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Trying out some new dies

Well, one new die. I also tried out some black shrink plastic and butterfly dies to make some jewellery. The trick with doing this is to roll the shrink plastic and the die back and forth through your machine more than once. Black shrink plastic tends to be difficult to cut. Anyway, once I had successfully cut out the butterflies I shrunk them. The best thing to do is to shrink them on the lower setting. After they had shrunk, I painted them with the new Sparks paints I got just before Christmas, before assembling them into earrings.


The pictures don't show just how beautiful the butterflies are. It's a perfect way of doing a pair of earrings for someone.

I've also tried my hand at making a slider card. There is a mistake there, as I didn't position the background paper properly so there is a little kraft paper showing through, but overall it went well. With these ones, if you are using the spiral slider piece you need to make sure that you use foam pads in the middle as well as on the edges, or the pennies will fall out. This works really well for simple cards, and the movement of the butterfly is quite smooth. Plus it's a novel way of using up pennies!




This is the latest update on my current stitch. As you can see, I have almost finished page 4, it should be done this week. After that is one full page and a smaller page, so I should be finished in plenty of time. After that it will be back to the tiger in the heavens one.


I've just realised I have clearly got a smudge on my lens haven't I? Whoops!

The spending has gone well this week, the weight loss less so. Not only have I had 5 No Spending Days (Monday to Friday- I had to get food for work and cat food today, and had a driving lesson yesterday) but I have also not spent any money on anything unnecessary. As for the other side of my resolution? I have found that it is harder to do my 10,000 daily steps when I am on a late shift. On earlies it is easier; I can walk to work and when I get home I can figure out how many steps I still need to do. On a late shift I cannot do that, and I am not going to turn down a lift at ten at night. On the bright side I have managed to keep up with drinking water, and the walk to work counts as active exercise. I don't know whether I have lost weight, but I am not too bothered about that, which is odd considering it is my resolution. I'd like to mark my progress as the clothes I am wearing feel looser, and I feel better in myself. I have already made progress there, as I can now run up the three flights of stairs to my office without feeling like I am going to collapse. Hopefully at some point I will be able to run up them, get into my chair and be ready to talk to someone without needing at least a few minutes to catch my breath.

Ems

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