Oh dear!

It’s been a long time since I wrote anything for this blog…very remiss of me. I do have a valid excuse though……I am up to my eye balls in moving to France and have not done any crafting for a long, long time!

I will do I promise! OK, I’m still not in France yet, but it’s only a matter of weeks. Give me a few more weeks to settle in and hopefully I will be off again, with added vigour and crafting enthusiasm. To be honest, it’s been the last thing on my mind!

I have big plans for life in France and crafting features quite heavily…so watch this space!

This weekend has brought two birthday celebrations. My sisters 40th and Diddy’s friends 8th birthday.

So we have been wrapping pressies. We used a CD that Liquorice brought over…it has lots of sweety wrapping paper graphics that can be printed out.Very sweet they are too!

Take a look at our achievements…let us know what you think.

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I’ve done some more messing with my Logicam and the photo editor. Thought I would share some more of my experiments. I’m well into this!

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What do you think of the Handmade Brigade header? I think it’s quite cool, in a garish, bright and snazzy way!

I wanted something that summed-up us, and our Handmade Brigade logo, and tried various photos of cards and projects that I have. But nothing worked!

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So in a moment of inspiration, I took a picture of my hand using my Logicam. A 2 second click and I had my base photo. With a bit of fiddling on the MGI Photosuite, I had a picture that I thought I could use.

I love the way that a rather plain, grey image is now pink and purple and jazzy. Unfortunately, I have lost the original, so I can’t show you what it looked like!

The header for this template is quite narrow, so I lost a lot of the picture. However, I am still happy with the result. Hope you like it too!

love Phoenix

It would appear that I need to do a little more work on the photos!

They aren’t brilliant in real life…but not quite that bad!

Today is my sister P’s 40th birthday. She is remarkably calm and cool about the whole thing….I seem to remember worrying about being nearly 40 for about 3 years. As P says…’I've been saying for years now that I’m nearly 40, so it’s no big deal!’

I needed to make her a card and as usual left it far too late to really think about it.

I wanted to do a collage of her as a baby, up until now. But, when I looked for some photos, I realised that Mum has the baby pictures and it’s too late to get her to send them to me.

Ok…no problem, I’ll use some images of the years gone by to make a collage instead. So after some internet searching, I found some images…a Sindy doll, a Brownie uniform from the 70’s, a Troll, Spangles etc.

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But when I started to place them on the card, I realised it looked a mess! So I ditched that idea for the end result.

I deliberately missed off the 40th bit for some reason…didn’t want to rub her nose in it!

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 We love crafting! We love blogging!

The Handmade Brigade blog is about both. Here we can share our projects, our cards, our scrap pages, our ideas.

Here we can inspire each other and share our thoughts on crafting. Please put us in your favourites, link to us, share us with your friends.

 Feel free to comment and send in your photos…we would love to hear from you.

yours truly,

Phoenix