801st Post (and a giveaway)

Happy Blogversary to me!
I've just noticed that my last post was my 800th!! Amazing.
I've been doing this now for 4 and a half years and some of my most regular commenters have been with me since the beginning. Thank you to all of you.
To mark the occasion I decided to look back at some of my highlights.  And then to make some changes for the future.
And there may even be a prize if you stick with it!
Here goes:

I started my blog on Jan 16th 2010, along with lots of others, by joining Shimelle's Blogging for Scrapbookers. At the time, I was hoping to use it to showcase my handmade jewellery and cards with a view to selling them, but that never really took off.
This was my first ever piece of jewellery. I made this choker, and matching bracelet with the onyx-coloured plastic beads from a single strand necklace I found in a charity shop. I thought this would be a good way of practising my skills without too much financial outlay.

 

Throughout 2010 and 2011 I joined in almost every week with Julia's What's On Your Workdesk Wednesday? I even met up with a group of deskers for a crop. This was a typical desk photo.

But then my work patterns changed and I never had anything to show on my desk on a Wednesday except for marking. I still follow some of the WOYWDW blogs, though.

 

I joined a lot of online classes in those early days: Love you Photos, Love Your Pages; Creativity Bootcamp; Learn Something new Everyday; Journal Your Christmas. I am still a keen JYCer, and have blogged this every year, but I haven't done any new classes for ages. I just can't justify the expense for the amount of time I am able to spend scrapping. And these is also so much free inspiration out there on the Web. I'm jus using up the last of the AC divided pages I bought for Document 2010 in this month's Project Life!I have

  

In 2011 I joined the counterfeit Kit Challenge, which was very enjoyable as by then I had quite a big stash and I did my first Week In The Life, which I repeated this year. This was also the year that I finally said goodbye to one stage of life. M, aged 3, finally gave up her bottle and started sleeping through the night. This was a massive breakthrough for all of us.

In 2012, I started a Smash book and I did this for 2 years. I love the concept, but I'm not very good at the throw-it-all-at-the-page look. I prefer Project Life. I also started taking part in Julie's Month in Numbers, which I recorded in said Smash Book.

 

2012 was, of course, the year of the London Olympics and we took R to the Paralympics for a birthday present. What a fantastic day. He still talks about it. I am still proud of this Photoshopped photo. We spent a whole day there and I didn't get a single picture of us all together so I cheated and PSed the 3 of us taken in the garden onto a background of the Excel Stadium.

This was also the year that the kids and I rode the London Eye and we bought Nibbles the hamster.

 

 I joined in with Sian's Storytelling  Sunday series and met lots of other friendly and talented bloggers there.
 

In 2013, we visited the Harry Potter Studios and I took enough photos to keep me scrapping and blogging for months. I still have a handful of pages I want to make, but I rarely scrap anything older than a few months, unless it's real heritage stuff, so they are still sitting in my drawer. Maybe I'll dig them out soon and finish it off PL-style.

By this time I was hardly doing any jewellery making. I just didn't have the time with 2 children at school and a part time teaching job.  I still made cards for family & friends but not for sale. This is something I'd really like to resurrect.

In 2012 and 2013, I took part in Rinda's Summer Scavenge Hunt. My photography has improved so much in the last few years and now I am photographing with intent to scrap, rather than just snapping and seeing what happens. I'm looking forward to this year's Scavenge Hunt in a couple of weeks.

2013 was the year R started secondary school and my blogging focussed a lot on family life. It was a massive learning curve, although he has managed 100 times better than I ever hoped. My blog has taken me from mother of a toddler and a disabled 8 year old to the mother of 2 bright, confident school children who are very much their own people. I'm immensely proud of them both and I try to tell them so often.

Our good friends M and A got married and R was a page boy. Cue another big batch of pictures, some of which are still waiting to be scrapped.

This year I've increased my work load at college and have had correspondingly less time for crafting. Both children do a lot of extra-curricular activities and my evenings are spent taxiing them around. I have started Project Life and am thoroughly enjoying it.

I've been enjoying Abi's Time for Tea posts and I started Helena's Zoom In, Zoom Out with good intentions but fell off the wagon in March.

So what for the next 800 posts?

I'd like to finish off some past projects, particularly the wedding and Harry Potter albums and catch up with some heritage layouts. I think I'll gather all the pictures up and take them to France this summer.

I want to share more photography posts and focus on that side of my crafting.

I want to join in with more monthly blog hops so I need to be a bit more organised. I struggle to find much computer time these days, as R tends to hog my laptop in the evenings. I have noticed the number of comments I receive has dropped off, although Blogger's Stats tell me the number of pageviews has increased. I like getting comments so I need to put myself out there more.

I also have plans for a push on commercial card making - especially Christmas cards -so I wil lbe starting much earlier this year. You have been warned!

Mostly, though I will continue to blog because I enjoy it. The commercial thing became unimportant very quickly and now it is a part of my daily routine. I would miss it if I didn't blog and read blogs and that is why I carry on. I am immensely flattered that you still read what I have to say and even admire my crafting.

Thank you, again.

And now, you deserve a reward for reading this far.  Leave me a comment and tell me one thing you'd like to see continue and/or start on this blog. I'll pick 5 commenters at random to receive a RAK. I haven't decided quite what form that will take yet, but I promise it will be both pretty and useful. I'll pick the names on 31st May but we are going away to France at half term and then I have a certain person's 7th birthday to prepare for so I won't be posting anything out very soon.