I made this hanging for this month's UK Art Raffle. The theme was circles, so I used a Tim Holtz clock mask that I got at the weekend. My friend bought them by mistake, thinking they were stickers. Ha! As any fule kno, masks are used to create relief effects and of course you cannot use them as stickers!! Oh she may have appeared irritated, but trust me, one day she will thank me for pointing that out at length several times.

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Rrrrrr, I'm getting well and truly in the Christmas mood though, so come on December! I've signed up for Shimelle's Journal Your Christmas project (a page a day between 1st December and 12th night) and am using acrylic 8x8 covers for it. I've made some of the pages in advance, but I'll wait to make the others up until I've got a few entries under my belt and I know what direction I'm going in. Or alternatively, if the whole thing falls into disuse by oooh, day 8, then I've not wasted too much paper on it. (But of course that is not going to happen because I am on top of Christmas this year and absolutely will find the time each evening to sit with a small alcoholic beverage and reflect on and record the day's seasonal events for posterity.)

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I have also bought an artificial Christmas tree. I have mixed feelings about this, because I have always had a real tree at Christmas. When I was growing up artificial trees were one of my mother's key indicators for common-ness, (together with watching ITV and buying anything from the ice cream man) and while I have always fought against such nonsense I can't deny that artificial trees just don't seem right. Until earlier this year my FIL worked at a local garden centre and we always got a really nice, big tree for free from there, but he has retired this year (without so much as a thought as to our ongoing tree needs I might add!) and so we are left to fend for ourselves, tree-wise. I can't be doing with spending £30 each year on something that's going to shiver all its needles off by New Year. Plus the disposal of the real tree was getting to be a bit of a headache. My husband, invariably in a bad mood with Christmas by that time, always insists on chopping it to pieces to get it out of the door. By the end it's like that scene from Shallow Grave when Christopher Ecclestone goes mad and starts frenziedly hacking up the body. By contrast, wrestling an artificial tree back into the box in which it arrived will, I am confident, be a doddle.

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So I got one from B&Q (WHOOP! WHOOP! - "common" alert!). It cost £30 (WHOOP! WHOOP!). Apparently it is a "Luxury" model and has "Cashmere fronds" (WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP! etc).