The Last Few

I have been scrapping on and off over the last few days, first while it was pouring with rain, then in cloud, then in bright sunshine. The temperature has risen as well - finally feels like summer out there. At the moment I have the fan on full force, and a large raspberry mineral water by my side. I am thinking I will need to go and water the pot plants soon, and get my feet wet under the hose.

I'm just about ready to say goodbye to 2010, the house is nice and clean and ready for the new year, my scrapping gear is in order, my phone batteries well charged, ready to say HNY to all my far flung friends and family when the time comes. Just need to squeeze in another page if I can while I wait for it to get a wee bit cooler so I can go get the last minute shopping.

Here are the last few that I've done, almost the last ones of 2010.

All the large diecut shapes are not large diecut shapes, I did them myself. I particularly like the top one, with the teeny flowers from my Cuttlebug paisley die. Just something about that cute little flower.

With the second layout, I used flowers I cut from some pp. I had a thing for buying different pps that I could cut shapes from for a while, and sat through several movies cutting them up. Now it's time to actually use them, and I'm quite enjoying the way they look.

The beautiful rose in the last one was in my Christmas parcels, and it's way nicer in real life. I'm SO lucky! I made the little blue ones that go with it with one of my new dies. Oh, and those cute little blue birds in the second last layout? I traced them and cut them out of cs. Very happy with the way they turned out.

Most of these layouts were challenges set on Home & Scrapped over the last couple of months, and I've just finally got to them.

love, Heather "It's about love. You don't have to scrapbook to love but you have to love in order to scrapbook." June

Wishes

I know this is a bit late, but I wish for you a happy and peaceful Christmastime full of love. I hope that's what happened for you. I hope that your New Year is brim full of love, happiness, friendship, good health, satisfaction and fulfillment, and that at every turn, you find that life is wonderful and that you get to live the life you most desire.

love, Heather "It's about love. You don't have to scrapbook to love but you have to love in order to scrapbook." June

A Christmas Gift

I have been busy making my mother a canvas for Christmas. I've not done one before, but this won't be the last, I'm delighted with how well it turned out and how much fun it was to do.

I chose an 11x14 inch canvas, and it was a really nice size to work with. I paint splattered and glimmer misted the canvas, then added my layers, modpodging over them before adding the next layers. To make the doily sturdier, I mod podged both sides of it before adding it to the canvas. It has a nice feel to it now, and doesn't feel fragile or brittle.

This was a bit of a learning curve for me, I've not done so much layering of embellishments before, but I will definitely be doing it again, I love the effect of depth it gives. 

Sorry for the dodgy photo - more rain here, and I just can't get a clear picture when it's dull. But I have to wrap it today, so it's now or never.

I made the little crochet flower and the blue folded flowers, my sister made the gorgeous dress-pattern flower and several of the other bits came from scrapping friends. I love the sisterhood of my scrappy friends :-)

Oh, and I was inspired by that card blog to revamp my simple cards - just a wee bit of bling and they look heaps better :-) No more boring cards for me, I will dutifully add a little extra love to each one I make from now on.

love, Heather "It's about love. You don't have to scrapbook to love but you have to love in order to scrapbook." June

Getting Inspired

I so have to lift my game - I just found this card blog, Card-A-Licious and have decided my cards need an injection of whatever those ladies have! I'm obviously not getting enough mo in my jo or something...  I admit to being in a bit of a rut, but looking through a teeny fraction of the blogs out there has given me a feeling of quiet anticipation and excitement. I can feel "it" coming back to me :-) Yay!

Not sure how long it will take me to get back to my desk, mind you... Christmas is coming and the To Do Lists are getting fat...

Here are some other great blogs you might like to browse through, to help with your own inspiration and excitement.

A Piece of Sky

Chloe's Creative Corner

Echo Park Paper

My Scrap Burrow

Art Of Love

or just browse any of the other blogs down my list, gee there is some great creativity about! Sigh... love it :-) Now I just need to do something! Looking is only half of it, even if it is a fun part. Better stop reading and go create something.

love, Heather "It's about love. You don't have to scrapbook to love but you have to love in order to scrapbook." June

Look what I found in blogland - Scrap N Craft has a tutorial on a new product - and I want some! Go have a look and tell me that you don't want some too! It's on my list for the next time I go shopping.

I have added quite a few new blogs down the side in what I lovingly call my gift space - it's me giving the gift of time to look at other people's inspirational creativity to myself. I seem to be doing it a lot lately - well, anything but the ironing, please! I just love seeing what other people are up to and there are some lovely generous ladies out there, who share their clever ideas with us so we can all learn how to improve our skills. Thanks to all of them x.

