Scraps Of Mind

Hi, and welcome to this week’s Scraps of Mind Newsletter.

Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat.

Please put a penny in the Old Man’s hat.

If you haven’t got a penny, a ha’penny will do.

If you haven’t got a ha’penny, well God bless you!

We used to sing this Christmas rhyme when I was a little kid. And back then I never understood what the last line meant. It wasn’t until I was ‘all growed up’ that I realised the rhyme was referring to people who were even poorer than the old beggar man.

When I read this wonderful poignant Christmas story on Fathered Five it brought that rhyme back to me and it’s been running in my head all week. Go and read the story for yourself. I know you’ll love it.

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Christmas Shopping

I am not good at Shopping.

I usually wander aimlessly around the shops and then decide that I’m not really in the mood for shopping and return home empty handed and frustrated. I am hopeless at making a simple shopping decision. I made the decision to buy my house with 15 minutes thinking time but it takes me over half an hour of angst to buy a sweater…and then I’ll usually not be able to make the decision and leave the shop without it anyway. And I’m even worse when I’m buying gifts. I usually have to ring up a member of my family and check whether they think whatever I’m looking at would make a good present for whoever.

I think you get the message – I’m no good at Shopping.

But not today!

Today I went out to start my Christmas Shopping (yeah, yeah, I know. I’ll talk to you about Procrastination in another Newsletter). And the Shopping Fairy must have sprinkled me with her fairy dust. Because everywhere I turned I found things I was happy to buy. I didn’t need to ring anyone up. Great gift ideas almost threw themselves off the shelves at me.

I trotted around the shopping centre with an ever growing burden of environmentally unfriendly plastic bags and I was in Shopping Heaven. I was totally ‘in the zone’ and it was heady stuff for this Shopperphobe.

I returned home in a happy daze and checked off a bunch of names on my Christmas Shopping List. And I just had to share the moment with someone. So thanks for being that someone.

I still have some more presents to get, but what a great start! I might even get them wrapped before Christmas.

That would be a first.

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And here’s some of the highlights from Scraps of Mind over the last week.

If you missed my podcast interview with Ro Paxman, CEO of Scrap Girls, make yourself a cuppa and sit back and have a listen.

Scrap Girls is one of the most successful Scrapbooking Websites on the Internet and it was a wonderful treat to talk to the woman who dreamed that dream and then made it happen.

And if you find choosing colour schemes for your scrapbook layouts or cards a bit of a challenge, have a read of my three part series on colour schemes. In the first one we look at what the different colour scheme structures are and then I illustrate them with a series of Scrapbook layouts that are based on each of the different schemes. The final article in the series will look at some of the different free online colour scheme tools that are available on the internet to help you pull together pleasing colour combinations. I’ll be posting that article during this week so be sure to watch out for it.

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Well that’s all for this week.

See you next week