Layouts

My first article has been posted at Aussie Scrapbooking! You can check it out here. If you have any ideas for articles or posts that you would like to see let me know here and I’ll do my very best to accommodate.

Also congratulations to Kate for her new Digiscrapping Design Blog at LazyCow Designs (great name!), head over and check it out, she even has a great freebie there too!

Speaking of Kate, she has some beautiful pictures of one of her daughters dancing on her blog this week, they reminded me of some I took of Quinn earlier in the year, I haven’t posted the layout I did with one of the pictures because I was never sure whether you could tell what it was, (it’s hard to be objective when I took the picture!). Anyway, you be the judge and see for yourself, is it just a blur, or can you see a little girl dancing away?

Twirl Girl

Lastly, I stumbled across these You Suck At Photoshop Video Tutorials on YouTube, at the risk of offending someone, I found these very amusing, and there were a few good tips in there too, if you don’t like, how shall we say, aggressive language, perhaps it’s best not to watch, they are very tongue in cheek, I hope you are not offended. Oh I am worried for you Angela! LOL

I am going to start adding some of my favourite Photoshop/Digiscrapping Tips/Shortcuts to most of my posts (I was going to say all, but don’t want box myself into a corner!), so watch out for more entries. Or better yet, if you have a question let me know :-)

I was supposed to go away with a couple of good friends this weekend for three nights of sloth and relaxation, unfortunately I managed to contract my second case of gastro in the last three weeks, along with Quinn. I still feel miserable and I’m still not over it, so if it doesn’t get better overnight I think I will be off to the doctors in the morning, I am a bit over feeling so queezy and off colour :-(

Also a big hi *waving madly* to some of my past students who I see have joined my mailing list, great to see you guys dropping in, don’t be shy! :-)

Oh and lastly, we spent a night in Melbourne last weekend with some dear friends, we took them to their first Aussie Rules Football match along with some other friends that hadn’t been in years, 6 adults + 6 kids = a great night had by all. And to end a lovely evening we finished it off with another big game of Puerto Rico AND we managed to purchase our own copy! Taught the girls how to play last Monday (Public Holiday), had two games, both of which Bronte won. Thanks to Mandy, Dave, Mallory and Odette for a wonderful weekend.

This was my big news! I got the front cover of the US Digital Scrapbooking Magazine!

I am completely chuffed as is Bronte (Quinn is slightly miffed LOL, wanted it to be a layout of her).

Thanks to everyone that emailed me or commented here with congratulations, it was great to see you as excited as I was!

Don’t forget to snaffle the freebie below.

Have a great day :-)

OK, I finally think it’s done, after much ado, I present my new blog (and site)! I won’t be making any changes for a while now, AND I will be blogging regularly again, well, I’d better, since I have spent two weeks on this without a night to bed before 2am… several after 4am…. well, I will say, I am tenacious…Please leave me some love and tell me it wasn’t all for naught!

I do know that I have an issue with the header and centring, but when I fix it in Firefox it goes awry in Internet Explorer, so I am aware of it and will attempt to fix it soon!

Some bits….

~ Congratulations…

To my dear friend Megan, who recently achieved her dream of becoming a police officer, I am so proud of you hun, and I know you will be great!

Thanks to Kate, for mentioning my new blog and saying such sweet things about me, right back atchya Kate…. If you enjoy an amusing read head over there, she is wonderful at telling bits about her life in the most amusing manner. Check out a recent one called The Trouble with Double.

And just because I prefer posts with some sort of graphic here is a layout I did a month or so back, my usual, “Embrace The Whitespace” style, hmmm I should coin that phrase… when I looked at these photos I couldn’t get the song from the Milo Ad out of my head, so of course, what better way to get it out, than put it in a layout… so here ’tis…

Update on the Puerto Rico, last time we played, we had 3 games (they are getting quicker now), I won all 3! Very happy indeed.

Hugs to Odette, who recently broke her leg, we are thinking of you babe and hope you are feeling better soon.

Also went to a trivia night on Friday night, it was a fund raiser for the Make A Wish foundation, last year we won (yay) and this year we came second, which does make you wonder about the rumours that alcohol dulls the brain, since last year the end of the evening was quite, shall we say, blurry, and this time we were all, well, much less affected by our drinks, however we only came 2nd, but that, of course, is nothing to sneeze at! So we came home with lots of lovely prizes and knowledge that we are good at, ‘knowing useless stuff’.

