Snip, Snap, Crop

I know I always seem to say that but it really is true as our family is on the move to Western Australia. Only one more week in our house then another week before we arrive at our new home. Crazy, crazy time. The boys have had their school concert this week and Ethan's class performed an adjusted Wakakirri routine to fit to the size of the stage they had to work on. Ethan did a great job. Mitchell and Keelan's classes worked together on their songs. Keelan out the front with the dancing and actions and Mitchell at the stage side playing the large bongo style drums. The concert was a great success and all the kids tried really hard to please their parents. It's always exciting to see the little Reception students giving it a go even when some of them have only been at school for a few weeks. The school band played before the event and I took the opportunity to take some pics of the boys as I realised that I have never really taken photos of them playing with the band before....

Having not scrapped in ages, I was very happy to go to Michelle's for a Fiskars workshop yesterday. With going back to work for the last few weeks, my time has been challenging keeping up with life in general so the mojo has disappeared amongst my tiredness. It was nice for a change to just follow instructions of how to cut the paper and put the layout together and all I had to do when I got home was find some photos and finish them off. Now, that I could manage to get done. I managed to turn my layouts into travel ones with photos from my trip last year. I can't believe it is almost 12 months ago and I am still scrapping the photos and have heaps yet to do. This is a photo of Ivo's front garden at his home in Heusden. The colours were so lovely to look at and so intense in the red's and yellows. I could not resist on taking a photo. This layout involved lots of stamping and cutting out and I love the effect of it all. The second layout is a photo of me and Mr Obama in...

Well I haven't been around for a few weeks as I have had the opportunity to work a few hours for six weeks and I am out of practice with the idea of working and running a household. My creative head has been resting whilst I get the basics around the house up to date and leave some for "later"....... I'm sharing a layout from a few weeks ago based on a sketch for August by Heather at Home and Scrapped. I might eventually finish scrapping my photos from Amsterdam and then I can move on to the other areas I visited in The Netherlands. As my post says, I am working on getting rid of my Christmas stash although I think I probably have another three years of cards to do before I finish it all off. I have some really old card toppers and papers from magazines that I have to do something with so here are a few more of my cards for this Christmas. I keep trying to alter some of the card toppers as they have words on them that I wouldn't use for my Christmas cards so tha...

I was challenged to do the "Get Challenged Now" at Home and Scrapped this week and was given the task of creating a layout using: masking tape, two big circles and lots of red. This is based around an old sketch of Julie Bonner's from a couple of years ago. I love the way it turned out and decided not to really embellish it with much as I liked the clean style that I ended up with. Does anyone else have that feeling sometimes of never being able to find an embellishment that fits the theme of your layout? Not a lot of scrapbooking happening this week as our Korean exchange student arrived on Tuesday and I have been busy with craft and dog activities too. Keelan has a school assembly in the morning and he will be singing with his class and the school senior choir who have been offered a spot in the Festival of Music in September. He is really excited by it but also nervous so I hope he does well tomorrow as he has a little solo part to perform. Have a good weekend everyone...

Well yesterday afternoon I ran my Christmas card class for July. I kept them simple so the ladies could duplicate them easily enough with their own products at home. They use stamps from Kaisercraft Merry Christmas set and The Stamps of Life Holly4christmas set. There is one small greeting from a Fundamentals Christmas greeting set also. Of course the Fiskars scalloped edge border punch made an appearance as well as the apron lace border punch in the card below. Some heat embossing and dimensional pearls helped to put the finishing touches on this one. The Die Cuts with a View paper range that is still in our stores here made a great background for this card. I love to use a more non-traditional paper range on my Christmas cards to give a break from the red and green and the black and silver really makes the little red and green I have used pop out. I even introduced the ladies to some Smooch which none of them was familiar with. I have the snickerdoodle colour which comes up gold loo...