New Year Crafting Resolutions and Candy Winner

Good morning everyone! I hope you all enjoyed the start of 2015. As always at this time of year we start thinking about new year resolutions, our plans, hopes, dreams etc.

I have made a few plans regarding my personal life which I won't bore you with here lol, but I have also made a couple of crafting resolutions.

I decided that I really must try to leave comments at blogs more frequently.  I started not too badly last year. but the pressures of work etc got on top of me by the end of 2014 and I let it slip away from me. So my aim is to try and keep it going better this year.

I also aim to plan my time a little better regarding DT work etc so that I can keep ahead of my makes rather than rushing at the last minute.

Last year I planned to finally be brave enough to colour with Distress Inks and I achieved that and am continuing to practice with them and feel that I'm really getting the hang of them now. So for 2015 my plan is to get better at pencils...whether I actually can fulfill this one will depend on time.

Lastly after reviewing my year I think I may need to re-structure.  I'd like to work with some different stamp companies etc, and I have received a lot of offers in the past that I've had to turn down. Even taking up GDTs sometimes needs a serious look at the diary and a lot of planning and rearranging. This is mostly due to work, I work full time and I have around 3 - 4 hours travelling a day to get there and back.  So I cram as much into my free time as possible, but I only have so much to go around. This means that if I want to try new things I often end up giving up sleep, unfortunately this doesn't help at all when coping with stressful situations, so I've decided that I need to stop doing that lol.

In effect what it means is that I may have a re-shuffle later in the year where I take on new DT roles and drop others to make way, which I hate doing cos I love all my DTs, but unfortunately without winning the lottery and giving up work (not an option without as I need to pay my bills), its the only way I can expand my horizons and grow as a crafter.

Anyway, those are my admittedly very sketchy, crafty new year's resolutions. I'd love it if you would share some of your own with me.

Now to start someone's crafty New Year off with a bang, my Butterflies and Bling Candy is due to be drawn.  There were only a few of you who entered, I wasn't very active in the last couple of weeks so people may have missed it, or may not many people like these? Anyway I'll be having another Candy giveaway with some stamps, which I'll put up tomorrow, but for now I'm using Mr Random to draw my winner and he has chosen

Number 8!

That's you KT Fit Kity!

If you send me an email at linda.levoir@gmail.com with your snail mail, I can get them in the post to you by next week.

Congratulations to my winner, and for those who didn't win, I will be having another giveaway tomorrow and I'm going to open that up to blog follower and my Facebook Page followers.

Hope you all enjoy your new year and thank you so much for following me! :) xx

Butterflies and Bling Candy Giveaway

*This post will remain 'stickied' till January 2nd*

so if you're looking for a recent post, please scroll down.

Hi everyone.

As a little thank you to everyone following my blog this year I have a little end of year giveaway.  I thought that instead of doing one big giveaway, I would do a few smaller ones, breaking them down into separate categories as not everyone likes/wants the same thing.  So for my Candy today (there will be at least 2 more over the holidays) I thought I'd give away some of the bling and butterflies that I often use on my cards and that so many of you admire.  The photos really don't do them justice, mostly because my photography skills for these small items are not the best!

So....if you would like to have the chance to win these lovely embellishments all you have to do it.

1. Be a follower.  If you're not already, you can become one and still enter, but please no Candy only blogs/followers.
2. Add your name to the link up below.
3. Share the love.  You can either put a button in your side bar with a link back to this post. (instructions on how to do this can be found here). Or if you are with Wordpress or something that makes a sidebar button difficult, you can make a small post on your blog and link back from there....

and that's it! Simples!  :) xx

I'll be posting the winner after 10 am UK time on the 2nd January, so you don't have to long to wait to see if you won, and I'll post World Wide.

An InLinkz Link-up

My Favourite 5 Cards of 2014

Well I hope everybody enjoyed New Year's Eve, however you decided to celebrate (or not) and that you're not suffering for it today ;)

I've been having a little break from crafting and blogging while Christmas has been upon us, but I'll be back with regular DT posts next week. In the meantime I'll be drawing my Butterflies and Bling Candy winner tomorrow, so you still have a few hours to enter if you haven't already, and I'll be hosting another giveaway this weekend.

Last year I joined in with Debby's 5 favourite Christmas cards, but I'm a little late for that one this year, however I'm not too late for the my 5 favourite cards of 2014.   Let me tell you, this one was hard!

To be honest, I didn't realise quite how many cards I had made until I had a look back......I'm not quite sure where I found the time! lol

Anyway in no particular order (and honestly, there were several others I could have chosen instead) my 5 favorites are:

Well I guess it comes as no surprise that there's a Saturated Canary image among my top 5 (in fact there's 2) This one is coloured in Copics and I loved her with these bright colours.  You can find the full post here.

2nd up is another SC make. This time coloured with Distress Inks, I love the softness and vintage feel to this in contrast to the previous make. You can find more pics here.

It's no secret that I normally hate making boy cards. They are without doubt my Kryptonite.  But I've included this one because I was soooooo happy with the way it turned out, it's the best 'boy' card I've ever made and one of my best cards overall I think. The full details can be found here.

For a complete change, this card had no stamped and coloured image, but a printed vintage photo.  I was really pleased with this one and aim to make more vintage style cards like this in 2015. You can find full details of this one here.

The last one was the most difficult, there were several wedding/anniversary cards I really loved and also lots of my beloved Tildas, but in the end I chose this one because I really liked the contrast of the femininity of the dress and flowers and the masculinity of the gears. Plus I do love me a bit of steam punk and don't get to dabble very often.  You can find  more of this here.

Well that's all from me, if you want to play along you can find Debby's original post by following the link below.

Debby's My Favourite 5 of 2014

Have a great 2015! :) xx