Being a sheep ...

... and following along with the flock doing a "quick" 2013 round up.

January:

• Still (quietly) patting myself on the back for winning Austral Bricks WA Employee of the Year for 2012.  The fact that I managed to (unintentionally) insult the Managing Director and keep my job apparently got me more points than all the work I did, but I'll take the win (and the $1500 Flight Centre voucher .. woohoo!  I can see a nice holiday in my future).
• Actually went out quad bike riding with the boys (all four of them) and didn't kill myself, break anything or hurt anyone else .. go me!
• Celebrated Alex's friend Chris' 18th birthday at Sizzler's in Kelmscott.
• Managed to get some more of the backyard finished and made some quirky crafty items for my upcoming birthday.  Bowls made from old records anyone?

February:

• Finally got the backyard landscaping guy to come back and finish it.
• Turned 40 ... aaaargghh!!  Celebrated with a 70's themed birthday party and had a great time.
• My 'baby' boy, Brad, turned 14!  Where is the time going??

March:

• Painted the 'spare' room for Mum to move into while she builds her new house.
• Tried my hand at fruit and vege gardening...

April:

• Let Alex drive us up to Ikea for a day out only to have his car die on the Cedric St off-ramp .. thank God for RAC road patrol! $250 for a new battery later, we were able to get his car going again just in time to go home.
• Celebrated Debbie's 50th birthday with high tea at Little Nich's Cafe.  Nice food, dribbly teapots and lovely company .. great day!!
• Clare came over to have a ride on the scooter to practise for her trip to Greece.  
• Commiserated with Deb over her baby, Amy, turning 16.

May:

• Had an early Mother's Day celebration with Mum, Clare, Rich and my tribe at the Mundijong Pub.  Peter and Richard went for a country motorbike ride first and met us there.
• Took Andrew and Debbie to see Cirque Du Soleil's OVO show.  Fantastic night out except for the bucketing down rain :-(
• Mum moved in.
• Went to Tasmania for our 20th wedding anniversary with no kids and using the voucher I won. Awesome but tiring (not for the reason you think ... get your mind out of the gutter!)
• Had another Mother's Day celebration when we got back from Tassie.  Love, hugs and presents .. yay!
• My middle baby, Drew, turned 16.  He booked himself in for his learner's test and passed first time ... go Drew!!

June:

• Ate the first apple from the Pinkabelle tree.  
• Got a wild idea to rip my wedding dress apart and use (what I thought was a hug amount of) fabric for other purposes. (Didn't get very far with that .. there was nowhere near as much silk in the skirt as I thought there was ..oh well).  Made Brad pose for photos in the bodice of the dress, mean mummy that I am!
• Painted Drew's bedroom wall with "racing stripes".  He likes it even if no-one else does!!

July:

• Had to race Xena to the vet in the middle of the night once we worked out that she had eaten almost a whole box of dark chocolate.  Got home at 2am and had to go back to pick her up at 8am to avoid paying another day's worth of ICU charges.  
• Went to Sydney for a work trip ... on the same day that I had raced Xena to the vet.  Couldn't sleep on plane so had an early night when I got there.  Found out that the company hadn't paid for the accommodation in advance so got hit with a huge bill on check out.  Thank goodness for 'secret stash' money...
• Took another trip to Ikea and found some inspiration for what to do on the long wall in the family room.  Besta bookshelves are my new best friend ... I think.

August:

• Had a night at the shed, just Peter and I (despite vowing not to go .. a girl can change her mind!)
• Drew had his first official driving school driving lesson.
• Finally got floor coverings in the bedrooms .. spotted gum floorboards.

September:

• My first 'little baby', Alex turned 18 and somehow became 6'1" tall ... waaahhhh!!  j/k .. so proud of him for the hurdles he's overcome and the wonderful young man he is.  Love you son!
• Had a belated Father's Day (as it was on Alex's birthday .. how rude!)
• Drew bought his first car, a Longreach Falcon ute, which was brought home on the Sunday afternoon and then stolen in the early hours of the Thursday afternoon.  Fire brigade found it on fire and reported it to police.  By the time the Police got there, it had been stolen again and still hasn't been recovered.  Thank goodness for insurance!
• Did some more crafty/practical projects that I will slowly be updating over the next couple of weeks .. I promise!