Hmmm just noticed I seem to have an aversion to fullstops in this entry, I’ll try harder next time…. put it down to the late hour…

Oh and Lincoln Eddy, yes you, stop nit picking on my blog spelling/grammar/ errors, you’ve had some that I have opted to overlook, and besides, Judy likes the way I type PLease….

Which reminds me! Go and check out the lovely Judy’s blog, she is lucky enough to be travelling around France at the moment and has been updating her blog very regularly, with lots of pictures and wonderful entries about her time there…. go on, go now, leave her some love!

OK check back soon, I have plans to add some pages and stuff, maybe some freebies, some tweaks…. so many plans…..

Thought I’d better blog this before Link beat me to it. He is winning the blog war at the moment….

Last night we went to Suzy and Lincoln’s and had dinner with our dear friends Mandy and Dave who recently moved to Melbourne. Mandy and Dave are in our inner camping friends circle and since the weather is getting cooler we haven’t seen as much of them as we would like. Anyway, we went to Waratah Bay with Mandy and Dave about 6 weeks a go, and while we were there they taught us a game called Puerto Rico , which is ranked as number one game on www.GameBoardGeek.com. After the initial confusion of trying to learn quite a complicated game, we finally ‘got it’. And ended up having 3 games in one day, which is quite a feat since the game we had last night lasted over 3 hours…. Any way, Brian emerged victorious and a good night was had by all, it’s not an easy game to describe, but it is vaguely like Monopoly in trying to acquire wealth and property, but instead it is setting up a new colony…. OK that doesn’t really describe it well at all, but if you like games, this could be worth a try. Mandy and Dave have left the game so we can have a play since, despite it’s ranking, it is not easy to get locally. To prove our level of addiction Suzy and Link our coming over shortly for a follow up game…. stay tuned….

I have recently purchased Foto Fusion and have created a few basic layouts with it, the first one below is of a night late last year at Suzy and Lincoln’s for a BBQ, so here are all the people that were there Puerto Rico-ing it up last night… Click on Pictures for a larger view.
Below is a layout of our weekend at Waratah Bay with Mandy and Dave. Dave was teaching the girls how to surf. I really enjoyed doing this layou as the photo’s made me smile and remember a great weekend, also the kids will remember this forever, they had a ball learning to surf with two of their best friends, Mallory and Odette. They really didn’t want to get out of the water, but all good things must come to an end. I think this is something they will try again next summer.

Below is another quick one on our Easter trip to Bright, we stayed both at the caravan park and also at Lincoln’s Mum and Dad’s house at Harrietville. Brian (Link’s Dad) was a wonderful host and we loved being there. The kids had a ball and made some new friends, Claudia and Mitchell who we have arranged to camp with next year.

Just like the divine Miss A, I too did the Smudge course at DAA along with a few other MAC girls, this Smudge I did of Quinn, before I really knew what to do. Scott Deardorf was an excellent tutor, with excellent video and written tutorials and the class was very chatty and full of inspiring people.

Here is the Eagle which was what we all did in the class.

Since Link has told you what he is reading I thought I should. I have had a bit of a reading hiatus lately, due to late nights and also the fact that I have been enjoying audible books on my iPod, but I recently caught up on all the First Tuesday Book Club vodcasts that I had missed on the ABC and it inspired me to get back into one of my loves, books. I went and bought “The Broken Shore” by Peter Temple, which had had a good review on the show and while I was at the book store I picked a book off the shelf called “The Book Thief” by Marcus Zusak, I bought this primarily because it was written by an Australia about the 1st world war set in Germany. Well, what a fabulous read… I like to read books slowly and savour them, but this I read in 3 days, reading the last 1/3rd of the book in one sitting, finishing at 4.30am. I can highly recommend this book, it was written with an unusual style, and was extremely engaging, I can’t recommend it enough. Unfortunatley I trued to start The Broken Shore straight after it but the writing style was so different I had to stop, will start it in the next few days.

Lastly, we ended up having a big sleep over here on Friday night, trying to take advantage of having Mallory and Odette visiting from Melbourne. So with six little girls staying in our rumpus room there was lots of, Wii-ing, SingStar-ing and DVD-ing happening, they were of course Angels and looked after themselves pretty much. Also in these pictures is Jesamine (Quinn and Bronte’s cousin) and Chantal, who is also belongs to one of our camping families. They had such a great time and here are some pics to prove it….

