In the cool of the night :)

Just finished two night shifts and despite feeling like i was just taking drunk people to hospital, it was nice working when the temperature had dropped :) also at this time of year it's only dark for about 6 hours so is easier to get through a 12 hour shift.

It was my brother-in-laws 30th birthday at the weekend and my sister did a brilliant job of hosting the BBQ and looking after 50 guests, she's a great house wife! Dad was the BBQ chef and everyone had a great time :) HAPPY BIRTHDAY ANDY!! the next time the whole family is together is at my cousins wedding in 4 weeks time, very excited.

I had hoped that the following layout would get into the scrapbook magazine but because they've decided not to publish it, i can post the layout here:

I finished my boyfriends album for his first year at med' school. I'm pleased with how it's all turned out and to see how my style has changed even in this last year! Below is a couple of pages showing him and his class mates practicing their clinical skills.

Went to the cinema with grandma this afternoon to watch 'My Sister's Keeper'. It was a really lovely movie but was such a tear-jerker, i definately recommend it :)

Published and Commissioned!

The scrapbook magazine arrived in the post this morning with my layout printed in the reader gallery, so excited!! The theme was 'dreams and milestones' so the blurb next to my layout is a bit cheesy but i'm pleased with how it all looks :)

I've also been commissioned to put together an album for the wedding present of a family friends daughter. She has given me a heap of photo's and memorabilia so i'm looking forward to putting it altogether :) however she prefers a more minimalistic style so i'm going to have to really restrain myself when it comes to the amount of embellishments and colours i use! i guess it's like renovating a house to sell, you need to put the buyers taste above your own. will be a fun project though :)

Below is a closeup shot of the main layout further down. The patterned paper (cars and trucks) came through the post a couple of days ago. I ordered a few sheets of patterened paper online when i was at my boyfriend's house and he treated me to them (thanks baby :)

Been at work the last couple of days, nothing too exciting, on a late shift today then got three days off, woop woop!

Back to work and some random layouts....

Back to work today and what a day it was..... kids having asthma attacks, a lady having a heart attack, a pregnant lady having contractions very prematurely :( and a man who had passed out because he was laughing so hard that he couldn't breath properly!! and then the thunderstorm started. It was like a tropical monsoon and was causing havoc within minutes! One ambulance got struck by lightning which caused water to pour in through the hole in the roof, a fast response car got stuck in deep water in a tunnel which created a rather large tailback and i was off work an hour late but hey ho, my job is rarely dull!

Anyway i haven't had alot of spare time to chill out in the scraparium so below are a few layouts from earlier this year (hopefully there'll be some fresh layouts to show you soon :)



Chilling out in the park. We love playing frisbee and have one of those fancy flying rings that David teaches himself tricks with :) The sentence under the photo is one of david's funny one liners but is related to medical terminology so therefore can't be enjoyed by everyone, sorry.

Coming home from California. I scraplifted the idea of using three photos in a row with a whole line of embellishments above, quite like the simplicity of it but still with detail to enjoy :)

And finally.... a page about my trip to the 'Body World' exhibition at the O2. It was fascinating and wierd and very educational. My favourite section was that of 11 tiny embryos from 2 to 12 weeks of development after conception. It's so incredible to see the rapid level of growth and tiny arm and leg buds developing so early in the embryos life, very cool :)

The annual family gathering for Grandad's BBQ!

From left to right: my brother-in-law, my sister, me and David :) What a good looking bunch!

Grandad was game for a laugh and let his posse of granchildren show him what we're made of!

The granchildren (in age order) looking gorgeous :) the trampoline was by far the best toy investment my parents made!

So yesterday was the big annual family gathering for my grandad's birthday BBQ. It's great to get together with everyone and play in the garden, chat, indulge and mess around on the trampoline :) The weather was gorgeous and the food was delicious, a nice day all round :)

Travels with Beth :)

Four years ago I went to India for four months (as part of my gap year) and had the pleasure of the company of Beth (from Canada) :) We clicked immediately and were inseperable! Since then we've been on more world travels including Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt and touring around Paris. We are brilliant friends and great travel buddies. We plan on still travelling the world when we're old and wrinkly, with our husbands in tow!