October:

• Took a week off work during school holidays and spent some time with my growing-way-too-quick boys.
• Thought about going to the Perth Royal Show(for about an hour), regained my sanity and stayed home instead.  Saved amount of money equivalent to the GDP of a small African nation.

November:

• Drew got his official Certificate II in light automotive servicing ..well done!
• Took yet another trip to Ikea .. just because.
• Got the windows tinted in our bedroom, the home theatre (or as I call it, the lounge room), the family room and Alex's bedroom.  Makes a huge difference to the amount of heat coming in from outside.
• Peter bought a new bigger motorbike.  Continued to hassle me about getting my bike licence ...

December:

• Put up the tree with the boys with minimal grumbling (from me!)
• Drew picked up his new car .. 1999 Lantra with very low km's for it's age.
• Made three Pepparkaka Hus kits from Ikea (otherwise known as gingerbread houses for English speakers).  Used an entire year's worth of lollies and royal icing between the three .. yum!!
• Had Christmas breakfast at home, lunch at Mark and Bec's and home again for dinner.
• Quiet day at home on Boxing Day, then out for dinner with Nonnie and Clare down in Shoalwater.
• For Peter's 47th birthday my lovely boss let me take half a day off so we had lunch at Hog's Breath in Kelmscott, then home for presents.  Managed to surprise him with the Springsteen tickets I'd bought back in September as well as the usual littler presents from the boys.
• Quiet New Year's at home with the boys (Mum went out .. has a better social life then me!).  Managed to see in the New Year, then slept like a log until 9am.

So there you go, a whole year in a rather large nutshell.  Here's hoping I can get my shit together slightly more organised this year and manage to post some of the happenings as (or soon after) they happen.

 A girl's got to have dreams ... right? 

Another pinterest inspired item - lead hangers

... as in somewhere to hang the dogs' leads.

I found this picture about 100 years ago and had filed it away for a must-do project:

original pin:  thesaturdaymorningsblog.com/

I even searched Spotlight and a few other shops for these large papier mache type letters, all to no avail.  I could get thin wooden ones (barely thick enough for a nail, let alone a cup hook) or small papier mache ones, but nothing as big as you see above.  So I filed the idea away and focused on moving into this house (yes it was that long ago!)

Upon unpacking boxes (ahem .. 12 months after moving into the 'new' house), I came across a whole lot of picture frames I had accumulated from my time working at Rabbit Photo.  I was going to pass them on to the Salvos as they didn't fit with the 'look' I wanted for this house when I realised that they were actually quite thick and real wood.  Thick enough to screw in some cup hooks and real-wood-enough to last for a while ...

So I took the glass out and sprayed the kind-of-oak-coloured frames with some spare gloss black paint and, while they were drying, set myself to the task of individualising them.

Despite my handy (huge) stash of scrapping paper, I couldn't find a single paper I liked enough to put in the frames, so I just had to go to Scrapbooking Secrets in Maddington to find some inspiration.  I was looking for something with paw prints on it but couldn't find a single piece of paper with paw prints ... oh the horror!!

I did, however, find some paper that looked like an old wooden fence so that got the brain ticking over ... maybe I could put a picture of each dog on a faux backyard in the frames.  Bought the fence paper, came home and spent hours searching for just the right photo of each dog, once again to no avail.

At this point, the males of the household were whining about something to do with there being no food and being absolutely staaaaarving so I left the craft room in disgust (both at myself and them for not being able to make themselves a sandwich or something) and went to cook dinner.

When I came back after threatening them all with dismemberment if they didn't do the dishes right now a lovely peaceful family dinner, I decided to use my craft room's white elephant:  my Cricut.  I have the ZooBalloo cartridge and after playing around for a while, came up with these:

Xena's ... obviously!

Can you guess who this is for???

And this is both of them hanging in a silly little space between two door frames in the entry:

I ended up fitting two hooks to each frame; one for the harness and one for the lead/leash.  It is just so much easier than trying to dig through everything that gets dumped in the storeroom (to the left of the frames) to try and find their harnesses and leads.  It has made it easier for the dogs too ... all they have to do is bark then go sit in the entry looking up at the frames to give us the idea that it might be time to go for a W.A.L.K. (or as it is referred to in our house, "an ambulate around the perimeter of the neighbourhood" as the dogs have cottoned on to the word 'walk' and even the spelling of it!)

