The special things

Like looking after this little fella

Isn’t he just adorable?!!!  This is my nephew Oliver who was born in April this year, he’s nearly 6 months now.  I’m looking after him today while his Mum, who has the flu, catches up on some sleep.  He’s such a darling and very happy baby!

 

Ollie is helping me take my mind off  a very sad situation we have going on in our family right now.  Some may have seen a very quick post that I put up last week (I then took it straight down again) I was feeling very angry and pissed off about the news at that stage, now I’m just very sad.

Jason’s Mum Kathy has been diagnosed with terminal melanoma.  We are all pretty shell shocked at the moment.  It’s almost unbelieveable after just having dealt with the passing of 2 of his grandparents last month.  On Wednesday Kathy was given a best and worst time senario from her doctor, but is yet to tell us.  It must be extremely difficult for her to even digest the news herself.  We are of course hoping for lots of time left with Kathy, but knowing that the time is going to be limited is heartbreaking.  Telling the girls was awful, but they are being very strong.

 

Gotta go now, Ollie is waking up.

 

Hope you all are well and can I just say a special thanks to the Scrapsidaisy girls for being such wonderful support!!  Thank you!

Hello and goodbye

We’re back from beautiful New Zealand – had a wonderful time and was in awe of the breath taking scenery.  Unfortunately our trip was plagued with hiccups, from a broken camera to a smashed side mirror on the motor home to nearly running out of fuel and the very sad news of the passing of Jason’s Nanna just 4 days into our holiday.  It was definitely a rollercoaster of a holiday!

Anyway, here are a couple of pics from our trip.

 

This was the route we travelled.

Our motor home

This is also a goodbye post as I’ve decided to hang up my glue and scissors and allow some new and exciting things to come into my life!  I’m not at all sure what those things might be yet, but scrapbooking has sort of run it’s course in my life and now I’m ready to move onto something else and enjoy more time with my family.  So I’m going to say goodbye to scrapbooking, forums and blogs and hello to a new chapter in my life.  Thanks to all the internet and real life buddies I’ve made along my scrapbooking journey – it’s been a wonderful ride!

 

Wishing you all happiness!!!

New Zealand here we come!!

Only a few short days until we wing our way across the seas to the beautiful south island of New Zealand. We are all so extremely excited!
This is what our motorhome will look like on the inside:
How cool is that?!!!
Speaking of New Zealand, one of my lovely card making buddies, Dawn sent me a lovely surprise in the mail this week, it was the Heart Winged Butterfly stamp by Hero Arts and she also sent me this gorgeous card
Isn’t she clever!!! Thanks so much Dawn!!

A couple of crafty things to share. I did this layout for the colour/word challenge over at the Aussie Scrap Source blog a couple of weeks ago. The word prompt was listen and so I used this photo of Jason reading poetry to Annaliese and Jack, he won’t be fond of this photo of him without a hat on, but I think it’s a wonderful memory to have of him reading to the kids.

 

And this wall hanging using Twiddleybitz.  Aussie Scrap Source are now the suppliers of Twiddleybitz in Australia and you can see what Nic and Jaimie did with some Twiddleybitz here

I still can’t leave comments or sometimes even read typepad blogs, so my apologies to my typepad buddies, hopefully they’ll find out what the problem is for me soon!

 

See you in a few weeks after our New Zealand trip!

P!nk!!!

Last Sunday night I got to see this amazing artist at work!! Unfortunately we didn’t have the best seats and couldn’t really get the full effect of her fabulous stage and props (we paid for gold tickets too! We were just a couple of seats away from the restricted view seat!) but it was still totally wonderful and fantastic experience being at a P!nk concert! (above photo downloaded from the internet) Here are my cousin and I all done up ready to go.

Speaking of pink, check out the outfit on this little character!

Can you tell that she dresses herself these days? Love those pink leggings!
And here she is with her top teeth finally gone!
And a bit more pink and a little purple!
Here is the layout I’ve done for this weeks Hero Arts Challenge which is to create a tag.

