Have you entered the giveaway on my other blog?

Posted under Wordless Wednesday

I’m getting to that stage in my life where I can never quite remember what I have done or not done recently so I’m going to assume that I haven’t told you much – if anything – about The Life Craft so far.

Way back in November I posted this entry explaining that due to a massive cock-up by my then employers, my maternity pay had been stopped three months early and I was being told to repay the entirety of my allegedly overpaid maternity pay. Because it had taken six months to discover this error, I subsequently was not entitled to claim maternity allowance from the state and thus this error put us out financially by somewhere in the region of £10,000.

Not content with that, the little doom fairies arranged for Bob to be made redundant from his job on Hogmanay, then me from mine at the end of March. Did I mention I had a complete nervous breakdown? We decided that since things were the lowest we could possibly imagine them to be, there was nothing to stop us pursuing our dream and thus The Life Craft was born.

Our website is now up and running and this week we will sign the lease on our gorgeous premises in the West End of Glasgow. We are going to be paying more per year in rent than I have ever earned and we are responsible now for five members of staff as well as ourselves. I probably shouldn’t be sharing this but what the hell – if the business fails, we will lose everything. We will have nothing except each other. And do you know what? I think I’m okay with that now. We’ve been through so much together that we can make it through any other bump in the road.

SO! In order to celebrate our future success, we’ve got a competition on the blog which I’d love you to enter. You can pick your prize from a selection of the amazing stock we have in store and share your crafty stories.

Bonne Chance!

Posted under Uncategorized

MAJOR NEWS FOR US! Our webstore at The Life Craft has been launched! Please let me know what you think and what you’d like to see us retailing!

So it would appear that this week is my lucky week. I had entered a competition on the lovely Leigh Shepherd‘s blog to win one of her really stunning upcycled brooches (seriously, check out her work. It’s so pretty!) and as the luck would have it, I was the lucky winner! So this beautifully-wrapped package arrived for me:

and inside was this amazing brooch which is made using a domino! Isn’t that clever?

I’m really chuffed with it particularly since I’ve been making an effort to accessorise better – and with preference to the handmade market – now that I have short hair, and this really is a lovingly-handcrafted piece. So thanks ever so much to Leigh for this.

So that had set my week up to a pretty decent start, when I was told that I’d won Cheryl’s mediband giveaway. I’m not sure if I’ve blogged here about this, but Erica has something called Atopy – basically she has allergic reactions to a lot of things – and I honestly live in panic about what she’s going to react to next. The big one which makes her mouth swell up is raw pineapple and it’s really important that she’s not given it but she’s now getting to the birthday party age. I’m hoping that these medibands will make our panic mode a little less pronounced! I promise I’ll review them once they’re here.

Two giveaways in a week. I was walking on sunshine when I got an email that literally made me drop my laptop. I’d entered a competition on Powder Room Graffiti to win a ticket to the CyberMummy conference not expecting for one second that I’d be selected, and lo and behold…

I’M GOING TO LONDON, BABY! YEAH!

I’m so SO chuffed because although the tickets were very fairly priced I just couldn’t justify it right now while we’re living off our overdraft and credit cards, I’m also being given £150 towards my costs which means I get to have a little fun too! Poor Bob is being landed with the children and business for three days while I swan off all by myself although I’ve been heartily reassured that this means I can’t whinge about him going hillclimbing with his pals over the Summer Hands up if you’re going to CyberMummy!

Posted under me

I promised you that I had lots to share and I am now able to share most of it. In my usual style, I’m going to tell you a bit of a story first.

I am a renowned rubbish practical joker. I try and play jokes on people all the time and they usually fall flat, this year’s April Fool’s Day was no exception when I told the kids that I was pregnant again and that as a result we would have to move into a one bedroom flat since we couldn’t afford to stay in our house anymore. They fell for it so well that I decided to expand it and phoned my sister, whereupon the following conversation ensued:
Me: Steph? Steph! Oh my GOD I’m pregnant. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. I’m pregnant and I have no idea how it happened and how can I possibly have another baby I’ll have five kids under 10!
Steph – Deadpan: Oh my actual God. Are you kidding?
Me – almost crying: NO I’M NOT KIDDING I can’t believe this how on earth did this happen?!
Steph: Are you kidding?
Me: NO!
Steph: No way. I am too.
Me – shrieking: OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD! I WAS ONLY KIDDING BECAUSE IT’S APRIL FOOL’S DAY! Are you ACTUALLY pregnant?!
Steph: I hate you.

What this little vignette doesn’t tell the reader is that I am also renowned for being the worst secret keeper in all the land. Seriously. And Stephanie is the only person I know who actually managed to keep her first pregnancy secret until she’d got past 12 weeks. GNNNNNNNNNGGGGGG! So the last eight weeks has been torturous for me knowing but not able to tell anyone until today. Steph & Gary had their scan yesterday and there’s a little baby in there! It’s the clearest scan picture I’ve ever seen – you can see it here which is a photo of the scan and therefore not great, but clear enough to see a bambino in there. Hooray! Baby is due to land before Christmas which is just perfect. I am seriously excited

So that’s my first piece of news. My SECOND piece of news is that Bob & I’s business The Life Craft (which we’ve been sporadically blogging about here) has been entered into a really amazing competition run by Barclay’s Bank. Competitors are divided up by location and then by sector; in 12 days the judges will shortlist their favourite three entries per location and whoever gets the most votes wins up to £50,000 to develop their business. We really need people to back us just now – a task that will take literally seconds to do in the hope that we can be shortlisted. If you could take a moment to do this I really would be most grateful.

