Giveaway - Breakfast Tray

I had a lovely morning yesterday working on this little breakfast tray for my giveaway and here it is, all finished. I really hope you like it!
The tray itself was made by Al Chandronnait - I have painted it white. There is a little Greengate placemat and some of my dollshouse "vintage" plates decorated with purple flowers. The plain purple bowl, cup and saucer are made by Sam Dunlap - such a pretty colour. I have filled the breakfast bowl with yoghurt with a swirl of fruit flavourings and I made tiny berries to add to the yoghurt. Of course there is a lovely steaming cup of black coffee, a coffee pot for refills and a little scone with jam and cream. When my husband saw this he asked if this was my idea breakfast and I had to admit that it was! I think it is really pretty, and I made it with lots of love for this giveaway to celebrate having more than 400 followers. Thank you so much for all your support - it means a lot to me and I really appreciate you all!

If you would like to enter this giveaway, all you need to do (you know the drill!) is be a follower and leave a comment on this blog. I'll draw it in about a week.

Have a lovely week with your miniatures!!

Back in Cyberspace

The last time I posted was 6th April!!! That is such a long time ago....you were probably wondering if I had dropped off the face of the earth after 7 weeks with no blog entries!!!

We have had such a disasterous time here. Not really, because actually everyone is well and happy and my beautiful children are just great and we haven't had any great tragedies to deal with, but it feels like I have had a tragedy anyway.

A bit of background....I run (actually maybe it should say ran) a dollshouse business here in New Zealand...., not my Etsy shop. I didn't really mention it much because I wanted to keep it separate from my blog, however like many dollshouse folk, I poured a huge amount of time and energy into setting it up - I ran it from home via a website. So....this is what has been happening with that: First the recession hit and that didn't do it much good, then my show displays were all at my mother-in-law's house when it burnt down so I lost those. (She is having a new house built and is ok but the displays are history.) Then someone hacked my website and destroyed it - one day the whole website was just gone! I have had a new one semi-built but I don't like the way it looks and also haven't had time to enter the about one thousand products back in. Which brings me to my recent misadventure...

...our computer fried itself about six weeks ago. It took with it all my business accounts, family and business photographs, basically everything, and I do A LOT on the computer! There's a lesson in backing things up for you. Please learn from our mistake!! We had to send the hard drive off to the men in the white coats and the computer had to be rebuilt.....got it back empty....no photo editing software, no email programme, NOTHING. We eventually recovered some things off the fried hard-drive.....our family photos of when the kiddies were little are all there, so that is good. My accounts are recovered up to Jan this year so that is a relief....I'll have to re-enter everything since then all over again.

Anyway, sorry to have to tell you all this - it's a bit boring to read!

But there are some things we haven't recovered, the absolute worst from my point of view is all the images I have collected over the last 18 months or so for my shabby chic miniatures.....everything is totally gone! All my images of plates, all my book covers I made, all my pictures that I used to make miniature framed pictures... just everything! I have to start all over again! So that sucks! Big time!

What amazes me, is how much it has completely thrown me! Even once we got the computer back, I just didn't know where to start trying to get started again. That's why I haven't been blogging - we've had the computer back for the last few weeks but I was so upset about it all that I didn't even want to have to tell you what had happened. And of course now that I have, I feel better.

So, let's look on the bright side....some of the plate images I had I have been able to re-find, and I can start collecting new images. I have now got a replacement photo editing programme that I can get to know how to use hopefully. I tried downloading a free one and look what it did!!! The photo at the top of this blog post is the result, but I saved it anyway because I kind of like the freaky 1960s hippy look....however that is NOT what I want all my photos to look like!

While all this was going on, I reached 400 followers. I don't deserve them, because I haven't been blogging for so long, but to those of you who are still reading, I have plans for a giveaway coming up to celebrate 400 followers and surviving my computer crash, so keep watching this space. Also, I received a lovely little gift from Mercedes for Easter, which brightened up my glumness...I'll show you photos next time.

Thanks for still reading my blog!