Creeping towards Monday...

I'm thinking I'd better make the most of my opportunity to post on this blog for the next few days - Monday is creeping ominously closer and this is going to be one very busy half term - we are hitting the height of exam season after all. It is weird to think I am only going to have about eight working weeks left before I start maternity leave - school is such a big part of my life right now. Don't get me wrong, I hate getting up in the mornings and love my holidays and weekends, but I do like the camaraderie with my colleagues and working with kids is great (most of the time!).

I spent this morning in school at an event for next year's Year Seven pupils - it was quite fun as we focused on team-building exercises including a blindfolded obstacle course which created a fair few laughs. Tomorrow unfortunately I have to be at the hospital in the morning for a glucose test - two hours of boredom while they check I don't have gestational diabetes. My husband is a diabetic and has been regularly testing my blood on his blood sugar monitor, so I can't help thinking it's going to be a big waste of time, but I suppose it's better to be safe than sorry.

Anyway, onto today's layout, yet another Paris one, this time of the view from our hotel. Our hotel was a last minute deal but was surprisingly nice - it was a Best Western in the Bastille district of Paris and overlooked a long boulevard, in the middle of which they held a fabulous market on the last morning of our stay. We enjoyed a good look around all the of meats, cheeses and other delicacies before heading off on the Metro to the station.

This was made using the May Cocoa Daisy kit (again!) and I experimented a little bit with misting through a template to create the circle background. My favourite bit is probably the little embellishment cluster which I've shown in close up below though - I have absolutely tons of these paper flowers but never really use them, but I think they look really cute stapled on here. I must admit, much as I love the slightly vintage look on occasion, I am starting to feel a little bit starved of colour looking at the last few blog posts - safe to say, I have some much more colourful offerings on the way.

If any of my blog readers (if there are any of you left?) has a desperate love of paper flowers, I would be quite happy to gift a little bag of them to anybody who fancies - just let me know your name and address. I have way more than I can ever make use of in a lifetime!

Coffee in Paris

Two layouts shared in a week, I really must be spoiling you! This is what happens when I have a holiday and a bit of free time, I get back to doing the things I love for just a week or so.

Stupidly enough, I think all the anti-teacher press that's currently doing the rounds in the media courtesy of Gove and co is starting to sink into my psyche and I'm actually feeling guilty about getting up in the mornings, chilling out with a cup of tea and pottering around the house. This is madness - we teachers do deserve some holidays after all!

Anyway, back to today's layout, Paris again. On the last day we had to check out of our hotel a few hours before the Eurostar was due to leave the station. The hotel was really accomodating and let us leave our bags for a while, but we decided to get the Metro to the station with plenty of time to spare, which meant we didn't want to be lugging our bags around with us. So we found this cute (but expensive, as always!) coffee shop near the station and just sat and watched the world go by for an hour or so.

The Cocoa Daisy May 2011 kit was ideal for my Paris pictures because it had lots of grungy, vintage style papers in it that seemed to fit with the Paris scenery pretty well. Having said that, I made a few pages with an even older kit which are much brighter and fresher, so anything can work.

It's nice to be onto the June 2011 kit which is much bolder and more colourful in style for a change now though. I'm currently creating some layouts for Shimelle's online crop from the June kit which I should share on here over the course of the week. She has also announced a new class which I have signed up to - I like the fact that her classes leave you with access to the message boards and class materials for ever, so that you can access them in your own time. I've completed a lot of Shimelle's classes in the past, though none recently, and think it's about time I had another go at something to get me scrapbooking more often again.

More news from the house of fun...

So my Easter hols continue to fly past the mid point all too quickly, and today I find myself feeling so heavy, stretched and uncomfortable! It seems to happen every week or so, I think it must be little one going through a growth spurt and my poor belly trying to accomodate it!

The fun and games in the kitchen continue, but the cats have been enjoying playing amongst the miscellaneous debris which litters the back garden.

Poor Ed was not having a very happy weekend when I took this photo - apparently our walls are not very good for hanging cabinets from. I gathered the state of his peace of mind when he hit the wall with his drill and swore at it - this is so unlike Ed, I made him an immediate cup of tea and told him to take a break before he had a mental breakdown!

Here is another page to share, using last year's May Cocoa Daisy kit (I'm onto the June one now - yay!), and again it is a photo from our trip to Paris in 2010. We had a really happy and eventful 2010 which I'm quite glad about, considering how awful our 2011 turned out to be!

This page tells the unfortunate story of our trip out to a bar in the Bastille district. It was opposite the Opera House, which can be the only explanatory factor for the prices they charged! Ed wandered off the to toilet as soon as we got there, telling me to order. The waitress was immediately upon me, so I ordered a beer and what looked like a nice cocktail from the French (obviously) drinks menu.

