A-Z starts here

The girls over at the It's a Creative World blog have an A-Z Art Journal challenge a goin' on....and I thought it might be fun to join in.

It's one page every 2 weeks, prompted by a different letter of the alphabet - so in theory by the end of the year I should have reached the letter Z.

Most of the other participants seem to be very organised, with themes, and book covers already done, and each page completed minutes after the fortnightly letter prompt comes out.

Not me :) I have no theme, and no book, and I've only just got around to doing my page for the letter A, 3 weeks late :) But I'll get there...

Here is my 'A' page - A for Alive:

The silhouette is me, in my jamas :) I'm supposed to be kind of paddling in the sea, and flinging my arms out in a joyful fashion - not walking on water lol. I don't really have a god complex, honest :D

The lyrics are Pearl Jam, and sum up a lot of how I was feeling last year, and still do up to a point, survivor guilt gets me at different levels.

But this page is mainly positive. It is fitting that this is the first page in a journal that will span the whole of 2008, as the first day of this year was a real turning point for me, left a lot of my demons behind, and stepped out of the fog.

I feel healthily alive for the first time in as long as I can remember.

That is brain healthy, not body healthy, I'm still overweight, unfit, and lacking in many vital nutrients :D

This was quick and easy to make. Selphy pic of me in my joy-to-the-world pose taken with camera on self timer balanced on a table. Background is painted with Daler Rowney pearlescent fluid acrylics and watercolour pencils. [ALIVE] is stamped and the rest is handwritten.

Next up, the letter B. for Brother.

Behind the scenes at the All Star Weekend....

This made me spit out my chocolate chip muffin :)

"Alex Ovechkin: Yes, comrades is good All-Star Games. Atlanta is full of beautiful womans who love long-terms contract. Is this true, Cosmo Kramer?"

Margee over at Sportsquee is a comic genius :)

http://sportsquee.blogspot.com/2008/01/fly-on-wall-all-star-game.html

I'm a little worried that Pronger, unhandled, might eat these children:

Andrius Kaminskas, you are on the list!

Wipe that smile off your face, mate, you're going daaaahhhnn.

Derek Boogaard, Chris Pronger and Jesse Boulerice have a new pal....

All 4 of you will be up against the wall in front of a firing squad when I start my revolution!!

This Romford thug took out both Tomas Janak and Cons' hero Lee Richardson last night in a dirty, chippy, badly officiated shambles of a game down in Essex.

Neither returned to the game.

As if we weren't operating on a short enough bench already!!!

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Get well soon lads!

Where's Waldo?

This is my entry in Jean's stamping CJ in the UKS circle.

The stamps we had to use in this book were three cute little faces from the Zettiology "quirkies" line:

I thought it would be fun to make a kind of crowd scene from the faces, and do a "Where's Wally" kind of thing. So that's how this entry came to be.

I love using masks with stamps to overlap them and create depth, so that's how I produced the crowd, on plain white card using black waterproof ink. Once finished and all dry, I sprayed the crowd with a suspension of perfect pearls in water, and then droppered Ecoline liquid watercolours onto the card while it was still wet.

Once this had dried I coloured in all their eyes with a white gel pen.

The backdrop (which I thought was the London skyline but apparently is Venice and I am ignorant and uncultured :)) is a GPP stamp designed by my buddy Michelle across the water, and the sky is just a scribble of watercolour pencils.

The main face, embossed and covered in crackle glaze, is surrounded by a metal frame with the page title ('face in the crowd') applied with rub ons.

I think that's everything. This was fun to do.

Oh....My......God....... (please read in best Janice from Friends voice)

Well....Friday night was the Swindon Wildcats quiz night. We aren't the best funded team in the league, so events like this, where the fans get together to have some fun (and the poor players are pressganged into turning up too lol) are vitally important fund raisers.

It was a brilliant night out. We had team captain Wayne Fiddes on our table. I am being generous and attributing his complete lack of either general or hockey knowledge onto his recent concussion :) Bless him. Nice bloke though.

We managed to end up 3rd out of about 15 teams, so we didn't do too bad. And no we didn't cheat at ALL, honest to goodness guvnor, but Wayne's mate Chris, and my bessie Alison and other half Ian all chipped in with a few answers despite not being there. Isn't telepathy clever?

Cons got to have his piccie taken with his hero, Lee Richardson, our young #16.

