I’ve seen the reaction to this first hand over the last couple of days.  I know people at our Japanese offices, we communicate with Japan on a frequent basis, two of our manufacturing facilities were evacuated but thankfully all people have been accounted for and there were no injuries.  The campus building were I work is about 30% Japanese staff and on Friday a quiet settled over us all, it’s a large building, almost 1,000 people strong, yet the silence was deafening.  Today is Monday and it’s still so much quieter than normal, more sober, we don’t yet know the true impact for some of our colleagues who have not yet been able to reach loved ones in Japan.  We can only hope.

I haven’t been crafting much either, the last card I made took the best part of three days due to lack of time and a distinct lack of concentration!  This card, well, not really sure if I should even show it to you or enter it in any challenges as it’s just not what I had in my head, my main problem I think was changing my focal stamp at the last minute, it changed the entire feel of the card, which should have been softer and more muted than this.  But here it is, warts and all!

I first cut out the largest oval nestie I have to use as a mask, before stamping over the card with a large snowflake stamp.  Removing the mask I stamped a Penny Black image in the aperture left free and coloured it in with pencils, adding a little Stickles to the holly berries, the corners and the ruff of the sock.  The card I’d chosen was slightly textured too, and that really shows up on the larger red part of the stocking.  Still, don’t suppose we can win them all can we???

Card Recipe:

  • Card: Bought in UK, can’t recall where from!
  • Stamps: Penny Black (can’t recall the name!!) ~ Stampabilities Snowflake background stamp
  • Ink: TPC Gold Pigment ~ Memories Black Dye Ink
  • Embellies: Yellow Stickles ~ Water colour pencils
  • Tools: Zig Water Brush ~ Oval Nesties ~ Cuttlebug

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Challenges:

Bah Humbug ~ Apertures

Less Is More ~ Single Layer and stamp off the edge

Crafty Hazels Christmas Challenge ~ Use Gold on your card