Do the Moo Shoo

The Man gets annoyed because it took him so long to agree with me on the name for our second daughter, and now it's rare that any of us ever calls her by it! We usually call her Moodles, or Moo, Moz, Moosh, Moodly Moo, Mozzy and it goes on and on.

One of our recent additions to her list of nick-names is "Moo-Shoe." It cracks me up because whenever we call her that she does a funny little foot-stamping dance! I think she's trying to tell us where her shoes are :-)

Which brings me to my other point on this layout. Despite coming up to her 2nd birthday in November, she doesn't have a lot of words in her repertoire. Should I be worried about that? I'm not sure. It could quite possibly be that Munchy gabbles on so much that she can barely get a word in edgewise! And trust me... she certainly knows how to communicate.

But it's mainly in mumbles and grunts and squeaks and baby-talk.
Did you ever watch The Adventures of Sooty, Sweep and Sue? If you're familiar with these characters then you'll understand why another one of her nicknames is now Sweep!! She's a funny little girl and I love her with all my heart :-)

I used the fabulous Lawn Party kit and Pink Lemonade add-on from Studio Calico's May release for this layout, but the background paper with the clouds is a random Basic Grey piece from my stash. It's quite old I think..... can't even remember what collection it's from. Any help?!
Speaking of Basic Grey, have you seen that they've now got a blog? And all the BG fans breathe a collective sigh of ..... "finally"!!! heee!

The Great Commissioning

We've got some friends who are organising their long-awaited wedding in a couple of months time. It's a second marriage for one of the pair and they're a little bit older and wiser now, so they aren't planning on doing the whole big formal traditional wedding thing.

But imagine my surprise, and Munchy's delight when they asked her if she could do a drawing to include on their wedding invitation! They didn't have any strict guidelines or direction about the subject matter, they just let her be free to draw whatever makes her happy as she thought about them. How exciting!!

I told Munchy she is now a commissioned artist, and this is her first piece of real artwork!
To mark this event I really wanted to scrap this photo..... I think it captures the essence of the brooding artist within her :-)

I mixed and matched a couple of products here.
The base cardstock in the delightful Core'dinations Cosmo Cricket woodgrain in coconut cream. It really is as yummy as it sounds! All the papers, alphas and label stickers are from the Authentique Blissful collection - I just adore the grey and yellow combination.... but you've probably noticed that by now! The Sassafras Sunshine Broadcast foldies gave it just a touch of pink to warm it up a little :-)

I'm totally digging the hand-cut title trend that seems to be going around lately. And at the time I did this layout I hadn't yet unpacked my Silhouette, so it was the perfect motivation to go the old-fashioned route of my trusty craft knife :-)

 

And for those of you who have asked to see what she drew.... this is it. Hopefully you are able to tell that this is the happy bride and groom getting married underneath a rainbow. The bride has her flowers in one hand and the ring in the other.  Happy days!

Sleepless in Seattle???

We just recently moved to the country town of Sale so that I can work in the hospital here for the next 6 months. I moved down first and then The Man and the girls followed a couple of days later.

On the first morning after they had woken Munchy started up a conversation with a mouthful of Weetbix......
"I couldn't sleep last night. I stayed awake for about 80 hours"
"Oh dear" I said, "what did you do?"
"I played with Moodles for a bit. When she fell asleep I just sat there and held her warm little hands."

It melted my heart, and I just knew I had to scrap this page to capture the moment :-)

Supplies: 
Basic Grey Basics in the very background.
The base cardstock started off white until I embossed it and inked it and dribbled paint down it!
All the alphas are from The Girl's Paperie.
And the flowers are Prima.

Love my sweet little girls.
xx

Chubby bubby bum

Is there anything cuter than the roly-poly legs of a baby? It's really the only time in your life where leg-rolls are considered an asset! Well what about a toddler in a bathing suit with her little backside hanging out? HHheeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!

Our recent beach holiday was Moodles first experience of the sand and surf and she absolutely ADORED it! She squealed with delight at the sand beneath her toes, and you can see her licking her salty fingers and getting such a surprise in the top photo :-)

The Blissful collection by Authentique are the perfect colours for a beachy layout don't you think? Lots of different techniques and tricks in the different sqaures in my grid layout. Let me share a few with you....
I was given a few colours of seam binding which Suzanne has just started stocking and used them here - firstly I ruffled and sewed them in layers beneath my title, and secondly I just did the traditional bow idea (original hey!?)

I made my own fabric covered button and snipped a Manor House Creations Whitsunday flower in half to add to this embellishment cluster above.

Do you want to know the secret behind my seemingly random scattering of pearls in this segment? The secret is.... it really is random! I sprinkled on my pearls in two different colours and then glued them on where they landed :-) Crazily ingenius hey!

