Zentangles anyone?

How was your weekend???
On Friday night our eldest headed for the hills with two of his mates and their hunting dogs.
On Saturday morning we were woken about 6am by the fire siren, which boarders our house...lucky us!!
Camden rushed off to help fight the fire and made it back just in time to jump into his kilt and round up his pipes before we hurried into town to the A & P show. Camden is a member of the Waitaki District Schools Pipe Band and the show is an annual event for the band.
Sunday brought another early start with me jumping out of bed just after 6am to be a passenger for our leaner driver (Camden again). We drove around the road to pick up petrol for Cam's motor bike. I clenched my seat belt and said my prayers the whole way there and back!!! I thank my lucky stars we did not have any more children, and that Camden is the last child I am going to have to sit in the car with while he practises his driving!
Once home Camden headed off on his motor bike for half a day of volunteer work on the Kurow bike trail track. I jumped back into bed for a couple more hours of shut eye.
Now for the best part of the weekend... my highlight was when my very best friend come to visit. She always brings sunshine and fresh ideas into my life.... today was no exception, Robyn introduced me to Zentangles... a word I had never before heard!!


What is a zentangle I asked ??.... well a zentangle is a method of creating beautiful images from repetitive patterns and its surposed to be fun and relaxing...

This is my first attempt at a zentangle, well not quite the first attempt , I threw my first 20 attempts in the bin before Id hardly put pen to paper. I'm into order and planning and really struggled with the randomness of creating a zentangle, but here it is anyway.....

...very random, and not at all wonderful. I'm going to have another go and see if I can improve on this, I hope I can improve, I mean I cannot get ANY worse now can I !!
I had a city scape theme in mind when I began this crazy doodle, but I got very lost along the way...do you see the word city in there????
Thanks so much Robyn for your company and inspiration. Do please show us yours :-)


Check out 'much better than mine' Zentangles HERE

Black and white with a POP of colour

I had a friend ask how I achieved this photo shop technique, so thought Id share it with all of you.

Here is my black and white photo with its pop of colour...

this is the original photo I have used for my example.

I'm using photo shop cs2 and this is what I do...
Open up Windows by clicking on the word windows near the top of your screen.
Press on the word Layers, so the pop up box appears.
Click on the word Layer, near the top of your screen again.
Click on duplicate layer...click OK
Ensure you have your background copy layer selected in the layers palette.
Click on image, again this can be found near the top of your computer screen.
Click on adjustments.
Click on desaturate.
Select the eraser tool from the tools palette (right hand side of your screen)
Now all you need to do is to rub out the areas you wish to have coloured by holding down the left hand mouse button and moving your curser over the area that is to be erased....
You may need to alter your brush size and zoom in on your image to make this process easier for your self.

Give it a go, its very simple and can look super effective

Cutting it fine with cards.

Hmm... I'm a tad behind with my blogging of late and I forgot to mention that Camden turned 15 on the 17th of February. Here is the card I whipped up for him about mid-night the night before his big day...told you crafting has been slow!!


I made his card to match his present, which is a tool box (surprise!!) that still has not arrived!! Poor Camden. Our closest town is Oamaru, and tiring to get a special present turned into a major, as of course the shops did not stock the pressie and it did not show up in time for the birthday. In fact we are still waiting, a week after the event! Lucky our Camden is patient.

Now its 11.20 pm and I have to make a birthday card for my Aunts birthday tomorrow.

Why can I not seem to get myself organised these days????

Missing Aimee

Aimee is gone and I'm missing her already!Funny that I have been looking forward to some quieter times, but now Id like the chatter and clutter back in our house. Aimee looked somewhat lost without her friends when we left her at Studholme. I sure hope she's not 'Nigel no mates' for too long!

We took these photos before we left home today...

I know Aimee is going to miss these two great friends (Claire and Charlotte) heaps!!!

She may even miss her mum a little bit :-)
Cody and Aimee work hard at pretending they are not friends, but I know differently

sigh... all of our children are growing up..."slow down" I say


Hard to beleive our little girl is 18, how nice it would be to wind back the clock.
Tonight I have had the old photo albums out and decided to scan a few favorite's from days of old. Here's a peek at Aimee when she was a whole heap younger....


...with big brother Cody

...and in pig tails

...face paint

All dressed up for her 5th birthday party, with Cody and best friend Claire (as seen in the photo at the top of this post)

Snow fun.

Ballet days

Aimee,with best friend Claire again.
Horsing around.

This photo was taken in 2000, spot a younger Camden in the background.

Good Luck sweet girl xx

Boy pages always take a little more thought from me. My lads are not the 'flowers type'. But, on this page I have made masculine type flowers..well, I tried to anyway!

My flowers are strips of paper, with one long edge of the paper strip distressed. I have stressed the edges simply by using a fancy edged ruler as a guide to tear my paper strips, instead of cutting them. I then rolled up each paper strip and placed them onto punched out circles that had been topped with glossy accents. Very simple

Several layers of paper and fabric were used on my page to create movement and grunge.

Journalling strips complete my page.

Crepe paper is a favorite scrapping item of mine, its very versatile and scrunches up delightfully well.


Today Camden passed his learners driving test and I am feeling very afraid as now he is going to want to drive every where we go. Boo Hooo!!

Tomorrow morning we head to Dunedin to drop our dear daughter at University. Its going to be one of those happy / sad days...and scary because Camden is already fighting for the drivers seat ..NO I say!!

Wishing you all a wonderful weekend. xx

Be on the look out

The latest Up2scrap magazine is on its way to the magazine racks......

so keep a look out for it.

Also, on its way is a new challenge on the Up2scrap Blog

this will be posted on the blog by the end of this month...

So look out for it and give it a go, there is always an awesome prize up for grabs.

