When I did my last quilt class in March, just before Easter, I mentioned that I had bought two charm packs from Moda, in a range called "At the water's edge". This week, I finally made the quilt top from them. There were two packs of forty squares, so I realised that I could do a 9 x 9 square if I made up one extra, to give me 81 in total. This I did, using a small piece of spare backing from the jelly roll quilt. The quilt is as simple as possible, literally just nine rows of nine but I am very happy with it, and love the colours, those soft, faded tans,corals and blues. Here I am holding it. I finished making it up late last night.

The next stage will be to select a backing fabric and make up my quilt sandwich. I will probably go over to Busy Bees in the next few days. As far as the quilting itself goes, I will start off by quilting in the ditch round all the squares and then might think about doing something else as well. We shall see. The beauty of these smaller quilts is that they are much easier to handle when they are made up.

The next quilt to make up will be the purple one for the Gothic seventeen year old, Sarah, who will be visiting later this week for the weekend.

Andrew has a cousin called Alastair; they look alike and get on well. In 2006 Alastair and Jennifer married up in Scotland and it was a fantastic day. Fast forward, and their first child was born on Friday. She's called Rhona, and mother and baby are doing well. Here is the card I made for them. A lilac linen look card. The ribbons on the side are a lavender organza and another variegated one from a variety pack I bought. Layered up are mirror board on the base, silver card and a delightful topper. I recently bought a set of around 15 of these, a variety of images of fairies etc, mainly copies of Edwardian illustrations such as Arthur Rackham. Trimmed up, this looks lovely and the colours are delicate and subtle. Too often, new baby cards especially for girls simply resort to hideously vomit inducing pink-fests with the usual assortment of teddies, nappy pins, alphabet blocks and similar nonsense. For a start, nobody these days uses nappy pins. Anyway, it'll be posted in the morning. I will also try and post a picture of Rhona too, who looks very happy.

My latest ATCs are for a Docrafts swop on Shimmer and Shine. A while back, at my local Tesco, I noticed that they have started a small selection of craft items, and if there I often have a little browse. On a previous visit, they had reduced some very pretty holographic self adhesive papers in gorgeous vivid blues, pinks and purples, so I bought some and tucked them in my drawer.

For this swop, I used three pearlescent base cards. On the dark pink one, Iused a holographic peel off of a flower, and filled in the petals with a glue pen, then dusted with turquoise glitter. Wow! I used a green Crystal Lacquer on the leaves. Down the side were two pink holographic strips of peel off and I completed the embellishment with an adhesive pink gem heart on the base and a 3D butterfly sticker from K & Co on the top.

For the second one, I used a mid-pink pearlescent base card, and cut out a small rectangle of the dark pink holographic to stick on the base. Across the join was a self adhesive glitter pink border strip (from a set from Lakeland). On the base was a sticker saying "Believe" with a picture of a fairy from a K & Co sticker book and on the top was a shimmery Flower Fairy sticker and two matching glittered leaves. It looks lovely.

The third one was a cream base card again with the holographic dark pink attached and a similar green sparkly border. On the top was a large shimmery holographic butterfly sticker and on the base were two smaller K & Co 3D butterflies. Again, I am very pleased.

Finally I made a RAK for the lady organising the swop. I used a Jemima Puddleduck stamp that came free this week with a craft magazine. This was stamped using Black Lightning ink and embossed with a pearl embossing powder. The picture was coloured using Twinkling H2Os and the fastening of the shawl was embellished with a pink gem. I then trimmed the edges of the card using a decorative edged scissors. This was then placed on a base of a rectangle of flowery paper from an old 12 x 12 sheet. An embroidered ribbon border was applied to the base and the words Best wishes cut out using the scalloped scissors and applied to the top corner. Finished. These will be posted tomorrow.