Tracey got yet another photo of her with Wayne for her shrine (her nephew told me she has a basement room full of candles and there is a little altar surrounded by photos of Wayne...I'm not sure how much truth there is in that ;) OK, I'm lying, but he did embarrass her soundly in front of our dear Captain, and his wife and mother lol

And Nelly called poor Tomas Janak to heel to have his piccie taken with me :) The pic is still on Tracey's camera at the moment, but I will add it to this post as soon as I have it. From what I could see on her camera, I was the colour of beetroot and was cringing with embarrassment :D

Edited to add, here it is. I am not constipated, I am embarrassed!!! :D

---

Fast forward to last night. A brilliant game against the Milton Keynes Lightning, who are a long way higher up the table than us, so certainly no pushovers. In the 2nd period we were sitting at 3-1 down, but we managed to pull it back to 3-3. We would have all been happy with a point, but then with virtually no time left on the clock, we got another one in and took the game 3-4. The place ERUPTED!

On a side note, at each home game, there is a "shirt off the player's back" raffle. I buy a couple of tickets each week. This week it was the turn of - you guessed it - #41, Swindon Wildcats Player of the Month for January, our highest scoring D-man (he shows up half the forwards), Janak :)

Well,I might have bought a few more tickets than I usually do :) (no, not 100s!! I bought 6, rather than the usual 2). But I was still in complete and utter shock when I WON!!!!!!!!!!!!

I was so embarrassed though, after mobbing him for autographs last week, having him accosted on my behalf Friday night, and now this :) I couldn't meet his eye as I walked onto the ice for our shirt presentation, in case he starts to think I'm a dangerous stalker :)

Luckily Connor was there to distract attention, so he got the shirt handed to him. God it SMELT. And it was dripping with sweat. Yuk :) I thought Tomas sweat might be sexy....but, nah!

:D

Thanks to Michelle for filming the momentous occasion on my phone:



All in all, what a great couple of days :)

And if any solicitors are reading, I know a tall Slovakian hockey player who might be in the market for a restraining order :)

A quick photo catch up....

1. The beautiful bracelet my fantabulous best pal made just for meeeee:

2. Me freezing to DEATH watching Connor play hockey (field not ice) in sub zero temperatures:


and 3. and 4. Connor and Scorch the Dragon (Coventry Blaze mascot. He's cheating on Willie Wildcat, such a floozie my son)

Why I love Cricut Design Studio....

This card took 10 minutes from start to finish, and that included the software crashing twice (I'll love it even more when they fix the bugs!)

Friday Fiver - 25th January

(well, it's the 26th today, but I didn't have time to do it yesterday...)

1. What are you missing?
4 way intra dimensional chats. And the Fru.

2. How do you feel?
Right now? apart from the above, pretty damn content. Just wish my graces were fighting fit.

3. What have you let go?
The ranch

4. Who have you hurt?
Loads of people, I almost always don't mean to, but I can be pretty thoughtless

5. What do you deserve?
To be happy

Happy birthday Malcy (yesterday)

And a fab time was had by all, not least the Blaze (who flattened the Cardiff Devils 8-1, wooohoooooooooooo)

I think Malc's entire family are now firmly converted hockey fanatics :)

And - nobody tell Willie Wildcat - but Connor has a new love-of-his-life, Scorch the dragon.

More pics to come when I can find my phone cable :)

Also I was given the fabbest pressie, pic of that to follow also.....

What a game, what a game, what a game, what a mighty good game

A note for anyone who has made the effort to plough right back to the start of my blog....I know my blog seems to start a little suddenly - this is because I had a pretty rotten year in 2007, and kind of wanted to start afresh in 2008, so I deleted all posts from 2007 and back.

So I'm sorry for the lack of a gentle introduction....



And yes, I'm talking about the Wildcats!!!

Fantastically entertaining game tonight at the Link. Worth the price of my season ticket all on its own :)

This game had everything, goals galore (final score was 9-6, in our favour) including a hat trick from Joel the Goal and a deuce from MVP (and all round hottie) Tomas Janak, a very contentious disallowed goal (we scored 10 really), a few fights and general high levels of physicality throughout, including the visiting netminder roughing up the ref and one of the linesmen, which was entertaining.

What else? Darby's mate Katie had her birthday do up at the game, and was surprised at the end of the 60 minutes when they called her onto the ice for a photo with the team and then presented her with Nathan Craze's stick, signed by the whole roster. HOW cool is THAT?

Oh and then to cap off a perfect evening, it was #41's turn to do autographs after the game (and Addie Brittle too, but I was slightly less excited about him, bit young for me :)) - he signed Connor's jersey and talked to him for ages (and Cons said to him "my mum is your biggest fan" lol), and then posed for pics. I look like a lunatic (and a FAT one!!!) in this photo, but chuffed to pieces :)

Oh, and tomorrow? MORE HOCKEY!!!! YAY!!!! Off up to Cov for the Blaze vs the Devils. Woohoo!!!!