Advent

Tomorrow is the first day of Advent and consequently the first day of JYC by Shimelle. I am really looking forward to getting involved in this and hopefully keeping up with at least some of the prompts.

Today I put all the Christmas stash I have in a box so that it is easily accessible and that way I don't have to hunt around for what I have got. I treated myself to some wonderful K & Co paper, chipboard and tags on Thursday and can't wait to start using it. I have lots of Chrismas scrapbooking paper left from a pad I bought a few years ago too so I have no doubt that I have enough. Enough for several years I think.


I also managed to scrap some more of our summer holiday 2007! It has been hanging around so long now that I am bored with it. But - I have only got 3 spreads left to do and it will be finished. It was the trip to Sipan in Croatia. Here are 4 of the pages I did today.




On the top left is our new bedroom! The one we got moved to after the electricity went in our first room.
The one on the top right is the view from our room - this is the terrace where we ate all our meals and you can see how close it was to the sea.
Bottom left is looking from our room window again, but out to sea rather than down at the hotel. You can see how beautiful the Adriatic is!
And bottom right is a view of the front of our hotel. Frank is outside the restaurant that they use for visitors.

As tomorrow is the first day of Advent, Katie and Lizzie will be opening their first present on their calendar. I hope they like the little gifts I have chosen for them.

Journal your Christmas

I have signed up to take part in Shimelle's Journal your Christmas. I am hoping this will give me something to look back on in years to come and remind me of what we were doing in 2008. And hopefully I will take part in future years too.

Christmas has always been a favourite time of year, especially since having children. And even though they are now adults it is still a special time of the year. We very much enjoy each other's company (well I enjoy theirs anyway!) and have lots of laughs doing things together. Some years we go away for Christmas and other years we stay at home and have family around. This year we are staying at home.

I can't wait till December 1st arrives and I can get started on this project. I just hope that I can keep motivated for the whole time. Some friends on an online group are taking part too so we are hoping to motivate each other!

Weekend

For the first time in ages we spent a whole weekend at home!

Frank spent much of the weekend working on his model boat - he will need a new one soon! And I spent some time scrapping some of our US holiday photos. My big problem is deciding which ones to leave out of the layouts, consequently I end up putting most of them in and I think my 2 albums with extra pages won't be enough for the whole 3 week vacation.

The photo on the left is of the Lincoln Memorial from various angles, the one on the right is of the reflecting pool. The bottom photo on this page is of Frank trying to photograph his finger on the top of the Washington Memorial! It didn't quite work out as he planned.

So far I have got to the end of day 2 - 30th March. This was the first of our two days in Washington DC! We visited the White House, Lincoln Memorial and National World War II Memorial.

These two photographs are of the National WWII Memorial. The photo on the left is one of the gateways into the memorial. It took us ages to get the photograph of the fountain without anyone in front of it. The photo on the right is of quotes and carvings. The carvings depict different aspects of the war!

Saturday evening we had invited a work collegue around for dinner, and as he is vegetarian we had a no meat Indian meal. Frank cooked a selection of dishes - Bindi Fry, Stuffed aubergines, dahl, mushroom curry, coconut rice and we had some naan bread too. It was all absolutely delicious.

Scrapbooking

I have been trying hard over the summer to get some of my albums finished as I want to start scrapping our April trip to the USA. I have been completing challenges on various groups and forums which has given me the push I have needed to get more pages finished. I will try to post more to the blog in future!

This is the most recent page I have completed. It is for the September Week 1 challenge on UKScrappers. I had to include a BeeGees song in the title, use the colour red, ribbon, bling and buttons. They all have some connection with the first week in September - 1st September 1946 was when Barry Gibb was born; 2nd September 1994 Roy Castle died so the ribbon is for this; Dallas was first broadcast on 5th September 1979 so that is the bling; Buttons because that is the name of the group setting the challenge and the red is nothing specific. Here is my layout anyway!

Maze Album

I have created a little Maze album for my mother-in-law. We are going to Southampton next weekend to see the family and will give it to her then. It has 27 photos in it - all of them are her children, grand children and great grand children and some of their spouses. I hope she likes it!

16 week challenge

I finally decided not to carry on with this challenge. The opposites were not things that I would normally scrap and as I have hundreds of photos that need scrapping I decided I could better use my time working on other albums.

16 Week Challenge - City and Country

For this opposites challenge we had to use the words City and Country. I chose Bath and the two pictures show the huge differences that there are in one city. We can see the old streets of the centre of town and the rolling countryside from just outside the city centre.

Scrapping challenge

I have just completed the layout for week 4 which was to choose 2 words from Fire/Earth/Wind/Water. My chosen words were Fire and Water.

I am using this as part of my Disney scrapbook as the photographs are taken from the Backlot Tour at Walt Disney Studios Park in Disneyland Paris. They were from our visit in October 2006.

