Welcome baby......

I love this little baby image from the Emma Canning Cd for Polkadoodles called Digistamp Heaven

and I also love this little sentiment stamp, I have had it ever since I started cardmaking, such a sweet sentiment - I put it on the inside of the card.....

and here is my card, simple and clean looking, just right for a tiny new person! The baby blocks stamp was a dollar stamp by Studio G

I was doing a bit of research into birthday sentiments today, and one that cropped up a lot was 'you can't have your cake and eat it'. What's that all about, what's the point of having cake if you can't eat it? What are you supposed to do with it if you can't eat it? Frame it? Give it to the dog? Put it out for the birds? Let it dry out and use it as a footrest? Just saying....

See you tomorrow x 

Market Day....

Yesterday, it was market day in Keswick, so of course we had to go for a browse - I love markets. I wasn't so pleased when I saw a top I had bought in a shop the previous day for £35, on sale in the market for £25! Mind you, the prices were obviously so reasonable I had to buy another top and some trousers (pants for USA friends!) from the market...well, it seemed to make a lot of sense to me. We stocked up with some lovely local cheese, and lemon curd and I even picked up a couple of Christmas presents! 

the drive there was glorious..........

and who wouldn't love to live in this gorgeous cottage we passed, the climbing plants, pretty cottage garden, and even the line of washing drying in the sunshine - it all seemed so perfect.... 

I am posting the other two tags I made for Letraset's post yesterday, I know some of you who use your phones have difficulty following links, so here they are. You still need to go over there for the step by step instructions though

This next one was a real experiment that I made last week when I was playing around with the Heritage Cricut cartridge, and the punny sentiments from the old Stampin Up set, called Furnished with Love. I just cut a lampost to use with the sentiment, and it was such a skinny little thing, I cut another one, and a fancy fence, and mounted them onto a card that I had sponged with distress inks. I tried to leave the areas around the lamps quite light, so that it looked as if they were radiating light. I suppose it would be quite a good male card as it is graphic and without fancy flowers and stuff. Mind you, my particular male would wonder what else I bought at that market if I gave him a card like this, he would look at me with great suspicion!

 There is a great offer over at Polkadoodles this week - buy a CD and get a fabulous Christmas CD FREE. You get free worldwide shipping as well, what a bargain



We go home today, sigh. See you tomorrow x

'Metal' Flowers for Letraset

It's my turn to post over on the Letraset blog today, I made some 'metal' flowers

which I turned into Christmas tags - to see the other tags, and how I made the flowers go HERE

No photos of the lovely Lakes from me today, mainly because it has been a rather soggy day. We went to Bowness, which was heaving with holidaymakers, and the rest of the day has been spent watching very soggy walkers in waterproofs trudging up the very steep hill outside the cottage. Mind you, not everyone trudges. There are some superhuman types here, some who cycle up the steep hill without taking a breath, others do it sooooo slowly, each turn of the pedal taking huge effort, the strain showing on their faces. Then there is the woman, who, every single day sprints up the hill as though she is competing with Usain Bolt, disappears around the corner, then reappears a few minutes later, presumably having done a quick two mile dash around the village. She repeats this about twenty times. Now while I admire this perseverance, watching the gritted teeth and pain on some faces, it  makes me rather glad that I am a tortoise, not a hare - I find it quite exhausting just sitting in a comfortable chair watching them!

See you tomorrow x

Owl Sanctuary............

Yesterday, we went to Kendal, a pretty little market town to do some shopping. There was a display of gorgeous owls, birds that lived in a owl sanctuary....... 

there were little ones.... 

a snow white one....

and this fabulous eagle owl, called Oscar....

I put on the falconry glove and was allowed to let him perch on my arm (he was heavy!). I look quite nervous!