I couldn’t get the colours right on this layout, the background is actually white, and looks a bit pale pink here. You may recall I did a layout about my nephew Jack a few weeks ago and his 20 questions. Just got Shayla’s layout to go now.
I got to play with some grungeboard products recently and put together this mini album from our road trip in March More photos of this project over here
Here is my tag for the fundraiser that Tamar is holding that I posted about a couple of weeks ago (see here) The tag had to be no bigger than 2″x2″ and had to be neutral tones and be a message of positive affirmation.

And lastly, I’ll leave you with a pic of our gorgeous Skip – I was outside taking a photo of the above layout and he came and plonked down next to me.

Thanks everyone for their most appreciated comments last week!! You’re all so wonderful!! Have a fantastic week!

PS. I’m having major issues with typepad blogs and all of a sudden I can’t leave comments on blogs hosted by typepad! I’m still in discussion with them trying to work out what’s happening. Hopefully we’ll fix it soon!

I {heart} Hero Arts Blog Hop

Ashley M from the Hero Arts blog group came up with the fun idea for the group to do a blog hop! So we are all getting together today and posting ‘thank you’ cards on our blogs using Hero Arts stamps of course!!!
We also have to answer these 2 questions:
a. Tell us your Hero Arts story. How did you get started using Hero Arts products?I originally discovered Hero Arts stamps via Rachel Greig’s blog, Rach is a wonderful Australian stamper who now has her own line of stamps called Darkroom Door! The new blog group had just been started and so I joined up and I think I owned just 1 Hero Arts stamp at the time (I was a scrapbooker and hadn’t really made cards), that was about 18 months ago and now I have become totally addicted to HA and love each new stamp or set that they release and I really have to use a lot of self control not to buy them all!!
b. Hero Arts is full of great people. Tell us why you are thankful for Hero Arts! I found Hero Arts when I was really starting to lose a bit of interest in creating and felt like I couldn’t keep pumping out scrapbooking pages at the rate I was (22 albums and counting!) and then I discovered card making and stamping. This was greatly helped along by all the wonderful inspiration from the members of the Hero Arts blog group and for the Hero Arts Artists. I had never done a stamping class, so the Hero Arts video tutorials have been just the best thing ever! I’ve also met so many wonderful, wonderful people that are always so helpful and kind! I won’t name names as there are so many of you and I don’t want to miss anyone out!

Without further ado!
THANK YOU HERO ARTS

My card also doubles as my entry for this weeks Hero Arts blog challenge which is a Monochromatic theme. I did white embossing as well as embellishing in white. Stamps I used: S5141 Four Leaf Grid, K5175 Houndstooth and CL173 Simple Message. I also used Hero Arts flowers, buttons and pearls. The large flower is a Heidi Swapp glitter flower.  To follow the hop click here And the lovely Beverley is kindly giving away some goodies on her Hero Arts Blog hop post here – that’s so kind of you Bev!

More Hero Arts!! Last week with the opening of the new look Hero Arst Website the blog challenge was to create something inspired by the website. Now I’ve poured over the Hero Arts 2009 catalogue so many times that I decided that the cover would be a cool ’sketch’ to base my entry on. Here’s what I came up with:

And I was thrilled to find out yesterday that I was one of the winners of the challenge!!!! So very excited!!!!

More creations this week. I’ve been wanting to also use my Darkroom Door Wildflower stamps again and decided to take a fresh approach this time. I made the following set of cards and scraplings!


They are simple, but I love them!! And speaking of Darkroom Door, Rach is in the middle of a 10 day giveaway of some of her new products – head over to the blog and check them out, they are super fantastic!!!

I’ve also been having a bit of play with Jessica Sprague’s free classes she’s been running for the past couple of weeks. The brushes and frames are from House of 3 and it’s what I’ve used in the ‘Hero Arts Thanks’ image and in this photo. The clipping I did around my Hero Arts card is a Jessica grunge photo mask. Lots of fun!!

I’ve had Shayla home sick from school from Monday afternoon onwards and then Annaliese went out in sympathy on Thursday, both with the flu. Jason has been working away in Emerald for the past 11 days and just got back late last night. Good to have him home – missed him like crazy. My cousin and her fiance arrive today and are staying for 4 days, we’re off to the P!nk concert together on Sunday night!!! Very excited about that!
Have a wonderful weekend and coming week everyone!

