I'm in Stitches

I got back from CHA (more on that later) on the 14th of February, picked up a hire van on the 15th and packed it, drove up to Birmingham and built the booth on the 16th and had a blast. There are so many people that I met for the first time and others who I was meeting up with like they were the old friends that they are.

It was great to see Alain and Tim were over in the UK again, but I don't envy either of them their gruelling schedules for the next few weeks. Becks and Leandra looked to be having a great time at the PaperArtsy booth, Wendy Rhodes was having a great time on her own little booth (although, without power for her heat gun until two hours before the end of the show) and as always, it was really amazing to see Barry Short again. Kim from Spellbinders was looking wonderful (albeit rather jet-lagged) and introduced me to Peggy Budfuloski from LuminArte who gave some of her lovely Radiant Rain shimmering mists. Joanna Sheen was having a great time with the people from Sakura and was very admiring of the Scrapperdashery range of papers.

I also got to meet a lovely woman, who is incredibly talented (and said all the right things about my papers) by the name of Traci Cornelius, who as well as teaching, demonstrating and designing, runs her own business. Go over to her blog and find out more about her. I also got to meet a talented crafter by the name of Els Van de Burgt who took away some of my paper to play with and came back with some amazing things using Sakura pens.

So many people were interested in Scrapperdashery products that I didn't get much of a chance to get out and meet as many people as I would have liked, but lots of them came to see me.

I have to thank Peggy Budfuloski for the Radiant Rains as I'm having so much fun experimenting with them and I also need to thank Kristen Highberg for giving me a Big Shot and some dies to play with. I'll post something as soon as I can clear the remnants of the stand out of the office and get to my desk.

Colorado - at the foot of the mountain

I'm here in Lafayette with my friend, Jen Lowe and we're having a fantastic time.

But I digress.

I've been in the USA for a week and I haven't told you of any of my goings on. I met with Product Performers in Chicago who will be launching my papers at CHA in 5 days time. I got a chance to teach at Stampology Chicago all using Scrapperdashery paper. At present, Stampology Chicago is the only store in the USA that you can buy Scrapperdashery paper, but after CHA that will all change.

Here are a couple of the Cheque Books made by the women in my class. I was very impressed as it was blowing a snowstorm outside and some of them came way across town to meet me and do the class.

My hosts in Chicago were Ken and Judi Petersen. Ken owns Product Performers who distribute a lot of great products for different companies like Ranger and now, Scrapperdashery. Judi and I took the tour of the Frank Lloyd Wright House and Studio and more inspiration has hit this head of mine.

I taught another class on Saturday making two greetings cards. My cards are very rarely simple ones. If my husband asks me to make up a card, I generally need three days to get something together: One day to clear my work space, one day to think of a design and another to put the design together.

The Stampology people were wonderful (pictured right are: Dave, Gloria, Me, Sue and Chris). On Saturday after the class, they took me out for BBQ.

On Sunday morning, Ken put me on a plane and here I am in Lafayette. Jen and I are having so much fun. I will post some of our creations when they're finished. There are some people coming over to play tomorrow and I (unfortunately) have to fly out on Thursday (pray for snow, people. If I get snowed in in Colorado for another two days I get to play for a little longer).

On Sunday I'll be at CHA on the Product Performers booth. If you're going, come down and see me!

Shrink Plastic - the world 10 times smaller

This is not a great photo because I don't have any artificial lights that I can use with my camera and at this time of year, the moments of good natural light are few and far between.

I was recently asked to teach a class on shrink plastic. This was supposed to be one of the items that we'd do in the class (although my plan had been to get the students to colour and decorate theirs) but it takes nearly two sheets of plastic to do this and I neglected to mention to the store owner that she needed to get in lots of shrink plastic.

It uses one of the Creative Expressions trunk box stamps, stamped onto shrink plastic four times with either StazOn or Jet Black Archival (if you're using Jet Black Archival you need to leave it for longer to set). Each panel is then cut out and decorated, then shrunk independently as you can't get shrink plastic to bend once shrunk - well, not easily. These are stuck together using a really strong glue. I've used E6000, but that is so difficult to buy in the UK. Any good strong glue that dries clear will do the job. I started by sticking the front and back panels to the bottom. Then I stuck the flaps to the front panel and the flaps inside the box to the back panel. The flaps for the bottom were stuck on the outside. Then, I stuck two of the little tabs to the edges of the top panel, waited until it was dry, then attached the flaps to the top panel on the outside edge so that I could angle them outwards a little so that they would fit neatly over the top.

Ah, gay Paree

Paris is wonderful. If money were no object, I'd be happy to live there. But until I can speak the language better, it is not something that I would do.

