Lately, I have been exploring a whole raft of new hobbies, from carriage driving to paper crafting, and several more esoteric pastimes such as dowsing in between.

Last year I attempted making my own Christmas cards, but failed dismally, I just couldn't get the rubber stamps I had bought to work the way I wanted them too. I understood nothing of the technical aspects of the different inks types used, and by choosing the wrong sort to begin with in my abject ignorance, the project was doomed to failure from the outset!

Whilst I was in hospital having major gynea surgery in January 2010,  The lady in the bed next to mine and I became firm friends. Being of similar ages, and having undergone similiar problems with cancer we both felt a kindred spirit. A mutual understanding of life threatening illnesses, and how they affect your life.  Marcia, is the name of this lovely lady, and we still see one another for lunch on a regular basis, and our friendship has developed over the intervening 2 years.

Marcia is a talented crafter, and makes all sorts of amazing objects which you could never guess what the constituent parts had been, I seem to recall a beautifully decorated large glass bowl being the result of an intimate encounter with a decorated paper napkin! It was stunning however she achieved it.

Marcia is also rather good at paper crafting and making cards, so I recounted my story of failure to her with my risible attempt at card making last year. She smiled and promised to get me some help.

This help came in the form of attending a crafting demonstration on Thursday evening, run by Amanda Fowler with Marcia, where we were shown many techniques to create artful and attractive greetings cards from simple components like plain card, ink and the odd bit of 'Bling'. (Bling apparently is a technical term used to denote all things sparkly, pretty and otherwise glitzy used as embellishment. You could tell I was a crafting virgin as I mistakenly called them 'pretty bits'.)

We were then set free to make one of the cards Amanda had demonstrated, and the image above is what I made. Its constructed from 3 different coloured cards, two different coloured inks, used to stamp the flowery images, a bit of scissor work cutting things out and some glue.  I am rather pleased with my first successful attempt at making a card, and it will be winging its way to my sister as we speak.

I have to admit that until now, I had a certain preconception in my mind about papercrafting,  and crafting in general - it wasn't all positive. So here for the record I am going to stand up and confess to enjoying papercraft very much and embrace my inner dweeb wholeheartedly.