MIA.

I guess you all thought that have been missing in action or AWOL. The truth is that I have had a really busy year, and blogging has had to take a back seat for a while. Just before Christmas, we learned that our expected first grandchild had been diagnosed at the 20 week scan with a serious heart defect (HLHS) this means that she would only have half a working heart and that she would need an eight hour operation shortly after birth. This came with no guarantees and all we could do was hope and pray for her survival and recovery. I am pleased to report that Emily was born weighing just 5lb 5ozs on the 23rd April this year and underwent her first surgery at 6 days old. To date she is doing very well,and is awaiting the second of the three operations needed to hand make her a heart. She is very cute and has a very good set of lungs on her which she uses to full advantage to let her parents know when she's not happy about something! 

In February, courtesy of monetary birthday and Christmas gifts from the family, I signed up to do a weekend craft retreat with the very talented and patient Clare Charvill of My Creative Spirit. Claire has a blog and online shop, which can be found at Mycreativespirit.blogspot.com . Her work is amazing and she is an ambassador for Graphic 45. I had never taken a workshop of this nature before, and was amazed at the amount of work some people managed to get through during the weekend. Needless to say I was very slow so didn't manage to complete the project which was an album using the Couture Graphic 45 paper collection. However, I intended to finish it later. This turned out to be much later as the events detailed above rather overtook me.
Here are some photographs of the Couture Album made during the February craft retreat.

I have long been fascinated by the construction of albums and learned a great deal during the retreat. So much so that when my daughter requested me to make an album for her, I was able to oblige and will post the pictures next time.

Thanks you for stopping by.