Dear reader, some of you will have no doubt read this blog forever, well I hope some of you have, I started blogging in 2003/4 and started this blog in early 2005, that seems like forever to me!

So anyway, you may have time to time encountered posts on here where I've been talking about scrapbooking, it's my hobby, the thing I do to relax, something which creatively nourishes me and stretches my arty crafty gluey persuasions for the parts photography cannot reach.  You see I love photos but I want to do something with them, I want to make albums with stories to leave for my ancestors, a kind of window on my life which the girls will inherit and then they can show their children and they can show their children etc.

My girls love to scrapbook, it's the only time they stoop fighting for more than 30 seconds, anything that can accomplish that is quite frankly a miracle!

I don't get very much time to scrapbook because business is so busy constantly but thats fine, yesterday after spending a day catching up in the office on Wednesday I gave myself the afternoon off and completed 4 pages to add to my scrapbooks, 2 of them went straight into the scrapbooks but I thought I would share a couple of pages.

I'm having a lot of fun creating things with Instagrams at the moment and I've found a couple of great companies who can free your Instagrams from the page.  Photobox.co.uk will do lovely quality 5x5 prints and printing.com will do lovely prints which look like polaroids, I'm testing another service based in Australia at the moment, I'll get back to you when I have the prints and have assessed their service.

Ask any contemporary scrapbooker what they love about the hobby and somewhere in there they'll mention the supplies and it's a really lovely treat to yourself to get all those pretty papers, stickers and embellishments.

I do think my style has changed over the years, in the peak of scrapbooking in the mid noughties we would all spend hours/days/weeks creating the perfect scrapbook page of well, sometimes quite frankly, an insignificant moment, those were the days I used to be a buyer for a scrapbooking company and also ran their design team and it was all about who could get published the most, I think we all took ourselves way too seriously, for me now it's just about having fun, it doesn't have to be the latest or greatest product (though I am still very good at scrapbook supply shopping), it's just about telling the story behind the photographs to leave a window to my world for future generations.

So while I am off photographing a wedding and the little people of the North East this weekend why don't you spend some time being creative, getting messy, and giving yourself an excuse to play, nourish your creativity and you'll be a fuller better more relaxed person whatever field you work in.

Happy Weekend dear reader!

A list for Thursday

Another personal post from me, I'm wanting to get back in touch with my blog, I want to blog more often, my blog is history, I should post more about life love and everything, after all business is just 1 part of my life!

So here's my 10 for Thursday

1. Why did my brain and body clock decide that I needed to get up at 5.30am this morning? The other night I was in bed by half eight, what on earth is going on?

2. I'm so enjoying sewing with my antique Singer sewing machine, I think we worked out that it's something like 110 years old and whenever I'm stitching with it I wonder about all the women who've stitched with it before me.

3. My brain as ever is crowded with creativity, when I'm not working I'm being creative with paper, scissors and glue.

4.  I've decided that we are going to have a TV free summer, Looby thinks this is a great idea, Abigail says she is moving out for the summer, I haven't spoken to Iain about it yet, we may not get rid of it completely ( I need my Apprentice fix) but we will majorly cut down and go out and have adventures.

5. Mollie Makes is my new favourite publication, I'm so glad I subscribed!

6. Cannot wait for school to be done and the summer holidays to commence, not a clue what we'll do but definitely a few days away to somewhere new, last year Looby and I went to Cardiff, who knows who'll want to come and where we'll go this year, I'm thinking maybe North Wales might be nice or somewhere in Scotland but no idea where.

7. Out tomorrow night to the Geekest Drink, hubby has a football meeting but is coming to meet me after, ooh it's like a proper date from the old days!

8. My first Sunday wedding of the year this weekend, I always panic about Sunday weddings on the Saturday in case I have the wrong day, it's a recurrent nightmare and even after 4 years in business I still have to reassure myself that people don't just get married on Saturdays, I should know, we got married on a Friday and renewed our vows on a Wednesday.

9. Where is all the rain this year, my gardener husband only ever feels he can take a day off when it rains, this year is the driest year ever!  Please pass a couple of days of heavy rain for the plants, the ever browning grass and more importantly so I can have a couple of days love-in with my husband.

10. I was on Radio Newcastle earlier this week, if you want to have a listen just go here and go to 2hrs 21 mins and you'll hear me talking about the sexualisation of children report and how I have a continued plan to ensure that my kids don't become Chavs or pregnant teenagers, you wouldn't believe some of the lengths I've gone to but thats another post for another day.

Happy Thursday, hold on in there the weekend is in sight

Hurrah for Scrapbooking

Back in 2003 I discovered Scrapbooking and it literally changed my life and helped lead me to the career I have now, sadly when I started my business in 2007 there just wasn't enough hours in the day and my scrapbooking fell by the wayside.

Well hurray, hurrah, hurrooh! (as Hugh Laurie once said in Blackadder) this week I have completed 7 layouts, the first pages in 4 years and as we've just bought a welsh dresser for the kitchen I have been able to reorganise things so that if I do have a few moments spare I can devote them to my favourite hobby.

and so with a wink and a smile at the end of the loveliest week off in ages I'd like to share just a few of those pages.

and so there you have it, if you've never heard of scrapbooking this is pretty much a good introduction and if you already have then this is my style, it's sort of like my photography style really, quirky, ecclectic and above all fun!

I have to say that I find it incredibly relaxing and I'm passionate that our ancestors will know about what we got up to while we had our time on this planet, you see I love photography and the legacy of leaving boxes of photos for the future Charltons to look through but I want them to know more, I want them to actually feel like they have a link to the past, I just hope the world doesn't end before that happens, haha!