Getting to Paris was easy. Get the train from our local station to Paddington, then Tube it to St Pancras. We thought we'd be able to withdraw and change money there, but no, everything isn't open yet. So we grabbed a snack and checked in. We left on the Eurostar just after 12 and 2.15 hours later, we arrived at Gard du Nord. Metro'd it over to our hotel and dumped our bags.

We walked up towards Bastille and I whipped out my camera - only to discover that I'd left the card back in the printer at home. We found a shop that sold cards and continued walking to Bastille where we found a North African restaurant to have dinner in. It was a little disappointing as far as North African food goes, but then we both like exciting food.

The following morning after a leisurely breakfast, we caught the Metro up to Clignancourt where you'll find the largest flea market in Europe with over 2000 stalls. Unless you're looking for rip off Dolce & Gabanna or similar, it isn't cheap. We had crepes and other great street food for lunch and walked our feet off. I found a great store that sells any number of watch parts that you might want. I picked up about 30 watch faces for €10. I saw some really cute old Lâncome ointment tins but he wanted €4 each and I didn't think they were worth it.

We caught the Metro back into the city, made our way to the river and walked to Pont Neuf where we picked up a boat tour and went up the Sienne where the picture of the Eiffel Tower was taken. We then went up to the Jewish Quarter in Marais and found a lovely Jewish restaurant where we were served a variety of things that went with bread until we were stuffed. We tried to get to see a movie but the only cinema nearby was only playing things dubbed into French. We gave up and went back to the hotel.

On Monday morning, we had another leisurely walk to Bastille, this time following along the top of the Viaduc des Artes which is an old railway track that has been converted into a green space running nearly all the way into Bastille, so named for all the little shops located in the railway arches underneath. We picked up the Metro at Bastille and went up to Montmartre, where we found the most wonderful fabric shops. Although I was tempted by lots, I restricted myself to six metres of the most wonderful purple/red shimmer fabric which I hope to have made into a blouse.

We had lunch in a lovely little brassarie and learned a great lesson for Paris: if you want good food, stick to what the French know how to do best - French food. After lunch it was a trip on the finicular up the hill to Sacré Coeur - beautiful but they don't allow photography inside. However, we did do the roof walk and got some fantastic photos - look, there's the Eiffel Tower again.

We gave into buying a few things in the local souvenir shops but managed to avoid the artists who were touting for business and started the gentle stroll down the hill taking photos as we went. You see, Zandy has a new camera (a beautiful Digital SLR) and so everything became a photo op.

We got back down to the main drag and walked along to Blanche and found a lovely patisserie that was doing baklava and suchlike and each picked up a snack. We walked down to the Moulin Rouge and took a few photos - well, I did anyway. Zandy's camera can't cope with as low-light situations as mine can.

Having caught the Metro back to Odeon we found a cinema playing English-language films and saw "Lions for Lambs" - fantastic movie, highly recommend it.

Tuesday was our last day and we really only had a half day. We went down to look around Notre Dame. Now, they have no problem with you taking photos as long as you don't use flash - so we took lots and lots of photos. The scale of the place is impressive. However, I'm less impressed than I would have been 16 years ago, because there are so many wonderful churches in Britain that (in my opinion) equal or better Notre Dame.

Still, the scale of the place is amazing and you can spend a lot of time wandering around it and still not see it all. We crossed over onto the south bank and wandered around until we found another cute brasserie to have lunch in. Our order had just been placed when our friends Lana and Toni discovered us, so the four of us had lunch together.

It was then back to the hotel to pick up our bags and head back to Gard du Nord where we arrived for our train with less than 10 minutes to spare.

Arriving back at St Pancras, we decided rather than rushing back to Paddington to get the first train out, hitting the rush hour and therefore probably not getting a seat, we instead went to one of our favourite restaurants behind Euston station before coming home at a leisurely pace.

I love Paris in the fall - Packing to go.

It's funny: when I pack to go on holiday, I have a methodology for working out what I need to take that starts with how many nights I'll be staying (in this case, three), then how much walking I'll be doing (lots) and how cold it will be (very). Normally, I would then pack my three warmest items of clothing, my most comfortable shoes and my warmest coat.

But this was Paris and you don't go to Paris in just anything.

I packed two pairs of my best jeans, then tops that would look nice on their own, but could be layered with other items and still look good. On the footwear front, I conceded that my walking shoes would have to be taken because there is no other way I can walk around any city for three days in anything less, no matter how grungy they look. And although it is the warmest coat I own, there was no way I was going to Paris in my flourescent yellow jacket with reflective stripes on it, so my full-length winter coat with fake fur collar was taken.

OK, there are limits to how good I'm going to look given the base that I have to start with, but the yellow jacket would have had people asking me directions and that wasn't an option.

Uploading photos - Vista, Grrr!

