Masculine Birthday card

Hi all,

It was lovely and cool here today. Apparently the heatwave from Christmas to New Years was the "fiercest heatwave in nearly 80 years" ... thank goodness for refrigerated air-conditioning! I only mention it because every time they say it has been the hottest/coldest/wettest/driest since whenever I laugh since the "whenever" part is usually "since 2007". To me "since 2007" really kind of loses the drama impact they were going for  ... "in nearly 80 years" however, now that statement has some meat on it!

It was such nice weather today I drove to town with Miss Six and went Christmas decoration shopping. Myers, where I normally buy my decos had 75% off. Yay! Not a lot of stock left, but enough baubles in the right colours to add a little more depth to the tree next year. I ended up with this huge bag full of stuff (not heavy, just huge) then had to lug it around for the next couple of hours. We also bought school shoes for Miss Six, so that's out of the way for the new year of school. First grade! My baby is growing up. We had lunch in a food hall and I ordered something I'd never seen before -- Chicken Goz -- Yummo. I had to google it after. Turkish food. I'll definitely be having it again.

Anyway, I recently made a card for my brother-in-law. So, so hard to make guy cards, I just never know what to put on them if the guy is not obsessed with sport or cars or some such.

Alan's favourite sporting team's colours are blue and yellow, so that was my colour inspiration, and I've been looking to use this stamp set for ages. All items used are from Stampin' Up! Very, very simple. Looking at it now I wish I'd used some patterned paper. Oh well, live and learn.

One thing I am very excited about is the scrapbooking class I have attended throughout 2012. We went once a month and were given a two page layout to do for the previous month. The hope being that we would have a whole album of 2012 by the time we finished. The final class is next week and I am very pleased to say that Jan to Nov is (nearly) done. Layouts are finished, photos have been stuck in, I just have to do the journalling for Mar to Nov. I am sooo bad at journalling. Well, probably not completely horrid, but it is one of my big procrastination points. But still, this is a huge accomplishment for me. It has been a couple of years since I've done any real scrapbooking so I am quite chuffed with myself.

Have a lovely weekend,

Lisa

2012 Personal Challenges recycled

Hi all,

I decided last year not to call them resolutions, so I called them my personal challenges (like a change of name would make it more likely that I would achieve them!)

So here we are in 2013 and since I failed to achieve 9 out of my 10 "personal challenges" I have decided to recycle them.

1. Attend another Wedding Expo as a stall holder
2. Be a stall holder at the Up-Market in Perth (higher quality market)
3. Use all my Cricut cartridges at least once this year
4. Get healthy
5. Complete 2012 scrapbook
6. Get back in touch with the world (friends, family)
7. Be a better parent (play, listen more, spend time)
8. Get more energetic
9. Start living outside my comfort zone
10. Stop Faffing! (Procrastinating) Get on with it.

So we shall see how I go this year.

What would you like to achieve? Especially with your craft.

Take care,

Lisa

Children's Door Signs Dec 2012

Hi all,

Here are the door signs I made for some friends. I decided to do something different this time ... the last few times I made door signs I used ribbon to trim the frame. This time I placed the completed signs in cheap picture frames I got from The Reject Shop. This obviously dictated the size of my signs (16" x 20"), but I think the finish turned out better.

Bianca and Dominic are shown with their frames, Heidi and Kyra without.

I used cuts from the following cricut cartridges:
Disney: Happily Ever After
Tinker Bell and Friends
Pooh and Friends
Everyday Paper Dolls

Fonts:
Heidi - Gypsy Font
Kyra - Pooh Font Set
Bianca - Winter Woodland
Dominic - Robotz

Woo hoo .. two days, two posts. I shall not promise this all the time, but I will try this year!

Lisa

Happy New Year!

Hi all,

Happy New Year to everyone! Hope you all had a lovely night. I decided to stay home last night since it is still revoltingly hot here (I am sooo NOT a fan of the heat and a week of 38C-40C is testing my patience). I spent NYE watching TV shows I had taped over this last month ... I had a few gin and tonics too, I'm not completely anti-celebration. Of course I got silly and stayed up until 1am, then my morning loving six year old came and bounced on me at 6:30am -- luckily some Panadol and lots of water has made me feel more human now.

I have so much to catch up on, and things to post that I have made. I did really well this Christmas season, getting out all my Christmas cards and I made four kid's door signs for some friends. 

As for my New Year's resolutions ... I am ashamed to say I will have to recycle my list of "things I want to achieve" from last year. Moving house seemed to distract me for most of the year -- and the evil Kindle took up another chunk of my year. I need to fight my inner procrastinator every day just to get things done.

One thing I did achieve last year was to go to a scrapbooking class once a month and scrap the previous month. I have nearly finished the whole year... one more class and some journalling to finish and I will be done. It is the first/most scrapping I've done in ages, so I'm pleased I stuck with it and it's nearly done.