The frames/holders have been hanging up for over a year now and still look good.  The gloss paint stands up to any inadvertent bumps/scratches and the cup hooks haven't needed to be replaced.  The only issue is that the hooks need to be turned to one side or the other as they make the frame sit too far out from the wall if they are straight but I have (finally) learned to live with that part.

Not bad for the price of a couple of bits of scrapbooking paper (I had everything else in the house/garage).

Continuing with the frame theme ...

After the success of the menu board, I decided to make up another frame as a sort of "command centre".  I had a huge frame with lots of different size cut-outs in the mat that I was going to fill with various bits and pieces.  After having it hang on the wall for a couple of weeks, I decided it was too big and yet not big enough, if that makes any sense at all, which it probably doesn't 'cos this is me we're talking about after all!

The frame itself was probably not too big, but having all the different little sections made it seem really cluttered and disorganised.  I tried taking the mat out and putting larger pieces of background paper in but that just looked cheap and nasty so I took it down and gave up on the idea for a while.

While shopping for something totally different (glass jars .. a whole other story) I spotted some really cheap frames at Red Dot Maddington ($2.99 down from $8.99) and bought four of those instead.  Of course, being me, I didn't really check them all until I got home, unwrapped them and then found that one was a slightly different size and one was the wrong colour. 

On my next trip over that way, I found that they had completely sold out so I decided to try other Red Dot stores.  None of the other stores I tried had any either so I resigned myself to more spray painting and somehow making the wrong size one work.  They then hung on the wall in all their wrongness with me getting more and more annoyed with myself every time I walked past them. 

Once again I was shopping for something completely different (melamine picnic set plates this time) and found some other frames that I thought might work.  Just as I picked one up, it slipped and as I fumbled for it (and caught it .. yay me!) I spotted two of the original frames I was looking for tucked under the bottom shelf and pushed to the back.  One had a slight scratch but nothing a bit of texta couldn't fix so I did a little happy dance and proceeded to the checkout.

These ones were the right colour and size so they were put on the wall while I pondered how best to dress them up.  (At this point, I realised that the frame I thought was the wrong size was actually the right size but the screw it was hanging on was slightly lower than the others, giving the impression it was a different size .. bugger!)

Enter Pinterest .. yet again!  Pinspiration (here):

The final result:

They are in the main walkway from the front of the house to the back so everyone can see them and so far, people are paying attention to them. That may change as time goes on but I'm enjoying the novelty factor right now!

(Please excuse all the mess in the kitchen.  The slaves .. oops I mean children .. hadn't done the after dinner clean up when I took these photos.)

The lighting isn't the best but that's what you get for taking pictures under artificial light at night time from weird angles to try and avoid camera flash showing up on the glass instead getting weird reflections of yourself looking like your arm is growing out of the side of your head.  Oh well!  I still think the frames look cute!

On tonight's menu, we have ...

We needed something to help us be more organised with our meal planning so I found an old frame and some scrapbook paper and ... ta-da! ... another Pinterest inspired creation was completed.

The inspiration (here and here):

The idea is to use the glass in the frame as a whiteboard with the paper behind the glass just being for decoration.  You can use ordinary whiteboard markers to write on the glass and best of all, it comes off with just one quick swipe of a cloth .. no scrubbing or cleaners required!

I went for a cross between the two types as I couldn't find the 12x12 frame that I was going to use to copy the right hand version.  (Still way too many boxes to unpack!!)  Here's the (almost) finished result:

We lived with it like this for about a week but the frame colour was really bugging me so I painted the outside edge matte black and left the raised section around the glass in the timber colour.  Left it like that for another week and decided I didn't like that either, so I painted the raised section in gloss black.  This is the final result:

I think the gloss section highlights the letters more and just finishes the whole thing off.  Of course, I may be slightly biased!  The only thing left to do is to make some sort of shelf/attachment for the marker to sit on.  At the moment, it sits on top of the frame, but with people walking past it all day it sometimes has a tendency to disappear.

So far it has worked wonderfully .. we all have input into what's planned for dinner and as a result, there's less stress on me when I get home from work.  It also means that we are eating less 'junk' and more real food as we are all making sure that the appropriate ingredients are out of the freezer in time.  (I know you can defrost things in the microwave but I reckon it makes the meat taste funny so I don't like to do it .. fussy!)

I should just put Friday's one (Fend for yourself) in permanent marker though ... I don't think it's changed in four weeks!