So that’s the news for just now! Onto the reviews.

I posted yesterday about our big walk around Calderglen Park with Penny the other night. When we got home, I was so knackered that I decided to have a bath. Lush had sent me a Big Blue bath ballistic and a bar of Sandstone soap last week as a freebie to encourage me to take 90 minutes as a World Cup Widow and I wasn’t going to look that gift horse in the mouth (although I didn’t have the heart to ‘fess up about Scotland’s lack of qualifying!) I’ve used the Big Blue loads of times before and love it but the Sandstone soap was a new one to my crappy sensitive skin and I’m really impressed with it! I got off all of the dry flaky bits without irritating my skin any further and it smells really nice too. Lush are also promoting their BB Seaweed facemask to World Cup Widows but I haven’t tried that one yet.

Although I have to say I’m very jealous of our friends in the South after discovering that Lush have Spas, but they’re only in London, Leeds, Poole and Kingston! Have any of you tried them out before?

The other review I wanted to share with you is for a website that I discovered after Christmas called Dot Com Giftshop. I got these supercute Russian Doll tins for the girls to keep their hairbobbles, colouring pencils and various tiny toys in so that I’d stop standing on them and I was really impressed with the speed and service offered by the site. A few weeks ago, they contacted me to say they’d listed Adventures of a Lady in Training in their top 50 craft blogs (at #42! The cheek of it, I reckon I should have been top 20 at least!) and would I be interested in reviewing some of their products. So they sent me out some of their Heart gifts range and I have to say that yet again, I was impressed with the speed, service and quality offered by them.

This gorgeous & classy tealight holder has been claimed by Erica for above her bed:

and they also sent this selection:

which just made me smile as soon as I opened the box which contained Feltcraft butterfly hearts, Iron-on patches, thick wrapping tape with hearts, thinner gift tape, alphabet heart stickers and decorative heart stickers which I have to admit made me want to sit down and write a letter to someone – anyone – which I could decorate with hearts. Yes I know, I’m unashamedly girly. Anyway, it’s a big thumbs up from me for the Dot Com Giftshop not just for having such a wide variety of cute and inexpensive gift items but also for the brilliant customer service experience.

And finally the bit you’ve all been waiting for – the giveaway! This giveaway has now closed

OK – up for grabs we have everything in this photograph:

and to enter the giveaway I would like you to:

1) Comment here (that gets you one entry)
2) Be a fan on facebook (that gets you another entry
3) Tweet about the giveaway (that gets you yet another entry)

Please remember to tell me in your comment if you’ve done steps 2 & 3 otherwise you won’t be credited for that entry! Also ensure you leave an email address for me to contact you on. You have until 8pm on Wednesday 2nd June 2010 to enter and I will post anywhere in the world.

Please note: I am not paid for reviews other than getting to keep the product I’m reviewing. You can therefore be assured that the review I write is unbiased.

Posted under giveaway

I haven’t talked much here about The LifeCraft because we still have not got our premises sorted out but we have been ploughing ahead full steam this month, with our staff Jenny and Lisa-Marie starting with us at the beginning of April. There’s so much that I want to – and will – share with you as soon as our website is ready to launch but I’m holding my cards close to my chest for now

Yesterday, the three of us trotted along to Busy Bees craft studio for Face Painting training in preparation for the shop opening. So. Much. FUN!

These were our models for the day:

I have to admit I hadn’t expected that – I thought we’d have been practicing on each other but this was so much easier since mistakes were easier to tidy up and objectively critique. The rapport with our trainer Elaine was absolutely brilliant and since the class was a nice small size (just 6 of us) there was a decent amount of chat too.

Here’s a snap of Jenny and Lisa-Marie practicing on their freaky models:

After we’d gone through the different brush techniques it was time to practice sponging (which has been my particular bugbear) and our arms were pressed into service. Using Grimas water-based face paints we were encouraged to sponge a base onto our arms and blend it with other shades and once we were a little more confident in that, it was time to practice on a real-life human! Here’s an action shot of Jenny painting Diane’s face and you can see her sponge blending on her arm too.

Diane’s finished facepaint

Lisa-Marie got to practice on Elaine and decided to go for a butterfly:

It was so much fun, seriously. If someone had told me a year ago that I’d be studying facepainting for work I’d never, ever have believed it and this is the start of so many exciting experiences. I can’t wait

Busy Bees can provide experienced face painters or face painting training based in the South Side of Glasgow. For more information call them on 0141 433 9506 or send an email

Posted under general crafty updates