Now I'm setting myself a bigger challenge for 2013. I've had the Project Life stuff for 12 months or more now -- time to crack on and get it done!

Craziness! ... it just "dropped" to 30C and there is a bit of a breeze so I have turned off the aircon and opened all the doors to get some fresh air in the house. Looking forward to Thursday as it is supposed to be 27C here - yay!

Anyway, best get on and entertain Miss Six. Will download photos to computer and put up all my projects ASAP.

Take care,

Lisa

Witch's Broom

Hi all,

I do have to say Halloween was fun. Miss J dressed up and we went to a friend's place. There were five girls all dressed up and four houses in the street answered the door to the trick-or-treaters. We then went back to Mandy's house and she'd done a great job of making some Halloween treats. 

The home made broom was a hit.

Mandy's food ... and great haunted house (made by her friend)

Eyeballs - love it!

Miss J goes to a private Christian school so the teacher was not a fan of Halloween, but I've decided it's just a bit of fun ... and if we have something here next year it will give me the opportunity to trawl through Pinterest looking for crafty things I can make for it!

Have fun,

Lisa

Halloween in Australia

Hi all,

Happy Halloween! 

Halloween is actually quite a divisive issue here in Australia. You are either quite into Halloween and celebrate it or you are very against it. The shops here have really gotten into selling the paraphernalia in the last few years, and many of the younger people are very "into" it, but if you go through the suburbs knocking on doors trick-or-treating you will find many homes that have a sign saying "no halloween here" or simply do not answer their doors.

Halloween really has not been a thing we do here. I remember only one party I went to in my youth. I don't remember if we even dressed up, but apple bobbing was involved - bloody difficult thing to do that apple bobbing. My parents and friend's parents were never interested in celebrating it, so I have to admit that before our daughter got to the age of five we were the "no halloween" people ... It just seemed like another American holiday that we did not want to participate in (and various other bah-humbug excuses my hubby would sprout). But of course, now we have a child in our midst it seems like a bit of fun, and another excuse for her to dress up. 

We are off to a friend's house after school as she lives in an area where a few of the families all participate in the trick-or-treating so you don't go to houses where you would be rejected as such.

Miss J has a witch outfit and requested a broom. Hubby and I went to the "Reject Shop" this morning and found bunches of decorator stick things... some bits of string to tie it all together and we have a broom. I will post a photo of her in costume later. We grown-ups don't generally get dressed up as well to walk the kids around .... unless we are going to a specific party.

I am thinking that I may prepare earlier next year and ask the neighbours how they feel about it -- maybe give them some lollies to hand out if they are willing, and maybe decorate our place a bit if Miss J is still really keen on Halloween. I am not sure of the response as we are mainly in a retiree area and many of them do not see the point of it.

What about you .... really into it? Or a bit against? Not looking for major drama and lecturing here... just interested in what people enjoy celebrating.

Have a good one,

Lisa

Nappy Ship

Hi all,

Well, I have completed my first project in my new craft room. I was invited to a baby shower on the weekend and I've been trawling the internet for ideas for nappy cakes. I was going to make a motorbike (they are sooo cute!), but as both the mother and father-to-be are in the Navy I thought I'd give a ship a go.

I used 5mm presentation board to make the ship and covered it in pink wrapping paper. Filled it with nappies, muslin wraps, bibs, spoons, and baby socks. The "flight deck" was made from a wet wipes box covered in pink wrapping paper. Anchor was cut out on my cricut from the Going Places cartridge. The base was also 5mm presentation board and I covered it in material from my stash - looking for that ocean waves look!

Warship with a pink twist!

Prop looks a bit odd, spoons a bit too bendy.

Both parents-to-be have served on ANZAC ships so I tried to
copy the ship's design (as much as you can with nappies!)

I also made an explosion card -- cannot seem to stay away from them at the moment.

Paper and ribbon from the stash

Cot cut on the cricut from the Everyday Paper Dolls cartridge

You cannot see it clearly but I used the patterned paper
to make a pillow and quilt for the cot.

Butterflies from the stash. One is stuck to the cot and the
other two are on long pieces of acetate to make
them look like they are hanging in the air.

Now I am all in the mood for craft! I went to Spotlight this morning and they had Christmas stuff out. Since I am sick of leaving Christmas to the last minute I bought a couple of things to make and some decoration storage I've been looking at for ages. I am determined to get my act together this year ... homemade cards ARE going to be made and sent, unlike last year!

I hope all is well with everyone,

Lisa

Lucky Girl

Hi all,

Well the craft room project is nearly done ... just some handles on drawers to go.

I am so very lucky as you can see from the photo...

I am also lucky I had paid the deposit for the room before the roof replacement reared it's ugly head! 

My hubby is such an amazing guy. He put all the cupboards together himself, put the cupboards on the wall, levelled it all and will put all the handles on the moment he can. Once he starts on a project there is no stopping him.