 

PS. Don’t forget the word and colour challenges over at Aussie Scrap Source, here is the next one

Due on Tuesday 28th July, email your entries to aussiedt@iinet.net.au for your chance to win a special prize pack!

The Up Series

Is anyone else totally enthralled with this documentary series as much as Jason and I are?  It’s playing on foxtel on Thursday evenings at 9:30pm and is simply the most wonderful concept of reality tv possible.  You can read more about it here and watch a trailer of it here A quick blurb about the program incase you’ve not seen it:

“Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man.”

Starting in 1964 with Seven Up, The UP Series has explored this Jesuit maxim. The original concept was to interview 14 children from diverse backgrounds from all over England, asking them about their lives and their dreams for the future. Every seven years, renowned director Michael Apted, a researcher for Seven Up, has been back to talk to them, examining the progression of their lives.

I’ve had to employ such self control to not read ahead on websites about it and just wait for it to air each week. It’s consuming much of my thoughts the longer the program goes on and I feel such a mothers angst for many of the wonderful human beings on this program and it’s exciting and at times heart wrenching to see their lives unfold each 7 years. Neil has been the hardest one to watch and it’s so sad looking back at him as a 7 year old so happy and full of life with not a care in the world and now to see him at 28 and looking rather defeated. I really hope with each episode to see him happy again.

Anyway, if you’re watching it, I’d love to know your thoughts on it. (one of my favourites is Tony – the aspiring young jockey!)

Camera Memory cards – does anyone know of a place online that sells good priced 2gb Sandisk Compact Flash cards that they can recommend? I’m wanting to get another memory card before our New Zealand trip next month. I’ve found some on ebay, but just would rather go with a recommended site or seller.

Here’s a couple more of the projects I did using Hero Arts:
I just love how this layout turned out!!
And here are a couple of cards:


And lastly, here is a quick card that I put together with a cute stamped Rachelle Anne Miller stamp, it’s my first card using my new Prismacolor pencils and it’s also using the sketch from the latest Caardvarks challenge.

Thanks for dropping by and have a fabulous week!!!

More Hero Arts

Hero Arts are having a big week – keep your eyes on their website tomorrow for all the new changes!

And speaking of Hero Arts, I got to use their wonderful products for my ‘design team picks’ over at the Aussie Scrap Source blog
And here are some of the cards and layouts I created.




These are just a few, you can see more here and also see the wonderful work of Jenn Biederman and Lucy Abrams who shared some of their brilliant Hero Arts work with us.

It was an eventful last week of the school holidays when Annaliese tried some acrobatics in the back yard and broke her arm!

Luckily it’s not a bad break and with minimal displacement, so it didn’t need surgery. However, this now rules her out of any skiing in NZ next month! Looks like Mummy and Annaliese will be making quite a few snowmen!

Oh, and don’t forget this:

Part of our celebrations will be a “Make us a Birthday Card” competition! All you have to do is make and send us a 4th birthday card. We will choose 2 cards we like the best and the creators will receive a prize pack of scrap goodies worth $50 each! One entry per person please.

Just send your card to us at 107 Isabella Street, Wingham NSW 2429 AND if you mention this competition and link us on your blog (let us know you have done it in the comments section so we can visit) we will put you in the draw to win a special blog candy pack worth $30! Open to internationals too!!! Have your cards in by the end of the month!

Links and things!

Lots of  links and things going on in this blog post.  Firstly, here’s your chance to start your Hero Arts collection without spending a cent.
Hero Arts are offering you the chance to win $100 worth of HA products just by signing up! And I get to win $100 worth as well for signing you up! So what you have to do is go over here http://heroarts.com/community/signUp.cfm sign up and then let me know in this post that you’ve done it so I can then let Hero Arts know in this blog post http://heroarts.com/blogs/club/2009/07/06/invite-a-friend-and-win-big/ that I’ve introduced you. In that blog post you can read about some of the big changes Hero Arts are making too.

Pop over there and sign up girls!!!!!

 

Next,

 

Imagine if we gathered together 100 mixed media artists from all over  and asked them to create a small charm or tag in their very own favourite style

Imagine if their message was one of positive affirmation

Imagine if we then took those pieces and used them to create a fabulous one of a kind dress form

Imagine how beautiful and special that would be

Imagine the chance to own that piece?