OK off to Puerto Rico it up now! Have a great day :-)

Updated to add: 5 games… (they ended up staying for pizza…bad I know….Lincoln NONE (although he thinks he has a better average because he kept coming 2nd…)

Score
Lee won 2
Suzy won 2
Brian won 1

Well that title is a bit ambiguous…. I’ll leave it at that I think, suffice to say, it’s a little dig, because despite my obvious disadvantage, I got to blog first, what did I get to blog first, well, that I went to see Juno today. Yep Suzy and I have started up our weekly Friday movie again (although we had a non-human gatecrasher today). And what a way to start the movie year… if you haven’t seen it, do. Right now…seriously now, the rest of this won’t be that exciting, trust me…. Anyway, I intend to rush out and purchase the soundtrack tomorrow, assuming of course, there is one, haven’t checked that yet, really loved the quirky bits of music, with some great classics in there too. Anyway, I highly recommend, it really was great and I am sure few films I see this year will rival it, we all enjoyed it immensely, even the non-human amongst us.

OK below, a layout…. tried to personify the amazing Anna Aspnes with the word art here, sadly, it didn’t work, but it’s the effort that counts…. right? CC welcome…. click for a larger view…

And this one was made for my dear friend Shez, it was made as a belated birthday card…again so sorry I was late Shez…. or maybe we could just say I am amazingly early for your 41st!

And for those who don’t know, we finally got a new BBQ and outdoor setting, see below, so we can now finally use our deck for some real entertainment, it’s been bare for 18 month now so it’s nice to be able to use it, even if we don’t have a step! There are no pics of the outdoor setting as it wasn’t set up when I took the BBQ ones.

Clinton and Jen, if you’re reading this again, we will have you over in the next two weeks or so. There I am locked in now! We look forward to seeing you….. Wow, is this a first? An invite via blogger? I wonder…..

OK, think that’s it for now… happy weekend everyone! BFN

Man, it has been ages, life is busy, but I hate to neglect my blog, it always makes that first post back harder, since I have been too busy to post and yet, really have nothing to tell…. ;-) And to my blog buddeis, I have also been neglecting my blog reading, sorry and I’ll get back to it soon! mwa :)

Work is busy and working 4 days is taking up more of my ‘me’ time than I had hoped. But in saying that I still love it. It’s my 12 month anniversay tomorrow, how freaky is that? It feels like such a short time and I still feel like I am learning everyday.

We went to Bright for Easter, it is truly a little peice of heaven and we can’t wait to get back there, but it will be a while, although we’d love to get there over winter to stay on the cabins that they have there. We camped right on the river, which is sadly lacking in water due to the drought, but it was so pretty and the kids had a ball with all the exciting exploring they had to do. We also had to camp without power for the first time in years, but it was no biggie, didn’t really effect us at all. Good food, good champagne and good company, all in all a great holiday….pics to come soon….

Ummm, what else? Oh it’s Quinn’s birthday this friday. I am having my own little crisis about that. I can’t believe she is turning 10 and it really seems obvious in the last month or so that she is not a little girl anymore. I am not one to worry about my age, it’s just a number, but this is really bothering me. A well meaning friend commented recently that she acts more like she is 12 or 13! That freaked me out too. Anyway, here is a sneak at her party invitations, personal stuff blurred out of course :). I took the pics here at home, and they turned out OK. (CLICK FOR A LARGER VIEW)

Oh and talking about Quinn has reminded me to wish Nic a very happy birthday for the 22nd! Quinn didn’t forget, and wanted to wish you all the best :)

Not much news on the layout front, being time challenged at the moment means it has taken a backseat, but here are two more recent ones, that I have done. Click for a larger view

My Digi Scrapping class starts tomorrow night, so I have been madly updating my notes for that. I did just mean to skim over them, but I ended up adding to the first weekes notes, beginning at 5 pages and ending at 15. Now I am only on the second weeks notes, but I’ll get there. Looking forward to beginning classs in a new venue, with new computer and a smaller class. Should be good. Looking forward to it.

The wonderful MAC Karen is heading out to Oz soon, so the MAC girls hope to have another gathering then, very excited to meet this lovely sweet person and maybe pick her brains, knowing what a fabulous photographer Karen is, I couldn’t let that chance slip by, and I think there will be a few more MAC girls wanting to take advantage of that talent!

