On my desk this week...

I have my design team work on the go. I was so lucky that my dear sister had just sent me this beautiful photo of her daughter with Elmo, taken on their holiday in Australia, when my kit arrived. Perfect timing! My papers contained pinks and Elmo is red- but my page worked out okay just the same. The photo scrapped, will be in the Scrap booking by Design Gallery very soon, keep an eye out for it at the following link ...

http://www.scrapbookingbydesign.co.nz/gallery/

Also on my desk I have my puzzle piece's waiting to be decorated for the Puzzle swap over at Glamour girls

http://www.glamourgirlstamps.co.nz/

I have one only posted away, one almost finished and 7 still to go!

On Wednesday I played at being Santa and sent my goodies away for the Secret Santa swap over at Scrapbook studio

http://www.scrapbookingbydesign.co.nz/jm3/

I had so much fun gathering scrapping treasures to post, the hard part was that the total cost was to be $15, and oh I gathered so much more that I had to keep some myself! How sad!! Had a wee bit of trouble with the choc'y disappearing as well... no it wasn't the children, I hid them in my scrap room! Bad choice!

I took part in my first ever challenge at NZ Dares, see the Layout below titled 'Love Looks This Sweet' and I must have had beginners luck as I was chosen to do the challenge two weeks from now. That was a buzz! Check out the new dare just up today http://www.nzdares.blogspot.com/

I would like to try this one also, another awesome prise is up for grabs. All I need are more hours in my day!

Do be sure to join in my challenge here...http://designteam.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/11/have-you-taken-the-timeto-think-about-how-you-are-going-to-endyour-2008-scrapbook-album---i-thought-it-might-be-nice-to-en.html The prize is a set of Alcohol Inks and Blending solution and I may just add a little something extra.

Wishing all my readers a safe and happy weekend. xx

My Advent calender has landed.

I received an email tonight from Karen to say she had received her advent calender. Well done to the postie as I only sent it yesterday afternoon, and Karen lives in the North Island!

My calender was based on a clipboard, for Karen to use after the advent! The flower is easy to remove and the chain with the charm doubles as a braclet. The ribbon can be tied to the back, or removed as liked. Inside I have... well I had best not tell-or show yet, until karen has opened them up!

NZ Dares Challenge - Love looks this sweet

I have been scrapping again today! This time I decided to go out of my comfort zone and tried a challenge over at NZ Dares. They have a photo of a very cool tee shirt on their blog- that my daughter would kill for!! Anyway, the challenge is to create a scrapbook page using the tee shirt for inspiration. So many things about the tee shirt inspired me into action. First I spotted those lovely looking sunflowers and my thoughts turned to my sunflower stamp, then to my rose stamp... I do love stamps ... and the winning entry wins...stamps from Purple onion, what better inspiration does one need! Check out the competiton details here http://www.nzdares.blogspot.com/ My sunflowers are coloured with water colour pencils and my roses are coloured with alcohol inks. The arrow stamp is white embossed and spot the cupid down the bottom- that is a rubbon. I have placed all of my elements in such a way so that they kind-of take on the shape of a heart. Oh and the photo is of my lovely mum and dad in their younger day!
Labels: My challenge entry's
Link: http://www.nzdares.blogspot.com/

Mother's Smile

Today I had a free day, well pretty much! I finished off this Layout of Muriel, Andrews lovely, but saddly departed mum. Muriel is one of the most lovely people, whom I have had the good fortune to share a part of my life with.

Stormy weather

It is so nice to have a day at home today, after a very full on weekend. Sunday saw us back in town at 10am. Camden had to be in to play his bagpipes, with the band, at Oamaru's Victorian Fete. We had mass in the morning , at St Kevin's and latter in the day we attended the prize giving and graduation ceremony for the senior students at the school. Aimee still has next year to go, but made us proud by receiving the Fair Player sports award for the second year running.
We have had a mixed bag of weather today, very hot this morning and then this afternoon we had a horrendous thunder and hail storm. I really was worried that my scrap room roof was going to cave in on me!!

So hot!