I've got some photos of work to put up and now I've found another snag that is preventing me from doing so: Windows Vista!

I can't find my original install disks for my Nikon camera (but it was bought when my computer was XP and Vista was just a beta product in Microsoft's eye), so I went to Nikon's website to download the appropriate stuff. Can't find anything there quickly. Knowing that I'm running out of time, I figured I'd just put the card into the card slot on my printer. Guess what? Vista doesn't recognise the card reader on my printer.

So, the only way I can currently read photos from my card is to put it into the PCMCIA converter I sensibly bought when I got the camera, and insert that into the PCMCIA slot on my laptop. Slight snag there: the laptop only has a 20Gb hard drive on it and it is too full to take all the photos on my card, so I have to send it to a shared folder on my desktop.

Anyway, the long and the short of it is: I won't have any pictures up just yet, but I made a really cool thing with shrink plastic the other day that I want to post, so as soon as I can, I'll have photos up there.

Blog Tagging

Oh no, Jen's tagged me. This is a problem because I'm not sure that I know 7 people who blog. I'll start with one and see if I can add others.

Here are the rules:

1. Link to the person that tagged you and post the rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 random and/or weird facts about yourself (on your blog, we all want to know them).
3. Tag 7 random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
4. Let each person know that they've been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog

And here are my 7 random facts:

1. I trained as a professional dancer - but you wouldn't know it looking at me now.
2. I am a computer geek who has the ability to talk to people - a rare thing in this day and age.
3. I've never had a career. I've fallen from one job to the next which has resulted in where I am today.
4. I constantly struggle with my artwork. I am often disappointed that what appears from my hands does not resemble what was in my head.
5. I appear to be very outgoing. However, I have a very negative image of myself.
6. I can block out things around me and focus fully on one task regardless of the mayhem ensuing around me, but turn on the TV and I can't do anything else.
7. My dream is to have a successful business running from my own back garden shed, with my (as yet, unborn) children with me.

I'm tagging the one person I can think of now and hope she doesn't mind. Then as I find more people, I'll tag them too.

Sally Lynn
Becky

Shiny... Shiny...

It is here. The photo isn't as good as the publicity shot from Antec because I don't have a clean, white room to photograph it in. You can see all the cabling around it and just to the left of the photo you can see DH's computer tucked away. My laptop is sitting on the top and you can see my Quickutz Silhouette reflected in the front door.

It really is as shiny as I thought it might be. Now, the question is: do I Alcohol Ink it or leave it shiny and plain?

Altered computers - what will they think of next.

The cheek of some people

My day job is a computer consultant. I provide help, advice and goods to people whose lives are so busy that they don't have the time to do the research that I can do for them. One of the services I provide is sourcing computer equipment for them. Basically: they tell me what they want to do with a computer, outline all their issues they're having with their existing solution and I solve all those problems.

Mostly, I end up building computers specifically geared for their needs. You know: buy all the separate bits and put them together.

When I first set myself up doing this, I registered as a reseller with a supplier. In order to get an account with them I had to practically sign my life away in blood. I had to provide company registration documents and sign a lengthy legal agreement which said that I was buying these items specifically to resell and not for my own personal use. The upshot of this was that I was supposed to be able to buy this equipment a wholesale prices.

The wholesale prices that I'm getting just simply don't allow me to make any money at all. If I compare the prices I can buy individual items for with items on the Internet, my supplier might be one or two pounds cheaper. But, if you add their £14.95 standard charge on the top, when some of these Internet places will ship for free, suddenly their prices aren't at all attractive. Additionally, I don't have to sign any legal agreements with these people, nor do I have to provide them with any proof of my company. In addition, these people have a consumer-inspired returns policy which allows me to return something if I a) don't like it or b) ordered the wrong one by mistake - neither of which I can do with my supplier.

The only advantage that I can see for working through my current supplier is that I can usually get everything from the one place and this didn't use to be the case. But the competition have stepped up their game and I'm now finding that 9 times out of 10, I can get everything from one of the competition.

For example, I'm looking for a really spiffing case to replace the case of my computer which I've just sold to a customer. I've bought three cases from the Antec Performance One series for customers and I really like them. They've brought out a Special Edition (pictured above) with shiny polished case. Technically, under my agreement with my supplier, I'm not allowed to purchase this for my own use. However, I've just found it on another site for .30p more than my supplier is selling it, but with free P&P, making it £14.65 cheaper. I've ordered it and it should arrive on Tuesday - providing I'm around to receive it.

If wholesalers like mine aren't prepared to go argue with the manufacturers about the prices generally available to the Internet stores, I could be sent out of business. My only saving grace is that the majority of my customers don't come to me for cheap prices, they come for good quality service - which they get, every time.