Wednesday again, and time to join up at Julias place, The Stamping Ground, for our regular desk hop. My desk in all its glory-as you can probably guess, I'm still working with stencils & paste. Right at the front, a tub of water for dunking dirty stencils in, on top of an old towel I keep in my room for drying stamps after cleaning, hence the dirty appearance! A bit further behind that, a magnetic sheet for helping to keep the stencil still, a few tools and pots of stencil pastes. The black tile is for mixing on, I've been mixing glitter into stencil paste, which is a great way of getting a glitter look, with no risk of shedding glitter everywhere. This is a selection of the pieces I've done so far, using 3 different Christmas Trees from Sweet Poppy stencils. They look a little dull at the moment, but as the paste dries, you see the glitter sparkle. The green trees had glitter mixed into Translucent paste, the gold and silver used gold & silver glitter into the same colour paste. The weekend saw a batch of 21 cards made using a Sweet Poppy Baubles stencil, and laminating with foil. They're in the post below this one. Has everyone been following all the new releases coming out of Creativation? Seen some lovely new Oxide colours from Tim, along with new tools,stencils and lots of Sizzix dies, as well as stamps. Particularly like the new Alcohol Ink storage tin- it holds 30 bottles, and will store Stickles & Pearls too. Something I keep meaning to mention, and always forget, for those fellow Pinterest addicts. Have you seen the new feature where you can now add sub-folders to a board? I'm loving this, as now I don't need a separate board for each type of Christmas Card for instance. Where I used to have boards for Christmas trees/Santa/ Snowflakes, etc etc, now I just have one Christmas Card folder, with each type in it's own folder. Finally, they've come up with a great new idea, usually I'm not impressed when they change stuff! I made this card up from one of the Mixed Media panels, to take with a box of shortbread down to the Oncology Clinic yesterday, as a Thank You for the Doc and staff there for looking after me so well last year when he took one look at me & admitted me, my not feeling well turning out to be Sepsis. I had no idea how serious that was, and since I've been out, I've seen so many news items about people who contracted Sepsis, and have lost limbs, and their sight, some even dying because of it. I'm still shocked that I left hospital without any serious repercussions. I mean, we've all heard about septicaemia, or blood poisoning, but I always just thought it was a bit of an infection mainly picked up from gardening related injuries. So be aware, everyone, and get any potential infection checked out ASAP. And finally .................