Scrapping challenge

I have signed up for a 16 week challenge - hopefully this will help me to create some layouts. We are given two words which are opposites and we have to create a layout using these words.

The first set of words were: Awake and Asleep.

I chose pictures of Willow taken in January 2007!

Scrapbooking crop

Thurdsay was another evening crop at Coleman's warehouse. I tried to put the extra pages in the scrapbook I am using for our Croatian holiday but the extender posts don't fit the posts in the book. This is really annoying as they were sold specifically for that album. That wasted quite a while as I then had to put it all back the way it was before I could start any scrapbooking.

I took the Chinese Whispers page home this week so now I have to use this as inspiration for a page of my own (not copy it, just let it inspire me). This is the page on the left! I will take my page into the next crop in two weeks time and this will then be taken home by someone for them to use as inspiration.

As I am busy with UCAS forms, references, tests and reports at the moment I cannot imagine me having much time to do any scrapbooking over the next two weeks, except this Chinese Whispers page! Only 4 more weeks until my Christmas holiday begins!

Scrapping Crop

I went to my first all day crop last Saturday and managed to complete a couple of pages! One of them was for the kit which was provided. It was using Tim Holtz Distress Inks but it didn't quite work out for any of us! I have been able to make the inks bleed at home so I think maybe the card we were given was too absorbant, or even the inkpads could have been too dry. As I have a few of these myself in my small amount of stash (LOL) I will probably have another go at this technique sometime. The rest of it worked ok though! We had to cut around images to make them go over the border and I chose to do the same over the photo. The photograph I used was of Frank, sitting on the terrace at Hotel Sipan in Croatia.




The other layouts I did were of our trip to DLP last October.

This first layout used some paper that I was sent from US. It has ghosts on it, so I thought it was ideal for Halloween. I thought the grey was a good background for these photos and the orange pumpkin was a die cut that another lady in US sent me. One of the ladies at the crop gave me the orange ribbon/fibre which seemed to really go well with this layout.





At Coleman's Warehouse I found some other Halloween paper and also some embellishments - these are what I have used on the layouts showing the Halloween Parade.





The next crop is Thursday evening! Watch this space to see if I finish anything else!

Long time no blog!

I cannot believe it is almost two weeks since I wrote on here! Where does the time go?

A lot has happened since my last entry. Katie, Lizzie and I went to see Hairspray, which was a very funny film. We want to go and see the stage version which has Ben from the Joseph show on BBC playing the lead role and Michael Ball playing the mother!

Katie flew out to Purdue on Monday 13th August and arrived safely at the university on Tuesday. We are having great problems buying her the laptop she needs as there is a problem with the Apple website not accepting UK credit cards, but this is a long story which I will not go into!

Lizzie got her A level results today and she is thrilled with them. She had been told she would fail her Geography but she got a D and that included a B in one of the papers! Her other A levels were both grade C - one was Drama and the other was Philosophy and Ethics. Her AS Music was a grade D too (another long story as the Music teacher was new to A level teaching and didn't prepare them properly for the written paper!). She is really pleased with all her results as she now has 3 A levels grades C, C and D and 3 AS levels, also grades C, C and D. She will now start applying to universities for next September to study Performing Arts. She is especially pleased with her performance grade in her Drama exam as she was given 83 marks out of a possible 90.

Tonight I went to a scrapbooking crop for the second time. Last time I managed to stick 3 photos on a sheet of paper in 3 hours and that was all. At least tonight I managed to complete one page which was an achievement!


I have also completed the second page of my journal (I know - I am VERY slow) - Things I love. Now to decide which prompt to follow next!

Stuff

Last night I went to my first ever Scrapbook crop. It was a fun evening and in 3 hours I managed to stick 3 photographs to a sheet of paper. That was it! Nothing fancy, not even matted because I thought they looked better straight onto the paper. I looked around the craft warehouse where the crop was held (20% off everything while you are there) but couldn't find any letters that would go well on the page and nothing else that took my fancy either. Back to the computer I guess for a title and then try to find some suitable embellishments to decorate what is a very plain page. My excuse is that I had an awful headache and when I did get home I went straight to bed. These crops are held every two weeks and I will definitely go again but I know to go better prepared with exactly what I want to do, rather than just some odd photos and a few bits of paper. I have also signed up for an all day crop at the same place on 15th September, which will be just before the new term starts at college. I know I have to have lots of stuff prepared to do that day!

This morning I got a couple of magazines that had been sent me by the Gay Switchboard in Colchester. I had contacted them to see how an old friend of mine was - I had lost touch with him a couple of years ago and sadly I discovered he had died in December. The magazines contained photos of him and an obituary written by one of his many friends. Such a shame!