A little while ago Ali Edwards showed a beautiful layout on her blog featuring a full width photo, some twill and an embellishment cluster. I love the impact that a full width photo has on a layout and have made a couple before. As often happens with Ali's blog, I was inspired to go and create.

I decided to use this lovely photo of me and the boys taken on 27th December in the cafe at the end of Bournemouth Pier. I made my layout 8.5 x 11 and used some Everyday Twill by Ali Edwards, some brown ric rac ribbon (American Crafts) and white Dotted Swiss cardstock (Bazzill Basics). I thought I'd try to be a little creative with my embellishment cluster. I used a Love Ticket (Tim Holtz), three clear plastic hearts (Heidi Swapp) and lovely 'Life' patterned paper (7Gypsies). I drew around two of the hearts and cut them out of the Life patterned paper, then glued them onto the plastic heart shapes with Mod Podge glue/sealer. The accents were attached to the page with either staples or glue dots. I really love the effect of these accents, it was really worth the effort.

This past couple of weeks I have been trying to get the house in order. It started with the toys. The new ones from Christmas needed a place to go and there were many hangers on that really needed to be either put away out of sight for a while or given to charity. I am a believer of 'a place for everything and everything in it's place'. (I should add that I am yet to sort through my own scrapbooking and fabric mess - sorry Jeff, I'll get there). After organising the toys I moved onto the boys bedrooms, the hideous cupboard under the stairs, my side of our bedroom and onto the built-in wardrobe in the guest bedroom (which was stuffed full of duvets, suitcases, bedding and throws, etc, etc). I used some of those vacuum storage bags for the summer duvets and wow they are great, and really good fun to use!

Apart from all the clearing out, sorting and organising that's been going on around here I have been catching up on some unfinished layouts for my Yesterday Today course (promise I'll show you those in due course). Jeff and I met up for lunch yesterday which was lovely and something which we hadn't been able to do since Callum was in Pre-school. I also helped out at school this week in Callum's base, next week it's Matthew's turn. One of my tasks for the morning at school was to sharpen the pencils and after 200 pencils I was left with a blister on my finger. Can you believe they didn't have a proper sharpener, just little gimmicky ones? Next time I'm taking our battery operated one which I bought at Tesco for £2!

Now, you are probably aware that Lego is BIG in this house - it is out every single day (today it' the mini-figures that were emptied out onto the lounge rug before school, the rest will follow later I'm sure). Well today is Friday which means it's Home Learning show and tell day for Matthew and this half-term the topic is Robots. So yesterday I helped him build a lego robot; M5-B5. It has a motor (from a Lego racer), when you pull it back it moves forward, it can also turn around 360 degrees. Matthew was very excited about taking in his robot into school and keen that we shouldn't be late to school today - and we weren't.

I really must make a layout or mini-book on their Lego creations!

Have a lovely weekend.