What is St Luke's Hospice?

St Luke's is a hospice which cares for people aged 18 and above throughout Sheffield who have incurable illnesses. Their aim is always to control the patients symptoms, alleviate pain, and give them the best possible quality of life – all free of charge. It costs £6 million per annum to keep St Luke's open, and government funding, via NHS trusts only provides one third of the funds required, which means the Hospice has to raise a staggering £4 million each year to provide this vital end-of-life care.

This challenge was set up by a St Luke's Supporter who has seen first hand, the amazing care given to patients through St Luke's and whilst donations are now closed we would like to thank all our donators for their wonderful contributions.

Saturday 30 June 2012

Our Little Furry Friends

Hello everyone and welcome to June and a nice long weekend in the UK to celebrate the Queen's Diamond Jubilee - there are a number of challenges out there to reflect this asking for red, white and blue or something regal so we thought we'd be different and get you to make cards featuring furry animals instead!  It can be any theme you like and can have as many layers as you like for those of you who found last months one layer too daunting!   All we ask is that it features something furry - dogs, cats, monkeys, mice, teddies or even furry monsters if the mood takes you ;-)

This month we have another fantastic set of Waltzingmouse Stamps worth £14.99 up for grabs - the fabulous and extremely useful set of wordy background stamps Text-It  Click the stamp set to link to the store and see all the fabulous projects the DT have created with it.



So are you ready for our inspiration parade (see parades are not just for her Majesty we can all join in!)  We've got a wide variety of furries to inspire you this month:








Hope that got your mojo flowing as we'd really like to improve on last months low entries - so please tell all your crafty buddies about our challenge :-)



Saturday 23 June 2012

Today's Fair

Just a little heads up in case anyone was planning on coming to see us - I have pulled out of the Heeley Festival today due to the inclement weather - I'm afraid I just couldn't stand another 10 hours of battling the wind and rain in an open field.

Sorry to disappoint - am looking for some INDOOR fairs as we speak.........

Thursday 21 June 2012

A little fury reminder.....

Just to let you know that you still have 9 days left to play along with our "something fury" challenge this month to be in with the chance of winning the lovely Waltzingmouse Stamp Set worth £15. 

If you need a little more inspiration - here are a few cards from the DT





It's also Jenny's birthday today so if you've time - pop on over and pay her a birthday visit.


Monday 11 June 2012

Quick Update

It's been a pretty long, pretty wet and very windy weekend - so sorry if you've been waiting for an update on yesterday's fair.  I'm afraid there wasn't a whole lot to share so I didn't feel like rushing to blog about it this morning.

As I feared - the weather here was pretty dreadful - no torrential rain (we got that tonight instead!) but lots of short sharp showers and really gusty wind all day.  That gave us problems as we couldn't get the gazebo up and couldn't display the cards in the normal way as they would have blown away so lots spent their time in boxes.  We ended up outside, at the back of the church where this years fair was, on a market stall next door to the vintage fairground organ (6 hours of tunes like floral dance, delilah and congratulations at about 500 decibels did little to cheer us up!) and unfortunately many of other stalls back there were either moved (food stalls were moved into the cafe within the first hour) or sold out within the first 2 hours of the fair, which meant that few people seemed to find us.  We made a pretty paltry £96, which considering we were open for 2 hours longer than last year when we made £125 was quite disappointing - it was just a pity we weren't up front with the rest of the stalls.

Here's a couple of pics - nothing exciting - but the shot of stall was taken while we were open - we weren't exactly rushed of our feet...........   (we had some other "non blog donated" cards on our stall too which were kept separate from our sales- we raised an extra £12 from those but I won't add that to our total)


This is the delightful fairground organ (it was on the pitch next door to us!)  I should have taken video so you could all have shared in the joy of it's music too - one song was great - by song 130 we never want to hear an organ again!!!


Hopefully the weather will improve for the next fair - and the total with it!

Thanks again for everyone's support.

Tara

Friday 8 June 2012

Update

Hi All

Just a quick update to let you all know where we're at..........

My hubby and I spent 4 hours last night bagging, pricing and organising all the cards we've received this year ahead of our first fair of 2012 which is tomorrow.  I should have taken a picture of the chaos that was our living room but I couldn't get to the camera (honestly it looked like ones of those programmes about hoarders and I swear we almost lost the cat......) 

We have now had a staggering One Thousand Nine Hundred and Eighty Cards donated since the challenge started last year - yes 1980 - so give yourselves a well deserved round of applause :-D

Now it's over to me to sell them - hopefully the weather will be better tomorrow when we're at St Luke's very own Summer Fair  (it's very wet and windy currently) and we're outdoors with just a flimsy gazebo for shelter :(   I will update the sales total on Sunday once I dry out ;-)  The fair is being held at St Mary's Community Centre this year for anyone local and NOT at the hospice.

We also have another fair on the 23rd June at Heeley City Farm so I will have another update then.

Thanks again for your continued support.

Tara
x

Wednesday 6 June 2012

May "One Layer" Winners

Well, even though it wasn't our most popular challenge (lol!) we still had some stunning entries and I can now announce our prize winner and our 5 runners up:

The winning card was this gorgeous fruity number by Susan Goetter - a perfect example of an one layer card with lovely stamp composition and brilliant colouring (don't those strawberries make your mouth water???)  Congrats Susan - you win our LOTV stamps :-D



Our runners up this month who become "St Luke's Lovelies" and will get a badge emailed shortly, in numerical order are:

Linby - we loved your text behind your image which added real depth without layers

 The Sticky Elf - your embossing and inking panel was bright and brilliant

 Sylvia Anne - again great inking technique with perfect over-stamping

Pauline - your little framed image was delightful

Pat K - the shading on your rose was sheer perfection!

Thanks so much for playing along ladies - hope you'll all be back with something furry this month :-D