A cautionary tale....

Well here I am, back from Berlin, having had a good time .... except for the incident below....

We were walking through a park in Berlin when a girl with a clipboard holding what appeared to be a petition approached me. I said No, walked on, but she kept shoving this clipboard at me. I kept walking, said No four times and she gave up.
At least that's what I thought had happened.
When we got to the café, I discovered my purse was missing. That clipboard had been shoved over the top of my bag - a messenger bag, mind you, hard to get into - and in those few seconds whilst the bag was obscured from view, she had lifted my purse right out of it. I didn't feel a thing, didn't realise what was happening, neither did the others walking with me, we all just thought she was just being really persistent with the "Sign, sign". They are professional thieves, these people, which doesn't make me feel any less stupid.
So that was 350 euros gone, and all my cards. We cancelled the cards whilst at the cafe, but I had a card which is linked with DH's, and they wouldn't cancel just mine, no they had to do his too, which left us with not much cash and no usable credit cards. Good job we were with friends.
The police were sympathetic and helpful, but obviously nothing they could do. It's a known organised theft problem, apparently, we were told it's young Romanian girls stealing from tourists. I don't suppose it's unique to Berlin, these things go on everywhere. All I can say is don't let anyone make physical contact with you which results in your bag being out of sight, even for a few seconds.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing .....

Back to scrapping - Hot Stuff

I worked out that last year I only blogged three new layouts.  Not because I hadn't done any, but because I hadn't finished any of the pages I had started!  So I went off to the ATDML retreat determined to finish off as many as I could.  I ended up with a total of ten pages started from scratch and fully completed, and also finished off fourteen others, most of which just needed titles and journalling.  I had pre-cut the titles on my Silhouette and taken them with me.  It was a very productive weekend, and I thoroughly enjoyed it :-)

Here is the first, hopefully I will have time to schedule some others before I head off to Berlin tomorrow!

The story is that we were talking to FIL about how the small tins of mustard powder don't really last us very long.  So he found us a big one ..... 1lb of mustard powder as opposed to the tiny 2oz tins LOL.  That's 454g and 57g for those of you who are imperially challenged :-)

The papers are Basic Grey Little Black Dress, which is quite an old range now but there may be a few sheets lurking around somewhere.  I chose to use Mini Owner's April sketch for this one and it worked out really well.  The punched shapes are a small circle and Stampin' Up Mosaic Madness.  The letters are Thickers.

I took the photos of my pages at the retreat rather than waiting to get home, as DS1 has temporarily moved back in with us and I have nowhere to set up my photo booth amongst the mountains of boxes!!  I am going to have to find a flat surface to photograph all the pocket pages on though, as standing the finished page up in the protector just results in a photo of reflections!

Purple and green cards

Here are some more of the cards I made a couple of weekends ago.  I decided to play with stamping and masking, using a mix of old and new stamps, and went with a combination of purple and green inks.

The first card is done with Stampin' Up stamps and punches - Gorgeous Grunge, Papillon and the sentiment from the Lotus Blossom set.  I used the matching butterfly punch to mask off the butterfly before stamping the background.  The mats are Nesties.
The second card was a little tricky as the flourish is an old Hero Arts (?) stamp, which is wood mounted, so placing it over the masked butterfly needs a bit of guesswork and luck!  I then used the splotches from Glorious Grunge and a Hobby Art sentiment.
The third card uses the same stamps, but I mis-stamped the flourish, so punched a circle from the whole image and placed it in the centre of a die-cut lattice mat (Tonic), with two scalloped circle mats (also Tonic). This still left a wider border than I liked, so at Sy's suggestion I over-stamped the whole central circle with the GG splotches and it works perfectly.  I decided not to have a sentiment on this one.

Very pleased with these cards :-)