Birthday card by Jessica

Hi all,

Thought I would share my daughter's version of this card that I made recently. All I did was cut out the card itself and stamp the seal image on ... everything else she did herself ... very proud since she is only six!

Eeeegads glitter everywhere - yup, that's my kid

Not too sure on the significance of the banana - maybe
something she learned to draw this week?

The craftroom floor is being ground down/sanded down as I write - each guy we got in to give us a quote said "gee I've never seen a floor this bad/uneven/lumpy before".... sigh. We did have a win though. The first building inspector agreed he may have missed some blatantly obvious faults in the roof and has agreed to pay for the repairs and the cost of the second inspector. Of course that still leaves the cost of levelling the craftroom floor and the termite treatment to us, but hey, still a win.

Besides, how can anyone be grumpy here -- we walked outside this morning and saw some dolphins and pelicans, and two ducks walking across our back paving surveying "their" domain -- awesome!

I have a whole day to myself today to catch up with some scrapbooking for a class I am doing, so I had best get to it.

Have fun,

Lisa

New Craft Room

Hi all,

Now that we have settled in to our new house I have finally been able to look at what we will do with the "games room" that we have. In our old house we had a home theatre set up so we had considered having another theatre room here.

However, I am planning on building up my wedding invitation/craft business and maybe doing card classes or some-such, and the spare bedrooms here are quite small - too small for me to set up my craft room properly like I was in the last house. Plus (as I told my hubby) we could use some of the cupboards for other storage as well - books, DVDs, etc.. You can see I was doing my best to sell the idea!

So ... craft room it is then! A bonus is that there is a door to the outside so I could use it as a "business" entry and not have people wandering through my house.

I have spent a while surfing the internet over the past few months and after discovering pinterest I made up a "Dream Craft Room" board. With those ideas in mind I got four quotes from kitchen cabinet makers and four slightly different designs. I then paid my deposit last week on the "winning" plan. So we stripped out the carpet from the room ready to put in wooden-look lino type flooring....

My before picture - carpet up, furniture we need to sell,
long pieces of skirting board showing how big the dips and hills are in the concrete.

Unfortunately, as is everything with this house, we encountered a small problem (we may have to replace the roof, but that is another drama for another day). Anyway, the concrete floor is seriously, seriously NOT level. A guy is coming out today to give us advice on how to proceed. Let me guess ... $$$. 

I refuse to get despondent, though. It is a huge room, and I am going to have LOTS of storage and LOTS of bench space to play on. Hopefully the process will not take too long ... I want to play now, now, now!  ;)

Lisa

Two Quick Birthday Cards for Kids

Hi all,

It looks like I'm finally getting the knack of putting together simple birthday cards --- and taking a LOT less time to do it!

My daughter is off to two kid parties today. Her social life is soooo much better than mine!

Inside

Hope you all have a good weekend,

Lisa

Been gone a while

Hi all,


Warning -- long post...


Well, I've been missing for a while, huh! Lots and lots of things have been happening in my real life so the poor old blog has had to take a back seat.


I did get a few crafty things done before I went off line.


I finished a wedding:

Seven "thank you" explosion boxes for the attendants.

Cute little jewellery box inside, necklace and earrings, lovely gift. 

Bonbonierre boxes, butterflies, explosion boxes and acetate place cards.

... and when my Dad got sick I managed to make and send him this card...

I tried the patchwork quilt look on this one and was very happy how  it turned out.

So to the big life changing stuff ---- we got crazy and put an offer in on a house in our dream location, so then we had to sell our house. I spent a lot of time keeping our house ready for inspection, as you do, so no craft for a while.


We successfully sold, but then the paperwork side took a while forever. Hubby and I got bored waiting so we did this to my craft room ....

Empty, empty, empty!

More empty-ness!

Hubby was supposed to be home for the move, but of course it took so long he was away for work when it all happened. This has been the story of my life -- when we were both in the Navy and moved interstate seven times in seven years somehow hubby was always at sea and I had to do the move alone -- how rude I say! This move was just the usual circus. The owners of our new place were painful and made us move on a Saturday (add $350), then the removalist miscalculated on the size of the truck needed so we had to go back for a second load. Thank goodness we only moved 30 minutes away! THEN ... 24 hours after the move we had a big storm and power went out for two days. I had only just found and set up my coffee machine when we lost power so it was tragic!


Good news, though ... we have a "games" room in the new house which is going to be my new craft room. I am going to set it up all flash-dandy with kitchen cupboards and a big island bench etc... But of course these sorts of things take time so at the moment I have craft stuff spread over two spare bedrooms.


Now you know how I loved my old backyard, and I swore I was never moving again

Well .... our new place is somewhere we thought we'd have to save up and wait until we retired here, but with house values stable in the old place and going way down in the new place we could actually afford it -- and got the boat with the house...

Our "backyard" -- the water views we've always wanted!

We are a little bit surrounded by the retired, so not a lot of kids in the neighbourhood, but how can you beat fishing before school as an experience as you grow up ....

All fish caught are returned to the water alive.

Then, I got crazy and had a joint birthday party for my daughter and her friend in our new house just after the move. It was a pirate and mermaid theme. I had the imagine and expression machine both going full bore the night before the party to get it all done. Of course there were so many other things I had planned to do for the party but ran out of time ... The kids had a blast so what I did not get done does not matter!

Pirate ship made from a cardboard box.
Hubby made it -- awesome job and the kids loved it.

Treasure chest thank you lolly boxes.

Our attempt at the underwater look 

After!

So, we are now mostly settled into the new place and Miss J has started her new school, so it's time for me to get back to my hobby .... YAY!!!


Hope to post again soon with some new craft.


Lisa