As I type the roofing guys are making a racket above me. It's looking good, real good. They should be finished by Thursday arvo, then I will post before and after pictures.

Hope all is well with everyone, I'm off to another room for some quiet!

Lisa 

New Roof

Hi all,

Well life is pretty busy right now and school holidays are on, so I've got young Miss JR to entertain full time for two weeks as well. Got to say, though I am pretty happy with my lot in life. I read a great quote the other day about how "your life is someone else's dream", as in people would love to be where you are so be happy with what you have.

The people who sold us this house were sneaky little things and the building inspector we paid was a lazy little thing, so a few items were unknown to us until we started living in the house - i.e. leaky roof, termites and a very lumpy concrete floor in one room. The termites luckily are contained to a small place outside and can be dealt with (having not created much damage), and the concrete floor is now level.

The roof -- sigh. When we looked in the ceiling after we moved in the two tarps and a bucket were a big sign something was  wrong ....  urgent repairs were required, but luckily the lazy building inspector was convinced by us that he should pay for them since the issue was blatantly obvious (if only he'd looked). Our second building inspector recommended though, that the roof needed replacing as the pitch/design of the roof should never have had tiles on it. The repairs we had done are great for now, but we will continue to throw money at the roof over the years unless we do something about it. So, after a bit of soul searching and counting of cash we have bitten the bullet and are getting a new colourbond roof. I received news today that we are booked in to start next Monday! 

Yes, the people we bought from were obnoxious from the start. They made things difficult through the whole buying process, and were obviously sneaky and not quite as up front as one would have liked. This has changed our plans as to when we would do things to the house (i.e. no pool for a few years, sob!), but we did borrow more than we needed at the time of purchase so luckily with a little massaging of bank accounts we can afford to get all these things fixed. Also, anyone would love to live here, it is a wonderful place to be, gorgeous, just gorgeous.... So, hubby and I have decided that we refuse point blank to get upset or angry. The previous owners were very unhappy, bitter people who were not necessarily liked by all their neighbours, and are refusing to pay their realtor (for no justifiable reason than they are penny pinchers as well) and gosh, it really must take sooo much effort every day to be that unhappy. So we just simply REFUSE to waste our energy.

Both hubby and I have worked hard to get to where we are today and we have been incredibly lucky and blessed too, in many ways. Life is full of one step forward - two steps back moments, but gosh I've had some good times as well, and at the age of 42 I am living with the "water views" I thought I'd have to wait for retirement to have. We saw dolphins, ducks, pelicans and all sorts out the window today.....

So, long story short ...... basically that is how I feel today -- happy.

Lisa

Craft Room update photos

Getting there........

Grinding down the "hills" in the concrete floor 

Hmmmmm ... might need a bigger machine

Bigger machine!

Bigger grinder needs it's own generator!

Filling the valleys in with concrete

Cupboards built and waiting

Flooring in, now we can get started

Hubby is such a handy dude!

Okay, now I'm getting excited

All the cupboards are now in and doors on. Now all I have to do is wait three weeks (..... aaaahhhhh THREE weeks!!!......) for the benchtop to arrive.

Have fun,

Lisa

My New Craft Room - in progress!

Hi all,

Well we have made progress at last .... the concrete guys have spent five days grinding down the "hills" on the floor and filling in the "valleys". They did a great job to fix a horrible floor. The flooring guy is now fitting the wood-look flooring and hubby has painted and put all the cupboards together in the garage ready to go. Hopefully we will be able to get the cupboards into the room today and tomorrow ready for the stone guys to measure for a bench on Monday.

So .... we are getting there! I will post progress pictures soon. I am so looking forward to getting started on making things in my dream craft room. Very excited!

Take care,

Lisa 

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

40th Wedding Anniversary Card

Hi all,


My Mother-in-Law and Sister-in-Law went to Melbourne last month to help some close relatives from England celebrate a very important event --- their 40th Wedding Anniversary. I was tasked with the card and I have to say I am really quite chuffed with how it turned out.


The 40th Anniversary is the Ruby year so I took that as my base idea. This is what I came up with...

I used the Ribbons and Rosettes cartridge for the Rosette. Learning experience that one ... I used seven cutouts of the "rosette" to make the actual item and I had a heck of a time keeping it from spreading back out. Used a few different adhesives that did not work until I suddenly remembered my hot glue gun! I have had this thing in the cupboard for many many years and never used it. Now I realise how silly I was, that thing is magic!

I used Weddings for the love hearts and Winter Wonderland for the 40.
Paper is from Artee Supplies and glitter paper from my stash.

Ooops, it seems I got a little out of control and made the card too
thick/3D -- it would not fit in the envelope, so I had to make my own.

I could blather on all day about this card. I really enjoyed making it.


Lisa