Addicted to Pinterest

I, like many others, have recently become addicted to the latest online trend of Pinterest. It's basically your own online inspiration board where you can 'pin' pictures/ideas that you like from all over the web.

The main problem, and not just for me, is actually leaving the computer and getting around to making some of the wonderful, must-have ideas that you've pinned. So I finally bit the bullet and made something .. one of those 'why didn't I think of that' craft things.

My original inspiration came from someone else's pin of this picture:
which takes you back to the original creator, in this case Angela Sgro Designs.

After spending waaay too much time in the paint aisle at Bunnings trying to decide which colours to pick, I finally just grabbed two of each of six different colour swatches and ran for the hills calmly sauntered out.

Then they were packed up with the rest of the craft stuff and moved house with us back at the end of November. I kept finding them every time I was looking for something so I finally stopped putting them away in mid-December and sat down to make some Christmas cards. (Can't rush these things you know!)

I figured they would be easy to make, especially as I already had card, adhesives and background paper. The hardest part was working out the angles to cut them on so I didn't end up with all the weird paint names all over my 'trees'. The trial and error with the cutting around the names is what caused the different sizes and the upside down 'darker at the top; lighter at the bottom' trees.

Anyway, here's my attempts:

I think they turned out quite well and the people I managed to send them to seemed to like them too.

Nothing quite like the sense of achievement you get from actually making something yourself ... even if it would have been heaps cheaper to just use all the discounted cards you bought at the end of last year's Christmas sales!

Aaahhh ... the joys of being crafty and not thrifty!

What I've been up to ...

You may have noticed, over in my sidebar, there's a link to a wonderful site (and person) called Bakerella. She makes the cutest little things called cake pops and I, having oodles of spare time (snort!), decided to give them a go.

My first attempt was at the (what I thought were) easier version called cupcake bites. (Having now made both kinds, I think the pops were the easier of the two; especially when dipping them in the chocolate!)

And then the Christmas Pops:

All packaged up and ready to go!

Frosty the Snowman

Rudolph

Christmas pudding

I cheated a bit (OK, a lot!) and used store-bought mud cakes for the centres. Woolies sell lovely mud cakes in three different flavours and the cost is very reasonable (less than it would cost to make them myself!) I used white mudcake balls for the snowmen, chocolate mudcake balls for the Christmas puddings and caramel mudcake balls for the reindeer. A little handy hint: when you crumble the mudcake before rolling it into cake balls, make sure you crumble in the icing too. I didn't do that with the first batch and they dried out and crumbled a bit before I could dip them all.

They are a bit fiddly to make, especially when you have to keep smacking boys' hands away from the decorating ingredients bowls, but are oh so much fun! And the looks on people's faces when presented with the finished product makes the work worthwhile.

I did find we are slightly more limited in our choice of decorating bits and pieces than our US counterparts but managed to find suitable substitutes for most things. I haven't yet attempted colouring chocolate (and I refuse to pay the $10 + per 200g bag for the pre-coloured choc melts off the internet) but as I have now finished working at the school for the year, I may give it a go soon. I'll keep you posted!

And yes ... they tasted as good (better even!) as they looked!

Ella sketch #3

I'm loving the six weeks of sketches over at Ella as they seem to have revived my motivation and are giving me inspiration at the same time.

I did sketch #3 almost as soon as it was posted but forgot to take a picture and post it here .. oops! So without any further ado, here is my interpretation:




I rotated it, mirrored it and changed the photo sizes a bit (and now it probably looks nothing like the original sketch!) but I like it! Wouldn't have a clue which papers are which because I don't keep track of all that .. sorry!

I also did this layout of Andrew:



It's very linear and started out based on one of Donna Januzzi's sketches in her "Stretch Your Sketches" e-book (Ella Publishing) but as is typical with sketches, it ended up looking nothing like the original! I'm still trying to decide if I'll cut the striped paper to the width of the blue as there's something bugging me about it. What do you think?

Journalling reads:
The first thing most people see when they look at these photos is the lovely mess you have made of yourself with your current favourite biscuit, the humble ginger nut.
Not me. All I see are the gorgeous chubby cheeks, cute little button nose, the happy smile underneath all that mess and your eyes... those beautiful blue eyes.
I really hope you get to keep those lovely baby blues but I doubt you will, so I'll just enjoy them for now and look forward to watching them change as you grow. (Feb '98)

Ella sketch #2

Seeing as the roll I was on on Friday came to a screaming halt yesterday, I decided to leave well enough alone and try again today instead. It worked! Here's two more layouts of mine and one of Andrew's. Remember that Andrew is a 12-year-old boy so of course the pictures have something machinery related in them!

