Expressed again, I am extremely greatful for the nice comments and understanding on my closing this blog down. I’ve received an offer towards moving the blog elsewhere, but have had to refuse this given my bandwidth requirements. I’ve just exceeded 15 Gigs again this month, based mainly on readership. People like some of this stuff.

But then I like some of theirs. Which got me thinking - I currently can’t afford to committ too much time to regular blogging because of my own day job mainly. Most of us understand this - whether a SAHM (something which is sliding up to me next year also) or a fultime worker and mum like myself. Cathy Z and Rhonna Farrer both closed down their blogs lately due to other priorities in life. They too, obviously for various reasons, realised they couldn’t maintain a blog constantly like they had been doing.

I’m not comparing this blog at all with those of celebrities or scrapping personalities like Cathy Z or Rhonna. But it got me suddenly thinking. What if - instead of closing theirs down, they combined into a joint blog - how kewl would that have been. No need to regularly commit to blogging, just the ability to combine content and blog whenever they felt the need, knowing that others on that blog were also going to be providing content.

Like some kind of blogging zine, with various viewpoints.

So, in a fantasy world of my own, here is the combination blog authors I would love to see myself blogging alongside of, selected just because I love these particular blogs. What I do endorse is that when this blog is gone - go to these ones. They are my favourites and the women involved are well-appreciated in the digital community also.

• Jen Strange - Digiscrappin with Jen - great content, great help notes for newbies, and of course - the links to Digi Designers. Digital Piracy blog also. Briliant!
  
• Melissa G - Digi Picks of the Day - I was doing digi picks a year or over back, and people probably don’t realise just what a commitment this is to select and publish one of these each blinkin’ day - Digi Picks of the Day
• Who else - the Digi Dare Ya blog does a great service also.
  

Firstly, just a note to say I am very flattered by the comments towards the closedown of this blog. I spent quite a few hours moving over the blog lists in preparation for this move last night - up to the “A”s only. Obviously this is going to take a great lot of time to do so, as the links on here have taken several years to gather. Ah well, give it a couple of months like I said.

So you’ll still see me around for a few months whilst I do this, and of course, I will blog occasionally, which I now have the inkling to do this moonlit evening.

Halloween.

In the UK here, there is currently a lot of media attention on a couple of things -

• i. the report towards global warming and therefore the need to somehow tax pollution to save the planet and
  
• ii. trick or tricking. It appears that a vast amount of the population are against allowing trick or treaters on the street tonight, because of the threats and culture of youth today. There are groups of thuggish youth who call tonight “Mischief Night” and see it as a carte blanche to go around throwing bricks through bus windows or generally causing havoc. Admittedly, my village doesn’t thankfully suffer from this to a large extent - but even I find the 16 year old men coming around in costume to my door each year quite intimidating. And so do my more elderly neighbours going by the amount of lights in my street which have just gone out.
  

When I watch those scenes, and remind myself of how many of my neighbours tonight will suddenly turn all their lights off, close their curtains and pretend they are not at home, I am reminded of my reservations about bringing up a child in today’s modern society.

And then I clobber my own ego over the head, because in many ways, I am a bad parent myself. Ah, but I’m enjoying it, though. Today my now 4 year old daughter had two things at her Nursery School - her Tuesday football session (often cancelled because it’s too cold, too wet, or even too windy - for Pete’s sake - what are we creating in our kids nowadays if they can’t even be allowed to get a little wet for a sport?) and her halloween party.

She’s been looking forward to the party for quite some time. A couple of years ago she wasn’t allowed one in her class - the teacher at the time had some moral problems with having witches and skeletons running around. They didn’t consult with the parents over it, just told that particular class they would have an animals costume party at some other time. Meanwhile all the other classes had ghouls, witches and black pussycats running around getting chocolate.

This year through a lot of haggling, she’s going dressed as a pumpkin. Any parent knows that there is a certain age limit to kids where you can enforce they dress in what you think is a cute outfit, and then they unfortunately get too old for it and start rebelling. As a baby, she was dressed as a christmas pudding, a reindeer and a santa baby, just to fit my own whims. But getting her to accept her pumpkin suit this time around was akin to negotiating for a new employment contract. With a little give and take, it’s taken several weeks before she accepted that pumpkin suit. And a promise that she can be a princess at some other point.

Why am I a bad parent? Well - the only reason I chose the pumpkin suit this year is because it matches all those orange and black digital kits which come aplenty this time of the year.

Who decided that orange and black is a good colour combination and the done thing for halloween? Were they insane? Is it actually possible to make a layout involving halloween in a non-garish way? Or am I taking the fun out of it? Perhaps I’m just anti-orange.

It gets even more difficult over here - trying to explain a pumpkin to a 4 year old is a whole unexpected kettle of fish. Supermarkets and farms sell pumpkins this time of the year almost solely for the halloween season. Carving, not eating. You can get pumpkin soup a plenty, but finding pumpkin pie (which I don’t enjoy) is difficult to do. People don’t appear to consider pumpkin as a great food source. When I roasted pumpkin for the Sunday roast and proudly displayed the lovely roast to my inlaws, they hated the stuff. Of course, I also did it with sweet potatoes roasted in kiwi fashion also. Yet they can’t explain why you would want to combine cheesey cauliflower with beef or turkey gravy on the same plate.