And that beautiful Imaginarium Designs chipboard didn't need anything doing to it at all.... perfect just as it was :-)

Aaaaaaahhhh now I'm all nostalgic for my holidays. Good times.

Every Single Day

I've been desperately trying to keep up with my idea to photograph and scrap a family portrait every month this year.......unfortunately I've been failing!

For a start, I totally forgot to take a family portrait in May and so had to go back through all the photos we took (which didn't happen to very many for that month) and try and find one that fit the bill. As it happens this was the closest I could get. It's only got 3 out of the 4 of us, and it's not a particularly good photo..... but... nevermind :-)

I used this fabulous sketch designed by Michelle Fowler for my inspiration. It's the current challenge at Handmade by Suzanne, and this month I was given the wonderfully Blissful collection by Authentique to work with. You can play along with this challenge too for a chance to win a $30 store voucher. If you were lucky enough to win I'd highly recommend any of the new Authentique collections, but it's true that the Blissful collection is my favourite.

I just love the serene vintage colours, the subtle tone-on-tone patterns and the sturdy thickness and texture that these papers carry. I'm really in love with this new company that is Authentique - the papers are a lot heavier than The Girl's Paperie. Think My Mind's Eye if you want a more accurate comparison.

The HBS store is just getting flooded with all the new collections, all your favourites that you picked out from the sneaks of CHA are making their way through the HBS doors. But some things that you might not have seen before that are new in store are these nifty little button makers. They're cheap as chips and allow you to make your own flat-backed fabric covered buttons that you can customise for every one of your projects. What a great idea! You can see two that I made in the close-up above.

So the idea behind my page here is about trying to capture the everyday family moments. Since I obviously couldn't do any major May event (it seems we didn't have any!!) I scrapped this photo of one cloudy afternoon in our garden. That morning Munchy woke up and decided she wanted to do an egg and spoon race. Who knows where she got that crazy idea from?! But it was do-able..... so we did it :-)

Basket Case

I might be behind in my sharing of scrappy projects here but did I mention that I'm still so far behind in my stack of photos to be scrapped that I've still got Easter photos that have been waiting to make it onto a page?!

Now don't tell me I'm the only one ;-)

Luckily for me the July Kreatorville Kit 
came a whole book of American Craft transparent accents and they had a whole page of stickers dedicated to Easter images like that cute little chick and Easter eggs I stuck on the bottom of my small photos. And the chocolate bunny that I used in the main photo.

If you want to check out my whole page dedicated to our annual Easter Egg hunt and to catch some hints on how I altered my Thickers to make this title even though I had run out of the right letters then pop over to my post on the Kreatorville blog.

She Paints with Every Colour

I am so far behind in my sharing, so sorry!  But what that means is that you can be gauranteed to see a whole bunch of scrappy projects popping up here on my blog in the next week (that's my plan anyway!). Let's start with this page I made for current Sassafras blog challenge.

The challenge is to mix up your alpha stickers and to use at least three different varieties of Sassafras alphabets. I've been doing a lot of this lately - making long titles with lots of fonts so this challenge came at just right time for me.

I wanted to document this stage Munchy is going through at the moment where she keeps wanting to draw rainbows everywhere. It seems whenever she sits down to create whether it's at home or at kinder or creche that rainbows are her go-to theme. And she keeps asking me what order the colours go in!

Oh my how much do I love the Sunshine Broadcast range from Sassafras!! The dreamy colours are just my style. I can't believe it's taken me this long to actually get my hands on some :-) So then you can imagine how incredibly brave I was to allow Munchy to actually grab a paintbrush and be let loose on my background paper?

That's right - I figured if I'm dedicating a page to Munchy's love of drawing rainbows then it only makes sense if I actually allow her to draw (or in this case paint) one onto the layout! So now it's a joint project between my daughter and I - what fun we had creating this page together. She watched me every step of the way and gasped and giggled as I added each element.

Mental note - must incorporate more of my kids art into my layouts :-)

How Great Thou Art

The August 15th challenge has been revealed at Once Upon a Sketch.

As per usual the challenge is to use the following sketch, and combine it with our journaling criteria.

 

 Write AT LEAST 2 sentences from the lyrics of your favourite song. Journalling can be in any language and can be any type i.e. handwritten, alphas, printed, rub on.

I rotated the sketch 90degrees clockwise so that my half circle was up the top, and used a good ol' paper doily to represent it. Then I layered up my photo and a couple of circular embellishments. And shifted my title over to the other side so it would fit :-)

For the journaling I chose the song "How Great Thy Art" - I just love the lyrics to this and so wanted to fit as much of it on my layout as I could. Forget the 2 sentences.... I wrote out 2 verses!! What a powerful reminder of the Almighty Creative God we serve.

