Update - I'm moving...

Just a quick update to let you know that I have moved my blog over to wordpress. Still working on the finer details, but in the meantime, you can find me at just some bits and bobs...

While this blog may have come to a grinding halt over the last year or so, I have not, and I have continued to scrap as much as ever, behind the scenes, and loving every minute of it. Hopefully you continue to follow me on my scrappy journey over at Wordpress.

See ya there...

Squeezed a bit of scrappiness in...

I attended a layout class at Shell's in Rotorua, recently and a group of ladies had great fun following along with Shell's layout class.
We used some lovely new papers she had in, all Krafty, extra thick card stock from My Mind's Eye. A new fave, I tell you, I fell in love with this paper line.
I started out with a picture of my younger brother and his two kids, taken on my trip to South Africa recently, when we were out picnicking at Oribi Gorge. What a lovely day it was too. As always I did not have any journalling ready, so brought it home to finish the journalling off.

Then I moved on to tell the tale of my Fear Factor Challenge. I was spurred on my by daughter to sit in a crocodile pit, eating crocodile meal. The lady we bought the tickets from went on to tell us that the crocodiles had not fed really well that day, at their feed time, so were probably a bit hungry!

It was an awesome experience, especially when one croc, did a swish of his tail and darted into the water. They move very suddenly, enough to scare the living bejeebers out of you!

The family then wanted me to touch one, for a photo opportunity. It was the quickest touch in history, I think. As I was moving it to touch it they swished around to face each other, as you see in the photograph.  I was so ready to hightail out of that pit, I can tell you.

Then another participant and I managed to talk Shell into letting us stay for one more layout as we had both travelled from afar, so spent the afternoon working on this layout. Lots of TH inking, on this kraft resist paper, Here my daughter and I were crossing the swing bridge at Oribi Gorge. It is really high, but another exhilarating moment. A nice family shot there as well to commemorate the day.

All in all an awesome day scrapping with the Rotorua Ladies. Thanks Shell.

WOW! I received an email from Shell telling me that I had won an award and found this. Thank you Shell.

The Liebster Blog Award is meant for those blogs in Blog Land that have 200 or less followers. Liebster comes from German, meaning dearest or beloved but can also mean favourite. This award is such a wonderful way to show appreciation for those people who do beautiful work and inspire you but have a small following. As part of the tradition the award is passed along to five other blogs that have motivated and inspired you.

To accept the award you must:

1. Link back to the person's blog who gave it to you and thank them.
2. Post the award on your blog.
3. Give the award to 5 bloggers (less than 200 followers) that you appreciate and value.
4. Leave a comment on the five blogs you chose to let them know.

So here are 5 blogs that inspire me:

1. Tricia 
2. Jude
3. Aquarius
4. Julie
5. Shar

Thank you for the award Shell… it was quite a surprise :)

Keep on crafting and inspiring!

First canvas

I had my first go at working on a canvas last week, and am pretty happy with the result for a first time out.

Dianne held a class, and we worked on creating the background with alcohol inks, stamping, creating textures, and embossing metal. It was a great hands on, fingers dirty session, and I loved every minute. The great thing was that everyone had such a different result!

Here is my version with some photographs I took myself a few years back now, but they seemed to fit the theme, after I grunged them up a bit.

Here is a link to Dianne's blog: http://artofcraft.co.nz/blog/

March Madness Scrap Retreat

I recently attended the March Madness Scrap Retreat in Rotorua, and I must confess had a really wonderful time. The event was filled with fun and excitement, with 3 wonderful lessons on the Saturday. I was really pleased the with the Challenge pack we received, beautiful papers. The weekend was made all the more wonderful by Shell's fiance playing the guitar and providing the ladies with some sing-a-longs in the evenings.
The first layout we did was a cuttlebug one, and great fun was had choosing textures. The amazing thing was how different everyones looked in the end. Here is my version, a photo of my granddaughter, taken as she was getting ready for a dance recital.

Then we moved on to work with one of my favourite papers of all time, Graphic 45, Once upon a Springtime. We were shown some texturing techniques and had great fun cutting out all the little images. I had recently taken some photos of my daughter and decided to use one of her for this paper. It was a beautiful shot, even if I say so myself, lol. I am still deciding on a title and the journalling.

And then lastly in the day, we worked with some Colour Wash sprays and had a great messy time. I managed to get in 2 layouts during this class, which was the greatest fun. Anyone who knows me will know that I love getting messy when working with ink and paints. :) I used a photo of my eldest daughters themed birthday party, on the Pink Paislee paper, and then "spotted" some colour wash on plain white paper for the second layout of my grandson, with his beautiful smile, munching on his much loved Chocolate cake!

And of course I managed to find time to work on the challenge pack, with absolutely gorgeous Little Yellow Bicycle papers. Just loved working with it.

My baby granddaughter in the park not wanting to do what I wanted and standing her ground! She is just the cutest!

In between times I worked on a tag. We had been given Tim Holtz tree die cuts by one of the ladies as a pin swap and I decided to make mine into a tag.

All in all it was a wonderful retreat, learned lots, achieved heaps.

Can't wait for the next one.

http://scrapbookdreamsblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/scrapbook-dreams-retreat.html