Having a Flutter

The Melbourne Cup. It's called the 'Race That Stops the Nation' and I'm usually lucky enough as a Melbournite to even get a public holiday. For a horse race!! Crazy right?!

Over at Scrapz.biz we're celebrating the occasion in true scrappy style by hosting a competition. It's like a layout sweepstake. All you have to do is upload a layout to our Melbourne Cup Flutter gallery using the sketch and colour inspiration (all the instructions are here) and you'll be assigned a random horse that's running in the Cup.

Should your horse place in the Melbourne Cup - then you win a lovely scrappy voucher!! There's even a prize for lucky last! But you better hop to it if you want to enter because the race is on Tuesday which means you need your entries in before that :-)

My layout tells the story about Moodle's obsession with my iPhone. She's not even two years old yet, she can barely talk, but she's taught herself how to play Angry Birds!! Whenever she sees me with my phone she starts calling out "Eagle? EAGLE!" or simply "Game?" which is her way of saying she wants to play.... now.

Kids hey? By the time they're as old as me they'll probably know how to fly their own hover-cars and communicate via telepathy or whatever it is that Star Trek tells us the future holds :-)

Reducing my Footprint

Last week's weekly theme at Scrapz.biz was "Footprints" and I hosted the Noteworthy challenge which is about making cards.

The first thing that challenged me was trying to figure out how to incorporate the "Footprints" theme into a card. As you can see, my first idea was to actually include some footprints, but I thought that might be a bit hard :-)

But you know what it reminded me of? All this talk these days about reducing our 'carbon footprint' to lessen our impact on the environment. So the challenge I'm setting is for you to "Reduce, Reuse or Recycle" something on your card!! You can interpret that any way you like!

I chose the "Reduce" option which meant I tried to limit the amount of supplies I used on these cards. Can you believe I only used one piece of patterned paper to make both these cards? And all I added was some scraps of twine, some left-over pieces from my Thickers and a splash of mist :-)

Other ways you might like to interpret the challenge would be to 'Reuse' something that was intended for a different purpose such as clothing tags, kitchen supplies etc. Or try your hand at the 'Recycled' option and include materials that might otherwise end up in the bin such as junk-mail or packaging.


Supplies:

InLinkz.com

Or if you're looking for more challenges.......here's a sneak of my new Scrap it Blind challenge that's just gone up today....

Happy scrapping!

Sweet Spring

It was a beautiful spring day here today. How about for you?

The town we're currently living in seems to have an abundance of cherry trees! Everywhere I look I see cherry blossoms, I see them scatter their petals in the soft breeze, and smell their delicate fragrance.

Yes I do get a little sentimental about cherry blossoms :-) It's because it reminds me of afternoons as a child at my Grandmother's house. Playing in her garden, young and innocent and free.

So I scrapped the memory :-) I really must do more of this sort of thing. It's like passing down an inheritance to my children. I used up the last scraps of my very first Studio Calico kit 'Partly Sunny'.... it seemed appropriate. And finally I can call myself a kit-killer!! I've only been subscribing for the last 16 months!

I just had to mix in a little Pink Paislee and some yummy woodgrain Hambly that I've been hoarding :-) And splash some paint around of course. I love Spring scrapping!!!

100 Years.... and a winner!!

Can I tell you a little secret? It's something I don't usually admit to very freely....
Once upon a time I entered a showgirl competition.
And won!

It was something I entered in order to support my friend who was entered, she didn't want to feel alone. I never thought I would actually win! And even though this was 12 years ago, it still came back to "haunt" me this year when they celebrated their 100year anniversary and invited all the past showgirls back for the party.

We had a parade through town, we got to feel like royalty as we sat on the back of a float and waved to people watching. Hheeee!! My family came to watch of course. The girls squealed when they say their Mummy on the back of a truck :-)

You might recognise this sneak peak that I revealed during the Scrapz.biz blog hop? This is the full reveal of the page I made for the "What's Cooking" challenge that I hosted last week

Lots of mix and match of products here for this page. You can click on each thumbnail to be taken directly to the Scrapz.biz store to purchase the same supplies if you like.


Supplies Used:

InLinkz.com

and now, the moment you've been waiting for.. The winner of my candy from last week's Scrapz.biz blog hop is......

MELANIE H. !!!!

Melanie, please contact me either by email (address is on the right there) or PM me on the Scrapz forum to let me know your postal address and I'll get your goodies in the mail ASAP.

I'll be back to post the sneak of my next challenge later.

Peace and Quiet?

When I first saw the journaling criteria at Once Upon a Sketch this time around I was a little bit stumped for a moment. You see, the challenge says "journal at least 2 sentences on an embarrassing / awkward / uncomfortable moment. A moment you remember for all the wrong reasons!" and I'm a pretty easy going kind of girl - I don't embarrass too easily.

But then I remembered this awkward moment that I experienced a little while ago.....

I was performing an emergency Caesarian late one night and being on-call I had my phone in my pocket (on silent of course!) Now usually once the baby is out and the mother is cuddling it it's pretty quiet in the operating theatre whilst we finish the rest of the operation. But all of a sudden I hear a voice.... the voice of my husband!..... and it's coming out of my pocket!!

I hear him saying "Natalie... Natalie? hello? Why have you called me?"
It seems I had leant against the table and not only managed to speed-dial his number - but put him on speaker phone too!! If the whole theatre didn't hear him in the first place they certainly figured out what was going on as I awkwardly tried to lean down and speak firmly into my pocket "Hang up the phone!!"

Oh dear! Not my most professional moment :-)

So if you've got an embarrassing story to tell - why not scrap about it? It's very therapeutic :-) Along with the journaling criteria you also need to use this beautiful sketch. You can go and catch all the details on the challenge at the OUAS blog here.

We've got a fabulous line-up of Guest Designers for this challenge including my very favourite scrappy-crush Julie Fei Fan Balzer! And the mother-load in prizes including a chipboard-lovers dream package of Imaginarium Designs chippies. Not to mention you get to check out everyone else's funny stories too!

Scooter Love

My eldest daughter recently just turned 5. Isn't it just ridiculous how fast they grow up? For her birthday gifts this year we really had to sit down and think about what we were going to get her. But eventually we decided on a scooter.

And not just any scooter mind you..... a pink Dora scooter! She loved it as we knew she would, and immediately took it out for a spin around the lake.

 I made this page to capture these memories, but also for my 'Fetch a Sketch' challenge at Scrapz.biz. This challenge runs all month now, so there's plenty of time to enter to win some incredible store vouchers. You can find out all the details here.

And while we're on the topic of Scrapz.biz and amazing prizes.... have you joined in on the blog hop yet? If not, you really should because it's a bunch of fun and there are a tonne of prizes to be given away! See my blog-hop post below for all the details, and to start your journey.

Supplies Used

InLinkz.com