Llangollen canal part 3!

The area was quite busy today - but it was nice to see lots of other barges.

Elieen and Jean.

Thelma at the helm

me with the first geocache - you can just see the barge disappearing in the background!

Llangollen canal trip part 2

Blogger only seems to allow me to upload 4 photos straight from Picasa so this entry is in a 4 parts! Here is Thelma with our first geocache - it was an easy find just along the tow path. We hoped off the barge and back on again a few minutes later and as the barge only goes very slowly it did not take us long to catch it up! A few of the girls had not done geocaching before but had heard us go on about it so they enjoyed their first finds as well.

This time wooden sculptures

Our boat was motorised but here is a traditional horse drawn one along the shallower parts of the canal.

Eileen - AKA Finchey! Washer up extraordinaire today and finder of the second cache at Ban Rivets (Trevor Basin).

Llangollen canal day trip

Today we had a lovely day trip out along the Llangollen Canal. We hired a barge and away we sailed! Weather was mixed but the company was great, so a lovely day out and we managed to find 2 geocaches along the way and I walked accrosss the Froncysyllte aquaduct - not for the faint hearted!

The area was dotted with gorgeous sculptures to admire.

The veiw across the Froncysyllte aquaduct.

The boat in action!

not a lot to report..

yep not a lot going on here!

Yesterday - the gas board came to replace our gas meter - the old one had imperial readings so we had to go to one with metric readings. Talking about energy - the electricity bill came - oh my goodness- it was huge! they have increased my monthly payments to £82 a month - just for electricity and we don't even use a lot of it as our heating is from gas. I dread to think what my monthly gas payments will be increased to. The cost of energy is getting really scary.

Liam finished his last GCSE exam yesterday so has officially left school now. He and lots of his friends went down to the quarry (our local park) to chill out - but he did not take his camera - I have not got him into my photography mind set yet.

A group of us have hired a boat on the Llangollen canal tomorrow, so today will be a baking day - as I am the official group baker and also photographer so had better charge up my cameras.

I had a delivery from Willowtree Crafts of 2 more leather American Crafts D ring binders. I love the one I got from the gogo retreat that I wanted some more.

I bought 2 more black photo binders from Jessops yesterday and ordered 10 more packets of archival sleeves from Arrowfile - which should be with me by the end of the week. I hope that will be all I need to finish this photo sorting.

A quick & easy layout..

but what a gorgeous photo. This was a bit of a cheat layout really as it only took a few minutes to do. I wanted to keep it fairly simple to focus on the brilliant photo of Liam. So in the end I just laid the photo on a sheet of Fancy Pants paper, added a title - American Crafts thickers, couple of brackets and a heart to cover up the yellow marking on his jumper and a splodge of white acrylic paint to make a journalling block. Everything was from last July's Scrapagogo kit.

Liam did not want to go on this school trip to Berlin in February - but I pushed him to go and this photo just shows how much fun he had - so it just had to be scrapped.

My layouts are getting worse!

Well I have done another layout but I am not happy with it.

I have wanted to scrap these photos since I came across them in my marathon photo sort out - I love the story behind them- hence the large journalling block, but oh dear how difficult was it to do!

I seemed to be stuck with red & yellow colours but could not find any PP in that colourway so was stuck with plain card stock. I have decided that I don't like layouts in primary colours and I don't like layouts without PP. I added a few circles and a heart from some Scenic Route Loveland papers but they just look a bit random to me. I feel if anyone looked through my albums they would think that this was one of my earlier creations!

Anyway it was number 59 out of my target of 52 for 2008 - shall I double it to 104 for the year now,  seeing as I hit the target ages ago?

Blow the photo sorting - I have scrapped again!

I just could not face any more photos today so I have done this layout. Its not brilliant but it has reminded me that I can scrap- as It has been so long that I had lost my confidence.

Liam did not want to go on this school trip to Berlin so did not give me any details, but luckily my spies told me about it and I booked him on it. Thank goodness I did - as he had a fantastic time. Travel is so important and I wanted Liam to avail himself of every opportunity to do so. I love these photos as they show him relaxed and having fun. He tries to be so cool that it is a side of him that we do not see very often.