(I'm going to apologise in advance for the terrible picture quality. I have problems photographing layouts under good conditions, so late at night under artificial light doesn't translate into great photos!)

Both of these are based on Ella's sketch #2.

Andrew's layout:

and my interpretation of the sketch:

and here's the one that I gave up on yesterday.

(Again, apologies for the photo.

I have taken about 15 different shots and this, believe it or not, was the best.)

Woohoo!

Lookee here ... I got picked as a winner on the first Ella sketch competition! My first time being 'published' or picked for anything scrapping related.

I couldn't believe it until I got the email telling me I was indeed a winner. Just the boost to my severely dented scrapping self-esteem that I needed, especially after trying to continue the roll of Friday and hitting a rather large brick wall for all of yesterday.

Note to self: Take a better picture next time. You never know when the whole world is going to see it!

Now please excuse me while I go drive the children insane with my dancing around the house full of the joys of life!

On a roll ...

Here's another yellow page with flowers and two different patterned papers:


Sorry for the photo quality .. the background paper is actually yellow, not beige/tan and the page is straight .. it's the photo that's not!

Ella sketch

After looking at this sketch on the Ella Publishing site, I finally found a little bit of creativity amongst the chaos that is my life and came up with this:

And look Ma .. I used flowers and flowery paper and yellow and typed journalling .. woohoo .. go me! Way to go with stepping outside my comfort zone!

(The journalling reads: "Bradley absolutely loves these ugg boots. They were a hand-me-down from Rheanna Good, who only wore them twice before deciding they weren’t comfortable enough. Luckily, Brad disagrees completely and wears them everywhere, including the trampoline. He says they make him bounce higher and has dubbed them his …")

Taking a small step out of my comfort zone ...

Here's the page I did based on Lita's first sketch. (The comment about stepping out of my comfort zone refers to the flowers and the ink around the edge of the whole page.)

Not the best photo but overall, I'm happy with this page (or I wouldn't be showing you .. lol!). There's a few little things that bug me but if I don't mention them, hopefully no-one else will notice them either!

Please leave an honest comment letting me know what you think ...

Confession time

I have been asked in the past why don't I post pictures of the scrapping layouts I have done.

Apart from the fact that I haven't actually done any new layouts in over 6 months and therefore have nothing to post anyway, it's due to me feeling that my work was not as visually appealing (and therefore not as good) as others' work or was boring because I'm not into all the flowers/ chipboard/ stamping/ inking/ sanding/ etc. I'm a very linear person (despite all my curves!) and like things to line up, be straight and balanced .. no randomness allowed!

I looked at work done by Debbie, Lita, and some of the people in their blog lists and felt that mine was just not on the same level of creativity. My pages all seemed to be lacking something when compared to other people's pages and I wasn't comfortable with putting anything less than my idea of 'perfect' on show. It made me feel vulnerable and I don't like not being in control .. what a surprise huh?

And then I realised that all of that doesn't matter one bit. It doesn't matter:

• if I'm following the latest fads or ignoring them completely,
• if my pages all start to look the same,
• if I prefer using plain cardstock to patterned paper,
• if I can't bring myself to write/paint/stamp on the surface of my photos,
• if the idea of using 3D non-photo safe stuff on my pages makes me cringe or,
• if a page takes five minutes or five days.

What does matter is if I like my pages and my family enjoy looking at the albums I create for them. After all, isn't that the reason most of us start scrapping in the first place .. to help preserve the memories?

So having freed myself (somewhat) from my self-imposed restrictions, I am going to start scrapping again, using Lita's first sketch as inspiration and hopefully posting some pictures of what I manage to complete. Wish me luck!

Debbie's Delightful Cards

I went to Debbie's first card-making class on Saturday and look what we did:

When I saw the colours we were working with, I have to admit I wasn't all that keen on them. Orange and green are not usually colours I would put together because I'm more of a blues and greens person. Once we'd made the first card though, I was hooked! I'm really pleased with how they turned out and can see so many possibilities for cards and scrapbook page decorations.

Deb was great as a teacher, so patient and easy-going, but I only have one complaint .. she's introduced me to inking and now I want all the different colours! Oh the choices .. where do I start?