Dear 2010, thank you for...

Happy Thanksgiving! Even though we don't have Thanksgiving here in the UK, I still love the idea of taking the opportunity to take stock and look at your life and all the good things in it :) I was lucky enough to receive a Thanksgiving pressie of a tin of pumpkin puree (thank you Toni!!) so I can see a pumpkin pie in my near future ;)

For Thanksgiving last year, I did a LO for the Scrappy Tree thankfulness challenge - it just so happened that I was working on this page just after Df lost his job and we had to give up our flat! My thankfulness at that time was that Df and I were able to stay together, and had wonderful family that were able to help us out with somewhere to stay.

A year later things have changed (thankfully!) and although it hasn't always been easy we have also had some great things happen to us this year! I wanted to do a LO again for this year's Scrappy Tree thankfulness challenge, and came across a great prompt from Shimelle's True Stories class which I found really useful in helping me write some journaling on the subject. As you may be able to see on the tags in the picture, I journalled using letters of the alphabet and although it didn't cover everything that happened this year, it was a lovely way of thinking about
different things (and really shoe-horning a few things in for X,Y and Z!)
Whatever the photo may suggest, I am thankful to 2010 for more than white wine ;)

It has been really crisp here this week and we are expecting snow any day now, but at the moment it is nice to have the cold sunshine instead of the rain :) we used to live near the sea before we moved to the valleys and I still miss it! I was lucky enough this week to have a training course in Swansea and really loved being able to see the sea from the carpark (small pleasures!) - I wish I had been able to get closer, but was trying for a sneaky pic without arousing the interest of the other people on the course!

Although I really should be studying at the moment (!) I have been plugging away at my December Daily album ready for the 1st December next Wednesday :) I was dubious that I would be able to get the foundation pages done in time, but it is beginning to come together now and once I have cut out two more pages and added some embellishments it will be fighting fit and ready for December to come! With all the best will in the world there was a little shadow over December for us last year, so this year I want to document and really treasure my Christmas - there will be so many changes in the New Year I know that I will be glad that I did :)

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone who reads this post, but especially to my wonderful scrappy friends (you know who you are - love ya!) Gayle xx