 I saw this sign in a shop, for some reason, I was very tempted to buy it....but resisted, it would just be another reminder of how messy creative I am

and it was a lovely drive home, past Lake Windermere, the largest lake in the Lake Districe.............

and on to today's card, my very first Christmas card for this year, made last week at home. I bought the Memory Box snow globe die last year, and had never done anything with it, so when I saw that they had bought out some new Christmas stamps which fit perfectly inside the globe, I had to get one. This was my first attempt, done quite quickly, but it did give me some ideas for using the die and stamp. Watch this space to see how those ideas work out - I see a lot of glossy accents featuring, and maybe an aperture or two! The shaped card and sentiment is from Craftwork Cards, I got the Memory Box stamp from Simonsaysstamp in the USA. I used distress ink pens to colour the stamp........ 

I sprinkled the image with some Frantage embossing powder, the blue circle was cut with the George cartridge and my Cricut

See you tomorrow 

Soaking it up....

As you all enjoyed the photos yesterday, I have been doing my roving reporter for the Buggy Times again today (slightly hampered by the fact that I forgot to put my memory stick back in the camera, otherwise you would have had a nice photo of a cup of coffee as well...........boring, so we won't stress about that)

Here is the old mill in the village of Ambleside where we are staying...........

Everywhere you go, the little cottages have such pretty gardens with lavender and plants tumbling over the dry stone walls...........

and here is my friend Anne (who invited us here to stay with her, thanks Anne!), sitting in front of the old bridge house in the village

One amusing little anecdote, some Japanese tourists were standing in the middle of a country road here,  having their photos taken - they obviously didn't realise that it was a road ( it probably looked nothing like the freeways of Tokyo), until the person with the camera started waving and shouting at them (obviously saying, get out of the way, there's a car coming). They carried on smiling and nodding for the camera, then looked back over their shoulders. The jolly smiles changed to alarm, and they shot to the side of the road, the last time I saw anyone move that quick was when Mike spotted a snake in Florida..............

On to today's card, made with a Whimsy stamp - every so often it is nice to pull out a stamp that needs very little colouring. I found my sewing machine on my newly tidy desk, so that came in useful as well....

I grounded the duck with some random lines of pale blue to look like water, and splashed drops of glossy accents onto the blue to look a bit like puddles 

See you tomorrow x

7 I love the Lakes.....

A card which sort of evolved into an 18th birthday card today - in the UK, 18 is when you become 'of age' and can vote, drink and legally do everything else that adults do......the key is a bit of a symbol for that age - the key of the door

The image is from the Emma Canning CD from Polkadoodles, I coloured her with ProMarkers, I thought she looked good on a step card.... 

We wandered around Grasmere yesterday a lovely little village in the heart of the Lake District, I took some photos, I know those of you overseas love to see photos of the English countryside....this was the view as we walked along the road leading to the village

How about this for a quintessential English graveyard - I love that tree!

The Parish Church is so ancient....

and has a beautiful vaulted ceiling....

the ropes leading up to the belfry, which ring the church bells

and how do you fancy sitting here for a quiet coffee?

Then we spent ages looking around Dove Cottage, which was the home of William Wordsworth, one of the most famous English poets, who was poet laureate to Queen Victoria. The house was fascinating and filled with furniture that belonged to the family - I loved it. The little sign looks like a 'for sale' sign, it's just a sign announcing the name of the cottage and the opening times!

Another peep at my holiday wanderings=/?0 tomorrow. Have a great week x

Thank You

Firstly, today's card. In my massive clean up I found another very old stamp set from Stampin Up called Furnished with Love. I only kept it because I liked some of the sentiments - the images are too small for my taste (I often find that Stampin Up stamps are really small, and I like BIG)

So here's the sentiment.............

which led me to my Cricut and gypsy. I seem to have lost the charger for the gypsy, oops, hope I didn't throw it away by mistake during the cleaning frenzy. So gypsy dead, I leafed through some cartridge handbooks and found this chair on the Heritage cartridge. It was a very simple die cut, no layering, but I liked the shape......

so I cut it twice, once in black and once in a tiny flower print and trimmed the back and seat parts to fit. I found some old black screen mesh and thought it would look a bit like woven cane, I really like the way it turned out. The colours aren't very true in the photo, the background of the pattern paper is more green than yellow.......