I kinda feel like I have more to say but not sure what it is….oh I know, I read a great book recently, if you are a working Mum, it is a fabulous and hilarious read, if you’re not, you should enjoy it just as much (although, the non working Mum’s I know that have read it, thought it was a bit of a dig at them). I have to disagree, I thought it was a big dig at working Mum’s and all the antics that some go through to try and keep their lives, families and careers on track. Anyway, enough babbling, the book is called I don’t know how she does it and it’s by Alison Perason.

Click on the title to read an excerpt.

My weekly movies have been put on hold due to my partner in crime getting a job! Although she will only be working Fridays for a couple of months so we can resume after that. It has actually worked out well really, I am not sure I would be able to fit them in at the moment anyway.

Oh and a small one. Shez, Tenille (a friend) and myself all joined a camera club recently. It looks like we are going to learn heaps. They recently had a Car Rally, which we had a list of things (I took the whole family) we had to take photgraphs of, whilst driving and looking for clues etc. It was great fun and I took some pictures I would not normally have taken. Here are a few of my faves, sorry the colours are a little over saturated, gotta get my screen calibrated…. Click for a larger view

~ DREAMS ARE ILLUSTRATIONS ~

Had lots of fun making this layout and have always loved that pic of Quinn, I really enjoyed experimenting and what I ended up with, it shows up a little bit light on the compressed version though. I used brushes by Hybrid-Genesis and a mesh brush by Denise Docherty.

Quote Reads: Dreams are Illustrations….from the book your soul is writing about you – Marsha Norman.
CLICK FOR A LARGER VIEW

~ CAMERA ~
Yay I have my camera back!!!! Woohoo, it is perfectly alright with no sign of the muck that was all over the sensor, I am so lucky and feel very very relieved and thankful to have it back….life is good ;-) I took some pics at a pool party that we went to yesterday/last night but haven’t downloaded them yet, must get to that….

~ STRANGER THAN FICTION ~
Went to the movies on Friday with my cousin and my auntie and saw Stranger Than Fiction, I wasn’t overly keen as I really don’t like Will Farrell, not that I have seen him in much, but the sort of movies he is in just aren’t my thing. Thankfully, the movies I had to choose from were narrow as I was time challenged and was going to struggle to get back in time to get the girls from school, so I was kinda forced to see this or nothing. Well what a FABULOUS movie it was, so refreshingly different, sweet, funny and sad all at once. It had some REALLY great actors in it and there was a real potential for Will Farrell to overact, but he didn’t, his performance was beautifully subtle and I think I can safely say, I am a convert. If you get a chance, go see it. Dave, my cousin thought it was the best movie he had seen in the last 5 years, I wasn’t quite there, but was very impressed nonetheless.
ROFL, I just read that back and I sound like I should be on The Movie Show with Margaret Pomerance! hehe!

~ SOME OTHER STUFF ~
Found these links over the last few days, this first one is via a blog link that Lis provided at MAC, not one of those links, but 1 I found via one of those links (boy that was a mouthful, not even sure I know what I mean LOL). Anyway I am addicted, it’s quite fascinating watching all these people tell a stranger about their lives. This man is from England and has decided to meet someone new every day for the next 30 years and ask them 3 questions check out Thirty Year Project.com I’d love to see what you think. It actually reminds me of a show that used to be on SBS a few years back where a guy would just stop people in the street and ask them about their lives. It was amazing how open and honest people were, the name escapes me now and I know it will annoy me for days…if you know the name please put me out of my misery ;-)

Next is a movie poster that was posted at Photoshop Top Secrets.com on the blog there, it is a really great effect on the poster and I am going to try and incorporate something similar in a layout (yeah, sure I am ;-) ). Anyway there is a thumbnail to the left of the poster, you can click for a larger view or go check out the blog.Also found these cute little camera bags on Donna Downey’s website, they are way to small for all my stuff but I thought they were cute anyway. Would be nice to have one for a day trip I guess where you only need 1 lens and no flash.

Anyway that’s it for me, hope you had a great weekend and if the pics are anything special I’ll come back and add them to this post!

~ PARTY PICS ~

And did you notice? There is not a spot on these pics….*sigh*…… thank you Mr Camera Fixer Man :)
BFN!