Merry Christmas ..and words of hope!

Dear friends, 

I wanted to take this opportunity to wish you all a blessed Christmas Day. I hope from the bottom of my heart you all have happiness and love on this special day and I thank you from the deepest of my heart for all the love and support you have given me this past year, especially the last 2 months. I will never have enough words to express gratitude on behalf of my husband and I for the support you all showed me and my family, the words that you all spoke, the care and love you extended during my very difficult time. I wish all the happiness in the world for all of you and I want you to know I am doing OK. I really am. I have not died from the constant pain of what happened yet, so let's just look forward to the new year and hope that someone up there knew what they were doing. 

Being Christmas, and being the season for love, happiness and hope, I finally wanted to share with you this amazing gift I received from my friends at Once Upon A..Sketch. i.e. my Design Team. I remember the day I announced to them I lost my baby. It was so matter of fact! And then I never really talked about it much after that. It was business as usual. But behind my back, they lovingly put together this album for me . They named it a Golden Book or The Book Of Hope with the theme throughout being just that..."hope". The day I received it, about 5 weeks ago I slept with it in my bed. I just could not believe that all these people conspired and did this FOR ME! I touched all the pages and cried and cried and cried. Cried at its beauty and its words, cried that these people cared for me enough to do this. Something inside me healed a little that day and ever since then I have this gorgeous book on my fireplace mantle piece, not far from where I scrap and glance over it and again, each time something heals inside me. 

This is by far the most amazing and treasured gift i have ever received, together with stunning handmade cards, beautiful flowers accompanied with touching words, emails, messages, gifts. All in the days that followed the loss from so many of you. I do not know what I did to deserve this but i just know that all this scrapping, blogging etc entered my life just over a year ago so I can meet all of you and for you all to help me with this. In the words of a quote that Maiko Kosugi wrote on her page below: 

" When you are sad, friends of the world walk with you hand in hand. The heart of the world wants to surround you"

I leave you all with these wonderful pieces of work and hope that wherever you are and whatever you are going through, you just keep the hope alive and take some inspiration from the words my friends have written on their pages. 

Take care my friends! Merry Christmas!!

**all album inserts and covers by Heather Jacob who also collated this special album. 

Natalie May 

Georgia Heald

Lene Neby

 Vibeke Harila

Jasmine Shea

Pamela Young 

Helen Tilbury 

Heather Jacob 

Sandi Taloumis

Jeni O'Connor, who together with Heather initiated this project I am told :o)

Maiko Kosugi 

Irma Peredne 

Natalie Elphinstone 

 Vicky Varvadouka