An update on our Miss Mouse...

 

Thank You all so very much for your sweet words of support about our Miss Mouse! I have some good news to share with you now, but there is not as much news to report as we would like...since after all this time we are still not sure what is ailing her.

The new specialist Vet now thinks it is her liver that is irritated, and can't rule out cancer of the liver yet... but has thankfully ruled out lung cancer. What looked like a tumour on her lung was a blood vessel! All we know right now is that she has asthma (hence the blood vessel in her lung) & that she'll need to use an inhaler. But she is coughing much much less & she does seem to be feeling up to playing and cuddling and eating like a wild ravenous beastie!

I just can't thank you all enough for your kindness. I read all of your kind comments with such gratitude (though I was unable to answer each one as I would have liked to) and I feel for those of you who have lost your fur babies or who have sick ones at home. I'm sending my love & hopes & hugs right back to you all, people and animal-loved-ones alike! ox

Much Love and Thanks,
Mel & Charles & Miss Mouse.

P.S. my computer is semi-salvaged so I hope to be able to do a post soonish. :-)

some tough news here at home...

Just a very quick post to say that I'm on an unexpected blog break. My computer is broken and to though that has kept me from letting you know about my absence here, to tell the truth the computer actually seems like nothing, since we found out that our Mouse is very sick. Ultrasounds show something scary in her lung and we are still testing, hoping it's something more treatable than cancer, like an infection, but it's not responding to antibiotics, and she has a bad cough... Of course we are heartbroken & I just haven't been able to reconnect online with it all. 

Sorry for the bad news, but I feel like you are all such good friends and you've all expressed the sweetest love for our fur baby in your comments on my crazy cat lady posts, so I wanted to let you know what was going on. 

To those of you who have been lovely enough to email me about your beautiful creations with my papers, I truly appreciate it, but I haven't been able to answer and I'm not sure when I will be back in the digital world, sorry about that.

Love,

Mel

P.S. The photo is one that I took when I found miss Mouse asleep in the paper recycling tray.

wondering what's up?! ;-)

Hi All,

Yup. Another picture of our Miss Mouse, which means another one of those chit-chatty posts where I finally find the words with which I try to balance A) the desire to let you know where I am at and B) the chagrin I feel at talking about health stuff so often on here.

On one hand, I often wonder how much information is too much information (know what I mean?) And on the other hand, I feel as though I know so many of you as dear friends and want to share life with you as well as craft...

So long story short, it's just been pure survival mode with our little family over the last month or so. Odd how things get away from you and the days blur together until you look at the calendar and realize far too much time has passed without a blog post.

Emotionally things are wonderful. I'm so very grateful that my frightening chest pains (which seemed like a heart attack and sent us to the emergency ward) were not heart trouble. The reigning theory is a bad muscle pull, but I'm still trying to sort out what it is and how to heal it already!

Craft-wise, I have a lot of cards made and ready to photograph, but just can't physically get them shot. I also have quite a few compressed paper sets ready (so that you can easily download entire sets in a zip file) but can't spend the amount of time at the computer that it takes to get them all posted. (Things that make you say "grrr!") ;-)

It will most likely be another while until I am back, but I'm thinking of you and I'll be missing you more than I can say. Hope you and yours are doing oh so well and that you are enjoying the last wonderful days of summer (or whatever season it is in your part of the world!)

Love 'n' Hugs,
Mel

Squeak?

Just wanted to say how sorry I am that
I've been as quiet as a Mouse...

...for so long.


Truth be told, I've been feeling simply broken, and I think
I've just finally admitted to myself that what I thought was the Winter Blues
was really a bad case of chronic depression. (Yup, it's July, hmmph?) ;-)
Not sure why I feel so ashamed to talk about it, since intellectually I know
it's a physical medical condition just like Diabetes or any ailment, but...


So anywho, long story short:
I lost my voice rather completely,
but I'm going to try and get it back starting today!

Much Love,


P.S. Thank you so much for your lovely emails letting me know that Google Reader is sending out blank posts all by itself. I found out that Feedburner is broken as well, and I'll do my best to fix them as soon as I can wrap by migraine-brain around it all.

Hiding away with the Blues

I'm so sorry for being gone so long.
Anyone else feeling those Winter blues?

I've been taking a beating from the relentless migraine-beast

lately (and to be honest) quite a bad case of depression
that has had me feeling extremely tongue-tied in life & online,
so I've been hiding away...



(I normally have a dash of melancholy in my constitution
but not as much as recently. Winter has really konked
me over the head this year, I tell ya!)

But...
And I am working on getting ready to poke
my head out into the world again:



(and I've been pinning to try &
stay in the creative mindset)

Just wanted to stop in to say sorry for my absence &
Thank You so much for your patience. I hope you have been very
well lately & that your days are filled with creativity and happiness.

much love,


(and love from Mouse too--who is just wonderful and much healthier than
usual, lately ...knock on wood!)

sorry no posts for a while

Sorry, no posts of late. Our Mouse is doing good. We were so worried about having her fixed, but she's recovering quite nicely. Just a lot of sleepless nights trying to keep her from pulling out the stitches. She can't lift the cone up to walk around because she's so wee. Poor thing. So I have to put it on & off for her to eat etc.

And I feel very safe in saying that I'm not exaggerating when I whinge that I have never been so ill in my life. I think it must be the flu or a bad virus. Feels like both.

Hope You're all doing much better than we are in this zoo ward.