Imagine no more

Welcome to Creating Hope- Thank you for finding your way here.

Join us as we create along with 100 other artists. Watch it all unfold here on this blog from now until October 31st 2009.

For your chance to own this one of a kind art piece please go to
http://www.everydayhero.com.au/creating_hope and donate $5Au dollars.  All money raised goes directly to the Australian Cancer Research Foundation. Each  $5 donation you make will give you another chance to win.

Check it all out here http://www.tarisota.typepad.com/hope/

 

Sydney:  What was I thinking???  Going to one of the most beautiful cities in the world without my Canon??!!  My sister took her little camera as we only had carry on luggage and when we went to use it we found the batteries were flat (we weren’t very organised were we?!) so we got some tourists to take this photo of us on my sisters iphone and they chopped the top of the Opera House off!LOL  Never mind, it’s still proof we were there!!!  We had the most wonderful time.  We ate, ate and then ate some more!  And we walked just as much as well!  We had afternoon tea at the Lindt Cafe at Darling Harbour!  My Aunt drove me out to West Ryde to buy a pack of Prismacolor Pencils!  Yay!!! (Thanks Ros and all the Hero Arts girls for answering all my questions on Prismacolors!)  Oh and it was worth the drive out to West Ryde as the 72 pack was cheaper out there than what Eckersley’s were selling the 48 pack for!  Anyway, it was lovely to spend some time with my sister alone and it was lovely to not be doing all the daily jobs etc.  A break from routine is always good!!!  And my cousins new baby girl is just divine!!!

 

I had this layout published in SM last month – this is Shayla’s best friend.  She was thrilled to be in the mag

 

And remember this photo?  I’ve made it into a card for the latest challenge on the Hero Arts blog (once you win your $100 worth of HA products you can come and play with the challenges as well!!!)
I’ve used the Screen Shadow background stamps and the All Occasions stamp set for the ‘Congrats’.

Have a great rest of the week everyone!!!!!

Winners, Sydney and facebook!

I have the winners from my ‘pay it forward’ giveaway.  I did the random generator thingie, but can’t work out how to put the results up on my blog.  So they are as follows:

 

Winner #1 – Butterfly cards – is comment 15 – Virginia!!!!

 

Winner #2 – Round scallop cards – is comment 10 – Heather Maria!!!!

 

Winner #3 – Little tree cards – is comment 2 – Dawn T!!!!

 

Congratulations girls and please send me an email at cmmillar@optusnet.com.au with your addresses and I’ll get those cards out to you later in the week. 

 

My sister is home from the Northern Territory on holidays so we’re taking off to Sydney for a few days for a little sister time together!  I’m really looking forward to it.  The kids will go and have a few days at Nanna’s and all will be happy – including Jason who gets to have the house to himself for a few days which he loves too!!!  Not long after we get back from Sydney he’ll be going to work up at Emerald for about a week or 2 (Emerald is about 7 hours drive from here).

 

A few things to share.

I did this layout for the Hero Arts die cut challenge a couple of weeks ago.  Love how it came to together.

And a couple of cards

And lastly, facebook.  Whilst it’s been a great way of catching up with old friends and keeping in contact with interstate relatives, it’s also been a way of finding out sad news.  Last week I found out that a girl that I worked with died just last month from cancer.  She was only a little older than me and has a 12 year old daughter.  I also found out that another work friends husband committed suicide last year. 

I really appreciate the scrapping friends that have wanted to add me as their friend on facebook, however I do like to keep facebook just for family and old friends as this is my way of communicating with them, and I have blogs for keeping up with my scrapping friends.  I’m sure  you will all understand and appreciate that.

 

Have a great week everyone and I’ll see you when I get back from Sydney!!

Queenslander!!!!

Proud to be one of these tonight!!!!

It was a fabulous game – lots of screaming going on in our house, especially when Crocker kept dropping the ball!!!
We made history in the end though!!!

QUEENSLANDER!!!!!!!!!!!

 

Back with the winners of my pay it forward in a couple of days.