A New Valentines Tradition........

I have been planning this for a long time now and finally got the give them to the girls on Valentines day this year. I have always loved charm bracelets and charms, the old vintage silver ones that open.... it is my favoured gift to give for Christenings of baby girls, but I never got them for my girls and wanted to. It came to me one day that I could start a new tradition and I spent a few happy hours over a few months sourcing tiny little charms - a wishing well that opens to reveal a pixie for Faith, and an oyster shell that opens to reveal a pearl for Eve. At the same time I decided to treat myself and I found both a beautiful bracelet and a country farmhouse opening to show a bed with a couple inside!

The girls charms I have hung temporarily on small silver plated bracelets that they had for their baptisms, as proper solid silver charm bracelets are too large for their wrists at the present time and I want them to enjoy wearing them for special occasion meals now and again - pancakes for breakfast maybe, or a Mother's day lunch, that kind of thing. I will have them mounted properly with soldered jump rings onto a solid silver bracelet when they are older!

I wrapped them in little organza bags and tucked them into heart shaped boxes, and the girls were gratifyingly enchanted with the idea, although even the children's bracelet has to be made smaller for Faith's little wrist!!

Accordian Book Photo Albums

 We just came home from our holiday in Lyme Regis - a fabulous week playing on the beach and the girls have many happy memories. I promised them we would print out some pictures for them to have but I couldn't think of a good way for them to display them. I was browsing around the blogs I follow when I got home and came across an e-zine called Alphabet Glue and there was an idea about making travel books using this accordion technique. How perfect for little photo albums I thought - and here they are!!

 We used some pretty scrapbooking paper for the covers and the zig zag, and plain coloured card for the pages....

 Eve spent a long time concentrating at the laptop writing captions for her photographs. When she began to get frustrated I sat with her and introduced her to the idea of funny little captions instead of tedious long sentences for her to write. For example, instead of The waves were big and washed our castle away, we wrote 'Tidal Wave!'. Eve enjoyed writing the punchy captions more and I'll wait and see if the idea translates into other things she writes!

Faith made some wax rubbings of the ammonite biscuits that she found on the beach and added them to her album - we still need to write her captions but the children's Grandparents arrived before we could do it!