Frozen Pond, Handmade cards and Fun Clear Snail Mail.

Hello again! It's been rather windy today after the tail end of Storm Imogen. I thought I would share some pics and a video from a frosty walk a couple weeks go at the Manor. The pond was frozen and we had quite a bit of fun throwing ice onto the surface to make a really strange noise. Apparently it is because the surface ice sheet acts like a sort of drum and vibrates.

I have had a few more cards to make this month. This was a first birthday card for Little Sparkles friend. The next was for her Dedication day.

This is a card I designed a long time ago but I changed a few bits like the colours and added the butterfly.

We had some friends come up to stay for Hubbys birthday weekend and so had a blustery walk down at Lepe Beach. We had some fun skipping stones and we also found this Mermaids Purse.

We had a quick explore of Eyeworth Pond. Unfortunately the weather turned cold, wet and windy very shortly after we started walking so we had to cut it short. On a nicer day we will definitely go back. There are some bird feeders hanging up and we manged to get a couple snaps.

A Blue Tit, I spy with my little eye!

A Great Tit in the rain.

Stormy Sunset.

 I saw a cool idea on Pinterest the other day and asked if Big Sparkle wanted to try it out with her friends back in Cornwall. They write to each other quite a bit and this is a way to make a letter look a little more exciting. First she wrote her letters out then we found pretty images from some magazines and old catalogues including a recipe for rose perfume and instructions on how to make a lava lamp! We also popped in a leaflet to get a free nature information pack from the RSPB, (find it here)

 When we had gathered all the fun bits together we put some baking parchment inside our clear envelopes (they are for 6x4 inch cards, find them cheaply on ebay). Then we put the letters in and put some cuttings under the parchment and some on top for an interesting look. And of course we had to add some sequins for extra sparkle!

Then we affixed the address label to the front. I think we will get these letters hand franked at the post office so they don't have to be put through the machines, it would be a shame for them to get shredded! Big Sparkle sent her friends a clear envelope each so that they could send one back if they wanted to. I think these are a great way to make snail mail even more exciting!

I hope you enjoyed this blog post, see you soon,

Love Amber x x x

Snail Mail Parcel Swap

 Just after Christmas we received a very exciting parcel from our friends all the way over in Canada. In fact we met on Facebook a couple years ago and since our little ones are a similar age we thought it would be nice for them to send each other some fun things. We spent a good portion of the year collecting bits on our travels to send over to Canada.

A very exciting package!

I will show you ours in reverse so you get to see it 'being opened'.

 We put in a magazine that has lots of information about our local area including a map...

...A special letter and some packets of tea, some pretty pebbles we collected at Lepe Beach...

...A stick of Rock and a little Cornish Piskie from Cornwall, some craft supplies, a British themed shopping bag and some handmade goodies...

Our friends sent us this cute little peg doll with Canadian ribbon so we made a little British dolly to send over to them.

We covered some boxes with pretty wrapping and put some treats inside.

 Big Sparkle had great fun painting this heart decoration and sticking on the beads. We also sent a blank heart and some beads so her friend could make her own.

 I had fun creating a pretty collage as a letter background. I really loved the Across the Sea image, very fitting for our exchange! Then we wrote a little bit about what we had been up to.

I wanted to include some used stamps so our friends could see what they looked like so I incorporated them on the letter envelope, sticking them on with washi tape to make it look pretty. I also used some bakers twine and a paper doily for decoration.

I used this sweet little Souvenir image as a back card for our pebbles.

Amazingly I found a banana dress lady image so she just had to go onto my Banana Cake recipe card. I used washi tape around the edges.

We included some different tea bags to try. The teacup packet had English Breakfast tea and the one with the British animal tea party contained fruit teas.

 Here is everything that was in the box. A few other bits that were in there were local postcards, some photos of us and our favourite places, a little handmade strawberry, a letter that Big Sparkle wrote, a pony scarf and a fun plane glider toy.

We had a really fun time collecting all the things for our parcel swap, in fact we plan to do another for later in the year.

I hope you enjoyed this post. Maybe our parcel swap pictures have inspired you to swap one with a friend? It's great fun!

Love Amber x x x