I'm not sure when I'll be able to post next, but I have a whack
of Halloween stuff that I'll be heartbroken not to show Youse,
so hopefully before then...

Happy Crafting,
xox

Some creatures can't 'resist' temptation! ;o)

Once upon a time, there was a scary snarfy
little creature lurking in the shadows...



....sniffling & sneaking up on her prey...



...and she couldn't resist devouring it! ;o)




Here's what Miss Mouse has been eating
in her spare time:


(I guess there's only room for one spooky kitty around here!)

It's a Halloween decoration
("No Duh!" hey?)
It's the size of a standard A2 card: 5-1/2" x 4-1/4" +the border.


There are holes pierced right through it...



...so that the light
sparkles through like stars...



...when you hang it on a lamp:


(I used chain to hang it, so there's no fire hazard
& just stuck the chain over the finial at the top of the lamp shade)

Wish you could see the sparkly star action in person;
it looks much better in real life.



It started out as these pieces:


I made this thinger for the Simon Says Stamps
resist challenge at Lily Pad Cards here
and tried to come up with a new resist technique
for the background...

So next post here will be a tutorial on how to go from
this piece of patterned paper:



to this texture:



The cat is an image from Claire Keay's Halloween extras.



I pasted a circle behind it in photoshop & coloured it as a moon
with distress inks (Mustard Seed & Pumice Stone)
then painted over that with shimmer paint.

But the cat got covered in shimmer, which looked awfully schloppy
at first, then turned out to be a happy accident when I scratched off the
paint and made fur texture on him (using a paper piercer):



It left some shimmer so it looks like he's kind of sparking in the moonlight.


(It's goofy, but I'm obsessed with texture).

The Fence:

The fence was cut free-hand from a digi patterned paper that
I made using Hero Arts Woodgrain digital stamp printed in beige
on Kraft cardstock:



The fence posts have wavy cuts in them to make them look more spooky:



To give them more grainy texture, I score lines in them using a paper piercer
(following the lines of the printed woodgrain).



The Mini Banner:

The teeny "BOO" banner was made by:

1) Typing BOO in a word document in red leaving space around them "B O O"
2) Printing it out on watercolour paper.
3) drawing triangles around them in pencil, cutting them out & erasing the pencil.
4) Piercing around the edges & stitching with yellow thread (by hand).
5) Adhering the banner triangles to the fence.
6) Piercing & stitching around them to add the blue bow & banner thread.

The Spider Web Border:



The spider web border at the bottom was made using an EK Success

large spider web edger punch (that was sent to me by the lovely Megan)
Thanks Megan. I love it!

I especially like that the web is wide enough that you could add doodling,
or little spiders in the center like these gem guys:



They are made of thread & black gems, like this...

1) Threading a needle so it has 4 'layers' of thread
2) Piercing two holes in the spider web center
3) Putting the needle through the front so it leaves the thread ends on the front
4) Holding the ends in place & bringing the needle back out front again
5) Adhering the thread at the back & trimming it at the front
6) It should look like 8 legs when you stick gems on
7) Adhere one black gem for the spider body & a smaller one for the head

And That's that!
Hope you're having a lovely day,

missing for a little bit...

Whoops! Looks like things are
stacking up around here a bit...

Be back to blogging soon, sorry!

Sick Mouse kitty, messy house, happy garden, icky allergies (seasonal and the ol' allergic to 3 major food groups thing) & the sweet Hubby are all needing a little too much attention!) Life has some nerve, hey!? ;)

I should have a post by early next week.
Thanks for understanding!
:O)
Mel

Damask Basket with matching box & patterned paper

Been trying to stretch out that vacation feeling, lately

but boy have I've missed you guys!

We had some great family time: a lovely visit on Vancouver Island.
We've gotten some household chores done. (With Charles's bum-knee and
my miscellaneous schtuff sometimes just getting the groceries all
stocked up feels like such a grand accomplishment!) :-D

We've also done a little happy hibernating:



(Our cat, Mouse, in a paper bag, heeheehee)

But since it's been eons since I shared a craft project,
I figured it might be time to come out of hibernation already!
So here's a printable template collection for that
curvaceous basket (now it's all doodled up with damask).

You can find the plain version linked in this older post.

You can find the whole damask set
linked here on flickr
( JPGs loaded to flickr
and links there to the PDFs on acrobat.com)

Click the pics and choose save as to save as a jpg
(or if you prefer, you can click the links before each template if you'd like to
save the page to your flickr faves or find the links to PDFs)

The basket box:

side panels for the basket:

damask patterned paper:
(to make a matching card, if you like)


jewelery box:
(2 and 1/4 inch square
1 and 1/4 inch tall)

Thanks for checkin' this out,

Mouse (the cat) reads Murakami...

Miss Mouse has been busy reading!
(And I--the crazy cat lady--have been at it again) ;o)

...

Mouse can often be found with her nose in a book:



One of Mouse's favourite authors is Haruki Murakami. Here she is
engrossed in his novel The Wind Up Bird Chronicle (for obvious reasons):



She will tell you that she is often enthralled and thrilled by
Murakami's mastery of magical realism:



Mouse gets rather grumpy if you interrupt her reading --
especially if you disrupt her enjoyment of the the last pages of a chapter
(or heaven forbid, you marr the end of the novel!):



She also detests it when you ask her stupid questions
about the narrative and will not hesitate to give you "the look":


Mouse has been known to read until she is
so very very sleepy that....

...she can't keep
her eyes open a second longer:

The End

Hope you're having a great week!