However, when Ed came back, we realised the prices for both the drinks were nearly £25! And my cocktail was horrible. Ed didn't let me forget about it, and finally told my dad the story a couple of weeks ago, which I could have killed him for as my dad hates wasting money in any way and I had been happily hiding the event from him even though he was in Paris with us on holiday.

Still, you live and learn.

I've been trying to take part in the online crop over at Shimelle.com. I say trying, I'm currently creating my second page. But this is a great creative achievement for me in recent times, and if I can possibly get to four or five challenges completed I will be happy. I'm trying to plough through my old Cocoa Daisy kits and use them up too, horribly aware that time is flashing by and I really need to clear out the spare room in the very near future...

Taking a break

Another week passes too busy to blog, but I'm determined to manage at least a post a week if I can, so here is a quick one. I'm now 23 weeks pregnant and loving all the kicking and squirming that little one is doing. In fact, I got a bit worried earlier today when I hadn't felt it kick in a while and had to have a little listen on the doppler (which was an absolute godsend in the early days of this pregnancy, but hasn't been used so much lately). But all was well, and since then I've been reminded of little one's presence several times!

Sleep is starting to be a problem - not actually getting to sleep, but waking up with lower backache and not being able to get comfortable again, not matter how I prop myself up with pillows. This morning I got up at seven as it was useless lying there trying to sleep - I'm convinced this is all training for the early mornings I will get to experience as a mum. My own mum exists on about 3 hours sleep a night even now, all thanks to yours truly who was a nightmare sleeper!

I actually got a Mother's Day card today (clever bump!). Nice to think that next year it will be for real...

So a layout to share, not photographed very well I'm afraid due to poor light this evening. It was made using last May's Cocoa Daisy kit, and shows some photos of our holiday to Paris in the Autumn of 2010 - this is me and mum taking a rest outside the Louvre. Everything on the page comes from the kit, except the chipboard thickers and the pink mist which I used to add a bit more depth to the background. I love that rose ribbon!

In other news, I managed to sell a few stacks of scrapbooking paper, but have lots more to go, including a stack of about 150 sheets of Basic Grey! I think I must have had a bit of an obsession at one point...

Anyway, off to bed now to get my couple of hours of sleep - back next week!

A weekend away...

Well, after the seriously poor attempt at blogging last time, when my photos didn't even show up, hopefully this post will be a bit more successful!

I'm blogging tonight in a bit of a bad mood. Sometimes work stinks. That is something I have definitely come to learn! But at least this time I had some lovely memories of the weekend to think back to, and so I decided to come along here and blog about them.

Last weekend was me and my wonderful scrappy friends annual jaunt to the countryside to scrap in a cabin. Except this time it wasn't a cabin - it was a proper cottage with lots of space and lovely countryside walks all around. I haven't been too good at keeping up with this lovely bunch of ladies recently - I missed our last outing due to being on holiday in Paris (shame, I know!) and my social networking has been, to coin a phrase, absolutely pants! And since I don't live near any of them, it means that beyond the odd comment on Instagram I had become something of a hermit.

You wouldn't have known it though - everyone was just as welcoming as usual, and in fact more than that, they made me feel so much better about a whole heap of things. I can only say to them - thankyou so much for a lovely weekend. You have even managed to get me a bit hooked on the scrapping bug again. I have (gasp!) purchased some stash. I may even use it. Though I will probably need to go through a whole lot of old stuff and sell it to cleanse my tortured scrapbookers soul, which is weighed down creatively by the guilt of so much unused and unwanted old stash hanging around. Watch this space - I think ebay might be getting a visit from me soon!

Anyway, thought I'd share some of the pages I made. These were done using on old Cocoa Daisy kit (from about 2008 I think) which we decided made it officially vintage which is kind of cool. These pages are all about our weekend in Paris with my mum and dad last October - we had such a good time, Paris was beautiful, even in the Autumn. I would definitely go back there, although I would definitely avoid going back the bar opposite the Opera House which charged me nearly £20 for a small and very disgusting cocktail made of whisky which I then felt obliged to drink. Mental note: always work out what exchange rates are before you start - the euro is NOT the dollar!

So first up we have Notre Dame, which we did queue outside of in the cold and then proceed to climb up, despite the woman in front of us nearly collapsing with an asthma attack (unfortunate!)...

And next we have the view from the Eiffel Tower (which we didn't go righ to the top of because my Dad nearly gave himself a coronary when he saw the length of the queue. He is not a patient man, my father!) As always with Cocoa Daisy, the kits are put together so well that the pages almost make themselves.

I made a few other pages, but they are going to go up on the Papermaze blog before I can share them here. Who knows, maybe this will be the start of something beautiful again? And if not - at least I've blogged Rach!