5 Patterns for Daring Cardmakers, and a tale or two from Paris

The dare over on Daring Cardmakers this week was to use five pattern papers on your project, I kept it small scale and used some hexagon shapes against a stencilled background, the butterfly was a free die from a magazine

So Kath and I are back from our adventure in Paris. Once we had got over the trauma of a two hour wait at passport control to enter the country, we found our hotel, and quickly wished we hadn't......let's just say that it hadn't had a good spring clean since the last millennium. Various elements of the room didn't work, a light in the bathroom would have been a luxury, and the loo stopped flushing, at regular intervals, leading to a bizarre conversation the next morning

"Room 201, the toilet is not flushing"
"When did you notice this?"
"In the middle of the night"
"Did you report it?"
"In the middle of the night?! No!"
"You should have reported it"
"Would you have sent someone to mend it in the middle of the night?"
"No"
"Well, I am reporting it now - will you send someone to mend it?"
"No, it is too early, you should have reported it in the middle of the night"

Added to this were various incidents on the Paris Metro, where we couldn't work out the ticket machine, which took our money but failed to spit out our tickets, leaving us pressing buttons and trying to make our plight understood to some disembodied French person at the other end, while a long queue of impatient Parisiennes formed behind us, clucking and tutting at our incompetence - when it reached the point when we thought we may destroy the rather fragile French/British alliance permanently, we cut our losses and left without the tickets, until a really kind person talked us through what we had to do, after that there was no stopping us, we whizzed about on that Metro like pro's.....

The weather was freezing, I mean really really bone chillingly cold. We had both optimistically packed nice little tops, which we had imagined would look fetching as we sipped an aperitif or two on the Champs Elysee. The reality was rather different as we layered up every garment we owned in an effort to get warm, and that was just in bed in the non functioning hotel.........

Does it sound as if we had a super time? Despite all of the above, we did, we really did. We laughed until tears rolled down our faces as one disaster after another unfolded. We met some really lovely people, and some people who were so rude it was hilarious. Thanks Kath, I hope the trauma doesn't need intensive therapy to recover from........xx