Busy, busy, busy :)

Well it's Friday night and time for the RAK draw... I asked Dave to pick two names out of the hat (actually it was an old tupperware container) and he pulled out three so I'm going to make another RAK parcel up and the lucky winners are (imagine a drum roll here LOL) :

So if you ladies would like to email me your address I'll get your parcels out to you :) And a BIG thank you to all of you who left me comments... was especially nice to hear from other 'Gothic Archers' out there :)

I've been busy doing LOTS of creating over the last couple of days (in amongst D.I.Y. stuff which I'll share shortly) but lots of things I can't share because they're for swaps. However I can share another new ATC folder cover. This folder is for my 2008 ATC swaps:

I've also been busy making a few cards:And now for some D.I.Y show and tell. If you've been following my blog for a while you'll know that we did a MAJOR D.I.Y. project at the beginning of the year and one of the things we needed to do when we were finished was to get a new retaining wall built... well we've done it!!! It's such a relief because every time it rained I thought it might come down! Unfortunately because it looked such a mess down there that more and more stuff kept getting dumped there until it ended up looking like this:So with the school holidays coming up (and me having a lot more time available) Dave got stuck in and cleaned it up a bit:And then he started digging some post holes:I'm glad it wasn't me digging because the holes had to be really DEEP!And of course we needed more pretty pink string and bright purple spray paint!!Then it was my turn to help so I got to mix lots and lots of concrete:I really do like making concrete... it's very satisfying!! But just like baking (honest Mum it really is like making a cake!) you have to do the 'dishes' when you're finished LOLBy the time we'd done that (on Wednesday) we knocked off... besides we had to let the concrete actually set!The next morning we checked our posts and they were all still lined up perfectly :)Then we got started on actually building the wall:We got 4 rows put on yesterday but there were a few tricky bits like banging in the nails with only a tiny gap between the dirt wall and the back of the wood... but we managed. The first couple of rows were the hardest because we had to make sure that everything was perfectly lined up! But it did make it much easier to carry on today:It was hard work getting the planks over the posts too... sometimes being short isn't such a good thing!!Dave checked EVERYTHING!!! Talk about fussy!!! But it really has made the wall look quite professional:We ended up with quite a good system going... first of all we'd put on a new row of planks and then we used the old soil to backfill each row as we went:Dave even did some of the back filling LOLWhen we'd backfilled enough I got the job of brushing down the wood so that there was no dirt on the top... the planks are like tongue-and-groove so little bits of dirt really do stop the planks from fitting together properly!After a few more hours of solid work we ended up with this:We've still got to add some top soil before we can plant, weed mat and bark it all but it's looking SOOO good!!And the final photo of the day just really appeals to me: HIS and HERS shovels LOLI'm so pleased this project is basically finished!!! We've got no more D.I.Y. planned for a while... I'm hoping to have lots of time for crafting over the winter... maybe I could move my table in front of the fire place... hmmm maybe not LOL