You can find the Up2scrap web site here

and the Up2scrap Blog here

Don't forget the up coming challenge...give it a go...I dare you :-)

No mess in my room tonight

This weekend has whipped by super fast...again!

On Saturday Andrew and I went to the movies to see 'Have you heard about the Martins'. The film was a light hearted comedy, easy to watch with a few laughs, and I'm a Hugh Grant fan so it was all good.

Today I had great plans to scrap, instead I made more apricot sauce and muddled through the washing and house work.

Tonight I took to my craft room at 9.45 for some much needed 'me time'. I sat down and had a play with this very cool new digital kit I purchased from Louise on Friday. Check out the kit HERE There are endless possibilities with the Fairywalk kit, its super gorgeous!!

Here is the page I created in a couple of hours, which is a quick page for me ....

I'm looking forward to having another play with this kit,I just love it. In fact I love all of Louise's kits, don't forget to check them out. Louise has other goodies as well.

And the awesome thing about digital scrapping is that now I can just turn off the lights and go to bed... there is no mess to clean up! Yee harr. Thanks Louise :-)

Apricot sauce

Here's my sauce and jam....

...and here are the recipe's, passed onto me by Gordon and Tina Williams several years ago.....

Apricot Sauce

1.2 litres of white vinegar

2.5 kgs of Apricots

1 dessertspoon of ginger

6 teaspoons of salt

1 dessertspoon of cloves

900gms of sugar

1 teaspoon of cayenne pepper

4 onions

Mince the onions and apricots, add all of the other ingredients and cook for one hour, stirring occasionally. Bottle

Apricot Jam

2.7 kgs of Apricots

2.7 kgs of sugar

2 and 1/2 cups of water

10 kernels from the apricot stones

Split and stone the apricots and place the fruit in a pot with the water. Cook slowly until the fruit is pulped. add sugar and boil for 15-20 minutes. Test and bottle.

And of course, if your into paper craft make some labels...just for fun !

Today was a non event at our house as we had the painters in painting the ceiling, in the kitchen, lounge, bedroom and one of the bathrooms. All of the 'cut outs' in our ceiling are now nicely covered, and after tomorrows top coats of paint we can reattach Andrews ceiling hoist back to the ceiling. It will be lovely to have this rather long, drawn out job completed.

The weekend was super hot at our house, so instead of staying home and doing the house work we chose to follow our children to the lake side. Well, we followed the boys, Aimee worked an 11 hour shift at the restaurant where she works in Kurow, so sadly we had to leave her there.
Here are a few snaps from our day out.

We have been coming to this gorgeous spot for years now

Tom, Hannah and Cody spent most of the day in and on the sparkling waters of Lake Waitaki
Looking for Hannah, who was on the biscuit when the boat left shore... and I wonder where Cody's life jacket went???

The lake side does pose a few problems for Andrew, who was well strapped into his chair!

Looking a little more relaxed here.
Hannah, enjoying the NZ way of life. Hannah is Cody's girlfriend, she comes all the way from Germany.

...and Hannah again, making friends with Bid and Shopie.

Saturday night was a sleep over at our house for Camden and his mates.

Dean, Hamish, John and Camden all headed to the river once darkness fell and come home many hours later with fresh eels for breakfast...yuck! And I slipped up and did not take a photo of the slimmy eels.

On Sunday I picked some of our Apricots, we have 60 trees full of Apricots, so if any one out there wants to come and help themselves ...please please do!! I can only make so much jam and sauce!!. Which, by the way was how I filled in Sunday afternoon. Tomorrow I will add a photo and recipe's.

Magpie on the loose

As you may know I just hate photos of me!!! The camera never lies, and I'm not good enough at photo shop to remove my wrinkles without making myself look like a clown, I know this because I have tried on more than one occasion! Anyway, here I am with Bruce the magpie, yes he still resides here, he just wont leave.
Bruce does not take kindly to other magpies flying into his patch, I guess he thinks hes a budgie, who knows? Each evening I pop the dogs in their kennels and let Bruce out of the aviary, he gets very excited and does circles of the house squawking merrily. If I'm out in the garden duing the day I let Bruce out and he just plays around beside me, he even follows me if I go walking! He flys a little and if he gets too far ahead of me he will land on the road and run along beside me. Bruce is quite a character. But he does not appear to like the rest of our family members and is beginning to swoop at them, and the odd visitor. I can see he is going to be quite a problem,

but I love him just the same.

A little bit of crafting

At last I have been back at my desk. Today I made a baby card that I should have made a month ago. I used one of my all time favorite stamps, Penny Black's - Nap Time. Its a very cute stamp.

This is a Thank you card I made a couple of weeks back...

Those tiny roses are my favorite embellishment at the moment


I am hoping I might get onto a spot of scrapbooking over the weekend, but Im not holding my breath!

Wishing you all a bright and sunny weekend filled with many happy moments

MIA

I have been missing in action for some time now! The school holidays and face book have side tracked me from both this blog and my craft work, but I am working on getting back to task. Even my calender, alias 365 project is not up to date. If you haven't checked out this site and like to take photos then check it out now and start your own calender,its fun and inspirational.

I have had a very lucky day, as Louise emailed me to tell me I had won her blog rak!!! Wol, what a lovely surprise... take a peek at the goodies I have coming my way and at the priceless photo of Louise's dear little boy pulling the name from the 'hat'. Check it out Here

Thank you Louise and Joshie.

As I have not been crafting I am going to share my photo of the day that I snapped for my 365 project. I have not uploaded it to my calender yet, that's going to be one of tomorrows jobs, and hopefully, by the end of the day I will have something crafty to share, but no promises though. By the way, today we did not get rain...what does rain look like, Ive almost forgotten? I placed this daisy, plucked from my garden, in a wet patch created by the garden hose!