Just making some more pretties. Will share later.

love, Heather "It's about love. You don't have to scrapbook to love but you have to love in order to scrapbook." June

Christmas Cheer

Have you been busy? I should have been, but it's been hard to do it for one reason or another. I've had a few headaches this week, nasty things.

Feeling better today though, and busy making a few little pretties to include in Christmas gifts. Check out this cute little box designed by Paula Goff, I had to make one straight away when I found it this morning. I made a few little gift cards to put in it too. One pressie down, a few million to go.. although, I think I will be making more than one of the little boxes, they are sooo easy and they turn out so cute! And all it took was one sheet of cardstock and a few scraps.

 

Paula seems to have a lot of cute ideas on her blog, I think I'll be visiting her more often. I'll be whipping up a few little purses similar to this one too I think, to put a big Christmas cookie in for each of the little people on my list, it's super cute. Most of the little people are boys, but I think I can boy-ify them no problem. That's one of the fun things about creativity - one idea sparks another, and we all keep growing as we share.


I've made a few Christmas cards, but I am terribly late this year. I need a good smacking! I'm doing some more this afternoon though, so I can post them all tomorrow morning. They aren't all that amazing, but I'd rather have these simple ones than bought ones.

 I have been making some of these cute calendars too. I made up the calendars myself, what do you think? They are just some scrappy bits attached to a magnetic clip, and the clip is holding the calendar. I think they'd be cute on the fridge.

Hope you like my offerings today. There will be more tomorrow - only 10 sleeps to go, so there has to be, lol!

And if you would like to win one of my magnetic calendars, I have two to give away. Just leave a comment on my blog to go in the draw to win this and maybe some other little pretty :-) Good luck.

love, Heather "It's about love. You don't have to scrapbook to love but you have to love in order to scrapbook." June

A Christmas Recipe for you :-)

I made some Christmas Muffins for breakfast this morning. Everything in the cupboard and fridge looked particularly unappealing this morning, so I figured I needed some muffins. I wanted something a bit different, so I made up this recipe. And now it's yours to enjoy too :-)

Heather's Christmas Muffins

90g butter
1 egg
1 cup milk
1 apple, grated
1/2 cup fruit mince
2 dessertspoons oat bran
1 teaspoon mixed spice
2 cups plain flour
1 heaped teaspoon baking powder
1/4 cup brown sugar

Melt the butter and mix in the egg and milk. Stir in the grated apple and fruit mince until the mince is all separated out and coated. Mix the dry ingredients in a separate bowl and then add in one lot to the butter mix. Stir only until just combined - overstirring makes muffins tough. Now pile into 12 muffin cases and bake for 20 mins in a hot oven (about 180C, fanforced) or until golden brown and the smell is driving you crazy. Turn out onto a rack to cool, dust with sifted icing sugar. Hope you like them as much as I do.

By the way, the oat bran? I add oat bran to almost everything, it's super good for you and much nicer than wheat bran. Get some, lol!


I've been doing a little blog hopping today. Oh, I love all that creativity, it's so much fun! Here are three of my favourites from today's journey through blogland.

The Joy of a Page! 

Simple Things

Ideas for Scrapbookers

I hope you find something you like there, or in one of their links. Such fun... sigh... :-)

love, Heather "It's about love. You don't have to scrapbook to love but you have to love in order to scrapbook." June

December, December...

It's December already... when did I last post something? Sept 23rd? Really? Gee, I have been neglectful. I wonder what happened to October and November? I guess I used them up, and I know I did do some fun things and scrapped a few pages, so they weren't completely wasted.

In October I went on Retreat for nearly a week with some of my gorgeous online friends. Ohhh, to get that IRL hug from people you know well, but only in chat. It was lovely. Still haven't printed those photos yet, but I will, I will.

I didn't end up finishing the Bootcamp pages, but I did enough to make myself happy with my achievements, and had a lot of pleasure scrapping those older photos. I'm sure a lot of us have photos BS (Before Scrapping) that leave a little to be desired in the scrapability stakes, and a lot of those Bootcamp sketches were perfect for them. These days I crop and zoom before printing, so I have a lot of 4x6 photos just right to scrap. The old ones however, need some careful cutting and figuring out, to make the most of them.

My camera is being naughty lately - and the weather doesn't help. I can't seem to get much in the way of decent photos of my layouts, but I am going to share some layouts I've done lately, anyway. Hope you don't mind.

love, Heather "It's about love. You don't have to scrapbook to love but you have to love in order to scrapbook." June