Can you believe I don't own a colour printer? I used my trusty Silhouette machine with sketch pens in place of a blade to do all the journaling for me. Some days I just don't know what I would do without my Silhouette! But stay tuned because soon I'll show you the layouts I've been creating this week with just the supplies in my crop bag (since I haven't unpacked my scrapping supplies yet... what a challenge that is!)

In the meantime I urge you to give this challenge a go. The prizes are just incredible. Our amazing sponsors this month are giving away all of this......

from Imaginarium Designs

from Pretty Paper Petals

from Tidbitz in Time

Go and find out how you can enter and get inspired by all the eye-candy over on the OUAS blog. You won't be sorry :-)

Summer Lovin'

Over on the Kreatorville blog Charity threw down a challenge to scrap some vintage style photos - either your old traditional photos, or in the form of Instagram or Hipstamatic prints.

Well, you know I've got plenty of those to scrap! In fact, on our recent holiday I snapped more photos with my phone than I did with my proper camera :-) It included this one of my husband and I holding hands on the beach. How cheesy but very cute hey?!

And I was able to use pretty much every one of the beautiful papers that came in the July Kit on my page. What a rainbow of pretty colours don't you agree?

So pop over to the Kreatorville blog here to check out my full page.
And if you want to join in the challenge then link up your entries here. There's a Scrapbook.com gift voucher up for grabs!

Let them eat (birthday) cake!

As I mentioned in my last post (so long ago now... sorry!) we're celebrating our second birthday over at From Screen 2 Scrap and with it comes 4 bonus challenges and a tonne of giveaways!
Today I'm going to introduce you to the bonus challenge I had the pleasure of attempting.

Challenge Number 4 is based on the movie poster for Marie Antoinette and you need to use it as inspiration for your project. You can create anything - a layout, a card or an off-the-page project.

As is our usual custom there are also some added criteria which are:

1- use a cluster of flowers

2- use a close-up photo

3- use a title with the name of the person in the photo

 

As you can see I was inspired to create a card for this challenge and as such just had to tweak the added criteria just a wee bit. Instead of including a close-up photo I opted for a silhouette cameo instead. I still added the name of the person for whom the card was intended, and my cluster of flowers is a mix and match of some lovely Green Tara flowers I got from here.

There are truly some amazing (random draw) prizes you can win if you participate in this challenge. Check out all the details here.
and also, if you're looking for a few more, then check out:
Challenge One here
Challenge Two here and
Challenge Three here.

Happy Birthday From Screen 2 Scrap!

I've Got My Girls

Bad blogger me! But I've got good reasons... we're in the midst of packing and moving (again). Off to the country we go for my rural rotation. 6 monhts could be considered a long time or a short time depending on your perspective.

Anyway... on with the show.......

I've made this page for the 'From Screen 2 Scrap' challenge. This month our inspiration poster is:

And for an extra 6 bonus points:

1) Use music sheet pp on your page = 1 pt
2) Two tone title = 2 pts
3) Lets see some red and navy on your page = 3 pts

I remember my Dad making up this song that he (and then my mum) used to sing to my brother which went "I've got my boy, and my boy has got me. I found my boy in a coconut tree. My boy goes 'Fiddle Dee Dee'". Well somehow that catchy song has stuck in my head all this time, and now I sing it to my girls.

I was inspired by the Holiday Inn poster to scrap some recent holiday photos of my own. Here are my two girls on the beach trying to pick coconuts, so the song came to mind and I knew I had to scrap this funny little story! I've included some (admittedly subtle) red and navy highlights, the music paper is behind my journaling, and my two-toned title 'Coconut Tree' is yellow and orange which unfortunately blended together a little too well :-)

August is birthday month at From Screen 2 Scrap. We're celebrating our 2nd birthday with a couple more bonus challenges and a HEAP of prizes!! You have really got to see the pile of prizes to believe it. So be on the lookout for my bonus challenge coming up soon, or pop over to the blog to find out all about the birthday shenanigans now.

The grass is greener

I just adore this month's kit from Kreatorville Kraft. It's full of such yummy bright and summery colours from American Crafts, Crate Paper and more!

I was instantly inspired to scrap some summer photos, and it makes me forget my chilly winter frosty mornings for a while. The b-side to the Pink Paislee Butterfly Gardens paper made the perfect background paper as it's neutral but with just the right amount of details to make it interesting.

Then I cut around the circles in the American Craft's Campy Trails paper and layered them up to represent the grass The Man is mowing away at in these photos. All the little embellishments come from the transparent sticker book that comes in the kit. Yes, you heard me.... the whole book!

If you want to see what the other DT chicks have been doing with this marvellous kit, here's the first post you must go and check out. Then try here and here.

Oh, and I've got a new post up over there too. Check it out here.