Ninety-five sleeps...

...or thirteen weeks and four days till we all find out how naughty or nice we've been this year!

Well I can tell you that the small circle of family and friends we buy gifts for at you-know-when will think they're on Santa's Naughty List as we are cutting back massively this year.  We've already stopped buying birthday and Christmas gifts for our best friends and they us, and instead we put that gift money into paying for a holiday house for a week in December.  This year we're off to Northumberland with them.  A far better use of money than a pile of gifts that aren't needed.

I've also decided this year I am going to try and make the majority of my gifts.  This could end up being very stressful or a great pleasure.  I am hoping the latter :-))

The hardest bit is coming up with gift ideas to make but I've had a few eureka moments over the last couple of weeks and that's reduced my stress levels.  

By the end of the weekend I hope to have my gift list written, any materials required on order (so far that list is empty as I have all the materials I need) and I will get started asap.  If friends and family end up getting gift vouchers from me on Christmas Day then it's obviously all gone spectacularly wrong!  lol!

My lovely friend S asked me ages ago if I could design some cards that could be printed and sold in aid of the charity she and her husband set up and run to help young people pay for their education in Kenya.  It's taken me about  five months to finally get my head into thinking about it.  Since the festive season was on my mind today I had a play with some paint in the hope of coming up with some ideas for Christmas cards (probably too late for her to sell this year)  So far this is all I've come up with but this evening a few more ideas came to mind so will try and get those onto paper tomorrow, after I've done some work on my drawing course exercise. I completely body swerved that today!