It is so hot here today, has to be in the 30's, I'm sure! We have been at the Duntroon Trail Bike Ride today. Our boys still ride motor bikes, I'm afraid, even after Andrews accident. Camden' bike broke down after the first round and to spite Terry tiring very hard to fix it for him, all attempts failed. Camden had no choice but to bail out- or ride the trial bike Cody had brought home from his work at the Motor Bike shop for Camden to try. Bailing out was not on Cam's agenda so he put on his brave face, and helmet and off he went, looking a little worried about being on an unfamiliar bike. An hour later he was back, all smiles and asking us if we had brought his Christmas pressie yet!!
Cody had not returned when we left. It was just so hot that Andrew had to come home to try and find a cool spot- he's still looking for one!

Hello there. Thought it was past time for an up-date! I am happy to report that I have finished my Advent calender for Karen. This project really threw me right out of my comfort zone. Always good to push yourself a little I guess. I cannot pop a photo of my somewhat busy and kind of messy calender on yet, have to get it to Karen first.
I do however have photos of my scrap space, taken at 12.30am on Sunday night, well Monday morning really. My long suffering husband insisted on me taking a photo of my mess to pop on my blog!!
Now that I have the calender done its time to get on with the puzzle swap, but I really do want to do a little scrap booking in between pieces as I'm beginning to get withdrawal symptoms I think!!
This afternoon I decided to whip up an ATC for the Quest for a cure challenge, not long after starting I realised it was Thursday- not Wednesday as I had thought. The challenge closed on Wednesday!! However I carried on regardless as it was such a cool idea and it was nice to be doing something other than the calender.

Eel for dinner!

Sunday night saw me happily scrapping and watching the clock as Camden had headed to the river with a friend to go eeling. The deal was that he was to be home at 8.30pm sharp, which after some text negotiating was stretched out until 9.00pm . At 9.30 I began texting my late home lad, to no avail. He failed to send a reply. I did a little more scrapping (is that a bad thing??), come 9.45pm I could concentrate no longer on the task in front of me so went on a torch hunt, at the same time tring to reach Camden on his phone. Just as I headed for the door he appeared, bag in hand, smile on face, and saying how very sorry he was that he couldn't answer his phone because first he was gutting his eel, then he was biking home! What really disturbed me was the slimmy horrid eel he had in his bag... and the fact that he had gutted it meant that he intended me to cook it!!

A big thankyou to Jenny

After seeing Jenny's new look blog I just had to have a go myself at changing my background. I had no joy at all after hours and hours of trying!! So Jenny was very kind and emailed instructions to me and now my blog is looking like a scrapbooker's blog should. Thanks Jenny you are wonderful!!
Check out http://alliebrownslayouts.blogspot.com/ for inspiration and beautiful pages!!

Bossy scrapper #18

What a fun 'Work do' we had last night in the Scrap Cafe. Scrap meek had a tasty menu planned and took our orders during the day. At 8pm I entered the cafe to have my menu choice deciphered as the following :

Shrimp Cocktail - 6 x 12' lay out
Greek salad - felt piece
Baked salmon - (now this sure scared me!!) - orange, purple and white
Baked potato - 3 or more buttons
Hot fudge sundae - card stock only

Wow ! Really put me off my baked salmon for a bit.
I was about to head for the cyber bar with a few of the other scrappers who wished they had ordered something else when Scrap meek tossed this blog link on the table for us to have a peek at http://colorcombosgalore.blogspot.com/ Oh, I was feeling super ready to tuck into my salmon after viewing that!!
Have popped the resulting LO above for you to have a peek at.
I have a 'Take one' that I completed last night, and a 'Take two', as of course I added a little more to my page today- as I always do!!

Stardust and social lifes!

Hi ya. I have just finished watching the movie 'Stardust' with Andrew and Cam. Such a sweet, beautiful movie, I do enjoy a good love story. Fantasy movies are not usually my thing- but I loved this one. So much so that I have just put the theme song onto my blog! Was time for a change anyway. The boys, well Andrew and Cam, are lining up to watch another Box office movie, so thought Id come have a wee play.
Cody is away to town to a mates for the night, no doubt the boys are out on the town. Cody kindly dropped Aimee and Jess (another of Aimee's friends) into town for me. The girls have a friends leaving party on tonight. They are camping at Uncles Davids for the night- in their tent, which may well have blown down by the time they return to it after the party! It was really odd tonight to see our two oldest heading off in pursuit of fun and social life's, didn't seem that long ago it was me heading out on the town...those were the days!! Oh dear I must be getting old
Right away to check out the neat digi goodies Jenny found on a this cool blog.