Thank you all so much for responding to my post on commenting. I felt quite guilty that I was putting you all to so much trouble - it was more concern that I had stopped getting comments from 'regulars' that made me post, I didn't mean to whip up a comment frenzy. Of course, one of you knew the answer - thanks Barbara. She reminded me that I changed the settings before I went on holiday, and I have changed it back so that anyone can comment again - you don't need a google account or anything. I have switched comment moderation back on, so your comments won't show until I've checked for spam. I did love reading your comments yesterday though, you made me feel very loved and made my day! There were a couple of people who said that because they got emails, they sometimes wanted to ask a question and had to go through all their favourite blog lists to get here. When you get your email, there is Going Buggy in quite a pale script, just above the post heading, if you click on that 'Going Buggy, it will bring you straight here.
Anyway, thank you all again for all your support, I really appreciate you all.

We are heading up to the Lake District tomorrow for a week, so expect scenic photos and tales of sturdy walkers. I will be blogging from there every day as the trusty laptop is going on holiday with me. See you then x 

Petal Card Tutorial using Elegant Edges Cricut Cartridge

I did this tutorial a while back for a design team project over on Scrappy-goLucky - Mandy has closed her store now, so I thought I would share it with you

First I cut four cardstock circles with a fancy edge at 4 1/2" using Elegant Edges....

then cut two plain circles out of pattern paper at 4" - cut these in half 

Score your scallop circles down the middle........

and sharpen the creases with a bone folder..........

Stick the pattern paper to one half of the scallop circles.....

Now comes the tricky bit. Take one circle with the fold line going horizontally, and place another circle with the fold showing vertically so that it overlaps. Make sure your pattern paper sides are on the unglued sides.....

these next two photos show you where to glue......

and line up your pieces....

this photo shows three of the 'petals' in place - a photo is better than a thousand words!

and here I have all four pieces joined together.....

cut strips of card to make a pretty 'belly band' to hold the card closed

and here is what it looks like when decorated and finished,, the flower is stuck to the belly band, which slips off, I used the embellished floral cartridge to cut that....

and the petals open to show your message. I cut a scallop square to cover the joins on the bottom......it would make a pretty way to present a gift card, or slip some cash into a little pocket on the inside...

Don't worry if you don't have this particular cartridge (or a Cricut for that matter) you could use a circle cutter and cut plain circles, or use one of the many scallop circles available from the Silhouette store if you have a Cameo. 

Now I have to ask if anyone has been having problems leaving comments on here? I had a few emails a while back when I was running a prize draw, saying they were having problems commenting, but I haven't heard anything since. I have been looking at my stats and although there were 187 visitors here yesterday for instance from around the world,  (which is an average sort of daily figure, email subscribers don't show up in the statistics), there were only a very few comments, and this seems to be a trend lately, now this tells me a couple of things are possible:
1. My cards are rubbish! (sad face) OR
2. I am spending hours on here talking to myself. HELLLOOOOO anyone there? I have my faithful bunch of blog friends who, bless them, comment every single time I post so I know that not everyone has a problem, but I would really like to know if anyone is experiencing difficulty. It may just be that we all lead such busy lives that it's just a matter of time, and that's fine. But if it's broken, I need to fix it

While I am on this sort of subject, I have had a couple of people under the impression that I make money from Going Buggy. Nope, nada, zilch, not a penny, in fact I spend quite a bit of my own money sending out various prizes when they don't come direct from the sponsor. I do get products sent to me, and of course when you are on design teams you get all their latest stuff to make samples. Magazine commissions are done on a fee paying basis, and that can be quite sporadic,  but the blog itself earns no revenue at all, it's just for fun - which it is, and I love it!

See you tomorrow x