My daughter thinks pumpkins are the things with toothed mouths cut out of them, and not a vegetable you cook and eat at all. She knows this, because her entire nursery school and any shops she walks into are decorated with jack-o-lanterns.

Hence the fact that her pumpkin costume wasn’t reliant on the fact that it is a large orange pumpkin with twirly green tendril bits. It had a face embossed on the front, to explain it.

Going back to my pumpkin choice (influenced by the promise of a princess time), it was either that or a blatant threat for her to go as a pirate. She does have a pirate costume. They are very easy to get nowadays, thanks to Johnny Depp and his pirate movie. She tried it on once for me - eyepatch, scarf, captain’s hat and hook and all. For some reason, she chewed the end of the plastic hook, so it’s kind of ruined now. I bought the costume because I wanted her out of princess mode for a short while. Oh, and I took a liking to a lovely pirate kit or two available in the digital scrapbooking world. As I don’t have a little boy - one does make do with any opportunity to use all the cool boy stuff out there. And make sure she’s not too girly. Didn’t work - she hates it.

Princesses are another matter. She loves princesses. Luuuuvvvvs them. I love to craft with my daughter, but woe betide me if I suggest we make a princess crown out of cardboard and glitter. Remember when you used to draw and cut out those crowns to bestow upon your now royal girly heads? Nowadays you can buy proper silver ones for £2.99. Not to mention the fluffy fairy heeled shoes, several different versions of starry fairy wands, and the full regata of princess dresses (brand-name - Disney Princess), royal jewels, royal capes and royal tents to play in. Children don’t need imagination anymore, imagination is catered for already by merchandising experts. She’s already attended one birthday party for little princesses. I’m expecting several more over the next year - with makeup thrown in also. Sigh.

My daughter is in the nativity play this year. Our house and car is currently filled with some squawky attempts at learning “Litte Donkey” and “Away in a Mangler (sic)”. They’ve given her the cast role of the angel. This a complicated role - she has the most adult lines of the lot. She has to say things like, “Aturn ye to Baby Jesus, and baske in the glories of God, our father” or something like that. We parents (presuming mothers here) have to provide the costume. My daughter has already got an angel halo and wings (a past Christmas whim of mine, to take photos again) but not the actual dress. Hmmm, do I mess around with an old sheet (and risk ending up with a roman toga-ed angel) or take the easy route - and buy a white angel dress for £20. I know which route she’d prefer me to take - but perhaps I should rebel and get out my big sewing needles.

Surely there must be some kind of ebay for used children’s costumes by now? Costume XChng, we can call it. I’ll swap you a baby christmas pudding outfit for one angel dress to fit a tall four year old. And some white tights, I guess. Next year she might be a cow or the donkey itself, but this year my child is going to baske in the light of pumpkin lights, and angel delights. And I’m going to match that to a digital kit if it kills me.

With November looming, it becomes time to announce something a little sad for myself, but something I’ve been deliberating for some months. November sees my annual bill for supporting this Scrapability website / blog, and it’s going to be a hefty one this year, as my bandwidth has been increasing unseasonally each month. I have been supported by some very generous donations by some people previously, but feel that they possibly haven’t been getting that much out of me lately at all.

There are now blogs and websites out there that provide some extremely successful and helpful services to the scrapbooker, and although I will always enjoy writing about the industry, I no longer perhaps feel so much part of it. This is due to a re-invention of my own priorities in life (as many women do), and a realisation that I actually need to make money out of something - and it’s not blogging, sadly. Writing will have to become a focus elsewhere, I hope. And if anyone is willing to pay me to do this, then give me a shout (tongue solidly in cheek).

From November I will be cutting over to monthly invoicing on this blog service with Squarespace. This is more expensive than the discounted annual bill about to appear before me, but is more manageable for a few months. It will take me a couple of months to move over some of my content to other places. For instance, I have a large gallery here which contains all my digital credits for the layouts and projects I have created recently. These need to be moved back onto my hard-drive. And then there’s the links lists themselves.

Many of these links are being moved over onto linkagogo, and published freely to the world. This will now include the many scrapblog lists which many people locate this blog from. This will take a bit of work as I go, so I ask for some patience with requests for new additions etc.

Eventually in the New Year, this blog will disappear, much as Cathy Z’s etc went this last month. In the meantime, you may see me blogging away on here, but not with the frequency of previous. I have enjoyed the last three or so years immensely. Blogging for me was a form of community and writing which made me feel the most creative of all (and so says a scrapbooker who can’t journal that well!), but I can not maintain it anymore regarding costs in many areas - and I am most certain that anyone reading this will understand the energy required, or the fact that in burning out from my work environment, I need every ounce of energy to simply survive out there, and bring home that mortgage for a little longer.

Time to enjoy the move….blog on ladies.

Very nice. Kandice Matsler announced on her blog that her company, Cross Your Heart, brought out four new collections during memory trends - new papers, etc - and each one has an accompanying digital kit. How kewl is that? I shouldn’t throw in the tidbit here that Cross Your Heart over here in the UK is better known as a brandname for a particular type of supportive brassiare, or should I? Cross Your Heart scrapbooking company is perhaps a company after my own support, lol.

Shimelle has threatened some kind of surprise bonus project for the last day of the You Think You Know Me course - tomorrow, but thus far, I’ve now caught up. Here are the last three of my 10 feelings. Credits can be found in the gallery (linked to yesterday) and for further projects from others, seek out the www.writtendown.com gallery.