Latest ATCs. These are for a Docrafts swop on the theme Peaches and Cream. I made three, and after some initial trepidation and a bit of faffing about, surprised myself by getting into it and wanting to make more! Here are the three I made. One features a spiced peaches recipe image, simply attached with some photo corners - nothing fancy, as I wanted the central image to speak for itself. The other two used some epoxy stickers I bought at Easter time, with lots of pretty apricot,cream and white tones. The background paper is one from a small selection pack of 6 x 6" sheets from Papermania. The middle one uses three small stickers down the left hand side with a gold peel off strip in the middle. On the right, I used a tiny tag from K & Co, with a little flower sticker on it, cream ribbon through the slot, attached with a flower brad. On the third one, I used a larger epoxy sticker in the middle of the card. K & Co photo corners in the corners, tiny butterfly stickers from a pack I bought years ago at Lakeland (and they are still going strong) with another tiny K & Co tag attached with a green brad left over from Christmas.

I hope whoever receives them likes them, and it is always interesting to see what will be coming back to me. My next ones to do are a Four Seasons swop (one card for each season) and a Shimmer and Shine swop, which I'll probably do something with Twinkling H20s with.

Tomorrow, I am going to an afternoon card making workshop at Inkspot, our local card/craft shop. I like going there - it is an old converted church on Newport Road, and has masses of stock and generally very helpful staff. This is the first time I've attended this sort of workshop there so I am looking forward to it, and hope that it goes well.

My last post for this evening. Yesterday I sent off my latest ATC cards for a swop on the Docrafts website. The theme was Stars and Moon, and you had to do a set of three, one with stars, one with moon, and one with both. All three cards were heat embossed with embossing powder to give a nice glossy base, two with a lovely deep blue, and one I was less certain about, which was a white card, inked with a midnight black inkpad and then powdered with the dark blue Moonglow powder as used on the other two. They were inked with a white inkpad though so this gave a purer blue colour. For the stars one, I used two little shooting star shapes in silver, and a variety of star stickers, quite simple but I liked it. For the moon, I used rub ons for the text, silver edging peel offs and a moon sticker. For the card for both, I used a star edging, a stick on 3D star and a pretty little sticker featuring a sleepy moon with stars around. I also added an epoxy text sticker saying "Dream". I also made a RAK for the lady organising the swop but sealed it in its envelope before I remembered to photograph it!

And now to record my first foray into scrapbooking. Keen readers will recall that my dear friend Leila recently visited for a few days. We both have digital cameras, and snapped assiduously while she was here. I decided to make her a scrapbook of her stay, so before she left, she downloaded her pics on to our computer. You often find this if two of you take pics of things - each photo stash will have caught something a little different of the same things. I attach a photo of the scrapbook I bought from QVC, which is a thing of bling and very pretty. Also, one of the first page I made. You can see I included a photo of the cake I made to welcome her, and a little map showing her route up from Devon to Cardiff. The paper is one from K & Co, that I bought from QVC during their craft day back in February. The scrapbook itself was very cheap, and in fact it came with a free smaller one, 8" x 8" - the larger one is 12" x 12". So hopefully tomorrow if I can get to the post office, I will be sending her the completed book, with a lovely selection of snaps.

Another post - this time to celebrate the wondrousness of Ikea. Like most crafty folk, there seems to be a permanent battle going on for organisation of storage of all my bits. After the Easter dog show, which left the spare bedroom looking like a bombsite, I realised it needed tidying. But to do so, I needed places to store stuff. DH showed his customary aplomb, whipping out a tape measure and tilting his head on one side in a thoughtful sort of way. Off we toddled down to Ikea, and came across the perfect bookcase cum cupboard unit, which as usual has some completely unpronouncable Swedish name. Also bought a little corkboard for the wall, which is desperately needed. Anyway, DH hammered away, aided by copious cups of tea, did a bit of rejigging and hey presto, I was able to tidy with a glad heart. I had also purchased some magazine folders, and some useful pink boxes. I went through my assorted cross stitch and craft mags and ditched the ones with patterns I knew that I would never use - the pruning helped considerably. Finally, I now have a lovely clear craft table, and neatly stowed magazines and crafting supplies. Who could ask for more?

A great deal to write about since my last post. Tonight, I'll probably do several short posts, each with photos rather than one large one which will take forever to upload. To begin at the beginning, I attach some photos of Leila receiving her jelly roll quilt. A very happy occasion, and we made a little holiday of it, which partly explains the delay in posting. In these pictures, you can see Andy the greyhound has made himself very comfy on the sofa.