Next week Beth is coming to England for a 24 hour stop over on her way to Africa and i can't wait to see her! These are some layouts of our adventures together :)


I wonder how many engagement rings have been dropped from the top of the Eiffel Tower!
We visited the tower in the evening and it was lit up with thousands of sparkling lights, so cool ;)


You'll need to click on the photo to read the text. We went through so many emotions together in India but had an unforgettable time in the school and on our two week trip to Darjeeling with the crazy public transport!

Arabian Princesses....in contrast to our accommodation in India we stayed in a seriously luxurious hotel and it was a bit of a shock to the system! The snorkelling and trip to Cairo were the highlights (and making a movie by the hotel swimming pool, which i dont think the other guests appreciated!)

A mini book of memory verses :)

Well here's my latest creation.... a mini book to write down some of the best verses from the New Testament. I read a small section of the bible each morning and wanted to record (scrapbook stylie!) the bits i enjoyed the most (will write the verses in over the next couple of weeks :) The basic mini book is by Maya Road, i love their chunky products which are really easy to alter and have a tin of the sheer journalling cards which seem to be lasting forever! I've also used some cosmo cricket paper (girl friday range) and paper by Daisy Bucket (that has some yummy colour combinations!). The mini rubber frame and pink chipboard letters are by Love, Elsie (who's book '52 scrapbook challenges' is one of my favourite sources of ideas :)

Got lots of jobs on my list today but they're all a bit dull (stuff like tidying and emails) so am going to put on some loud power ballads by beyonce and whitney houston to liven things up! Went shoe shopping yesterday to look for something suitable for my cousins wedding. Was looking for some funky brown wedges to match my green (ebay) dress and after dragging around the shops with my sympathetic auntie i found the perfect pair in Primark which were dicounted to £6! so chuffed, good old primark eh :)

swimming and chilling :)

Had a chilled out day, went swimming with my cousins although all the fun stuff like the flumes and rapids were shut so we ended up just floating about and having a girly chat. Have also been trying to organise a day in the maternity department of my local hospital (as part of my paramedic course!) so that i can shadow a midwife and hopefully see a cesarean section but have so far just been passed from pillar to post, will be more pesistant tomorrow!

Whenever i travel to another country i try and get a photo of a local ambulance there and have been working on a scrapbook over the last couple of years to compile all these pictures. So far i've got photos of the river ambulance in venice, the bicycle and stretcher-trailer ambulance in rural malawi and ambulances from Argentina, Ireland, the USA, Italy and Poland. I am therefore always on the lookout for medical themed embellishments ('Me and my big ideas' and 'Sandylion' offer a good selection :) these also double up as good embellishments for pages in the scrapbook i'm making for my boyfriend (who is at medical school) and for thankyou cards when i've been on a hospital placement.

Here goes ............

hi everyone, so this is my first post, venturing into the vast world of all things technological (i am about as a computer literate as your average 99 year old!) but hey ho i'm very willing to learn and absorb things quickly so lets hope it all goes well :)
i love browsing other peoples blogs and now that i've had a one of my layouts published, i thought i'd join the gang and share some of my creations with you.

some recent layouts....

here's a small sample of some of my recent layouts. The skeletons page was recently published in Scrapbook Inspirations and i have another layout featuring in next months issue which is rather exciting! there's also a layout of my 'chance meeting' with some fellow paramedics on a recent trip to California. My mum and i were walking along the high street of a small town and came across a minor road accident. The driver didn't want to go to hospital so i took the chance to chat with the paramedics and find out some trans-Atlantic similarities and differences in our jobs!

In my layouts i like using one large photo that fills most of the page and then adding embellishments down one side. I also love using lots of different textures in my pages such as plastic, wood, metal and card which add dimension and that touchy-feely element :)