Ally Pally

I have been looking forward to going to Ally Pally for months, we usually combine it with a romantic weekend in London but this year we decided to drive up and back in a day which at the time seemed like a good idea. Rebecca wanted to come and we took Mum as well. We were up at 5.30 and left to go and pick Mum up in Weymouth at 6. The journey up was great, hardly any traffic and we arrived a few minutes before the doors opened.
Rebecca has been really enjoying making cards and a few smaller scrapbook pages so she went armed with a small list of stash that she wanted to buy, let me rephrase that....stash she wanted me to buy her! Both Mum and Rebecca were really overwhelmed with the amount of stash there was to choose from.

Last year I met up with Angie at Ally Pally for the first time which was great, this year she wasn't sure if she was going to be able to go but she managed to persuade her lovely hubby to bring her. Her daughter Emily came too and it was lovely too meet her after seeing so many layout featuring her and her brother Adam. We just had to photograph the moment.

I too went armed with a list of stash that I needed, although surprisingly it wasn't very long, and I managed to get everything that I wanted.

Last year I bought some chipboard templates and I have found them so useful that I wanted to see if I could get some different shapes. I managed to find these all on one stall!

Here is the rest of my stash purchases, I wanted some more distress inks and got five new colours. Talking of distress inks I met PennyK at one of the stands (she introduced me to the blending tool) it was lovely to see her again.

Don't you just love this dotty paper by Bo Bunny! It is a bit like dotted swiss but even more yummy, there were loads of colours but I was quite retrained and only bought five sheets.

I managed to find some more bling although not the pearl swirls that I really wanted, I will have to trawl on line to find those I think. I did find some gorgeous prima bling with tiny flowers attached which I just had to buy. Rebecca was really good and kept finding lovely little bits for me, she knows what I like all too well! Mum did really well and came away with some lovely packs of paper, bling, card blanks, ink, stamps and lots more.

Our journey home wasn't too good, it took up ages to get out of London and onto the M4, the traffic was nose to tail. From there is was ok until we hit the New Forest and then the dual carriageway was at a standstill we thougth it must have been an accident. Thankfully we had stopped very near a turn off which lots of cars were taking so Justin decided it would be better to be moving and lost than sat still in traffic!! It was actually a really lovely detour all through the New Forest and he didn't get us lost although it made for a very long journey home. We finally got back at about 6.15 so a long day but very worth it.

TFL

xx