Get Coppered?

No it doesn't have the same ring to it as "Get Silvered" does it? But lately I've been playing around a bit with copper and Brass.  What about "Brassed off"? Lol - no I think I'll stick with Get Silvered.

M. came in from the shed the other day and gave me a stack of nice thick copper wire. Each wire almost 3mm thick in 30cm lengths! Score! He salvaged it from work - it was a sample piece of Industrial cable that was going to be chucked out! There I was, thinking he was hiding in the shed playing with his fishing lures and reels when all the time he was stripping wire for me :)

We've had days and days of heatwaves lately with temperatures in the high 30s and even getting as high as 42 degrees (that's 107.6 degrees farenheit for the Celsius challenged!) Obviously, that's not the weather for soldering in a tin shed, especially when there are total fire bans.  So I waited patiently and courtesy of Cyclone Iggy out to sea further north we've had rain and even cloud cover and cooler temps in the last day or two. Of course I seized the opportunity to light up the torch -Here's the before and after shots. It's nice and chunky - The largest shape is around 8 x 4cm.

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What's Black & White & Read all Over?

During the last few years, within the extended family we agreed to give money instead of buying Birthday Presents.
It's Dad's Birthday this month and he'll get money too. He's really good and when he spends the money he makes a point of telling us what he's bought. He never lets it be absorbed or just disappear into the household budget.
There's good and bad to this system. Good because it's so easy for the giver.......no trawling the shops wondering what to buy and will he/they like it etc etc...but it's bad because I always feel a little guilty at the lack of effort required on my part and maybe it's a tad boring for the receiver.
To ease my guilt I always try and wrap the money nicely, so it looks gift like rather than money just shoved in a card! 
Dad follows the stock market so I based my wrapping on the share price page from the newspaper.  I  made a gift bag from an A4 copy of the page (the actual newspaper was a bit flimsy to use), and copied a second page to make the gift card and Heart. Trimmed with red card and sealed with a red paperclip, it's all set to go....as soon as I put the money in it, that is! 

I've really enjoyed looking through all the paper craft blogs to get gift wrap ideas. I'm going to try not to use any commercial gift wraps this year.
I found  two versions of the Gift Bag Tutorial, here where the sample is a music score/page and here where they've used pages from discarded children's books. And while I'm throwing links around, here's a Paper and Craft Paradise  where I've dropped quite a few hours - enjoy! Pin It