A little bit of sugar

Sometimes I like to make this sort of layout. A bit of sugar, not enough protein. I liked the photo, but didn't have much to say about it.

Carrie's artwork

I've always admired Caroline's beautiful artwork, so when she offered to pay me for a little canvas print I did, I asked for a card or a small artwork from her.

Very bold indeed, as anything of hers is worth about 10 times what is did! Last week I received this absolutely gorgeous canvas with her trade mark cage, which take place of pride in my craft room.




As will her card, which I am going to frame.



Many thanks, Carrie!

Taurus

"Unless you take your creative impulse seriously, nobody else will. You simply have to put your money where your mouth is. "

July horoscope for Taurus in "Marie Claire". Saw it here.

Should make a poster with it and stick it on my craft room.

Which reminds me, got an absolutely gorgeous 3D-painting from Carrie. Will take a photo and post it.

Journaling in scrapbook pages

I enjoy looking at challenge blogs - there are so many of them and so many talented people around. But I hardly ever do the challenges. I always mean to, but I never do.

Lately I felt the need to have more "meat" in my layouts. Instead of concentrating in pretty photos or papers, go for the content. I had the Journaler's Junction blog in my Google Reader for a while, but finally I made my first layout based on last week's challenge. It helped that I had 20 themes to choose from!

I have been meaning to write about the fact that I speak Portuguese with my children for a while, but since I didn't have a recent photo with me and the kids which I liked enough to scrap, I always postponed it. Challenge #1 was just the kick I needed. It ain't pretty enough to be one of my favs, but it is done.





Should have run the spell checker but I don't have Word in my laptop - excuse any errors your find.

"I write {most of} my scrapbook pages in English, I blog in English, I write notes, emails and shopping lists in English. In a daily basis I speak English. English is embedded in my life so much that now, I even dream in English. But just so that you know, my main language and most importantly the language I speak to my children is Portuguese. And they speak back to me in Portuguese. Well, sort of, sometimes they speak a kind of Portunglish, and you have to be able to understand both English and Portuguese to know what they mean.
I am proud of them. They are so much better that I was. Because technically my first language is Japanese but as soon as I started learning Portuguese at the age of 3, I slowly forgot Japanese. And Lucy, aged 6, is an fluent Portuguese speaker and able to communicate with my parents and my brother. And so is Luke, aged 3.
I am so lucky that Roger also took the time and effort to learn Portuguese.
So we are a bilingual family.I speak to my children in Portuguese. I speak to my husband in English. And the children - regretably - speak to each other in English.
Often I recount the conversations I had with the children in translated to English, because I figured that they might not be able to read Portuguese when they grow up.
But we speak in Portuguese.
Just so that you know.
Portuguese."

Perfection doesn't have to be perfect

I just managed to squeeze myself into Cheryl Johnson's People Imagery online photo class. I wasn't going to do it - usual excuses, no time, nobody will pose of me, etc, etc - but by chance, Lainey was talking about it during her class&crop and that was the push I needed. I enrolled myself a day after the class started.

The first class was the "Money shot", we had to several photos of someone, looking at the camera, catchlights, different facial expressions. I got my daughter to pose for me.


I did try to take some of my son too, who is much less cooperative, when we were stuck in the car, waiting for my daughter's drama class to finish. Later, when I was setting a chair in the hall to take photos of DD, he came along and I managed to get him to pose for me too. The photo came out dark and focus went to his his shirt instead of his eyes, but I absolutely love it, because I got this sweet smile of his which makes my heart melt. So it is a flawed, yet perfect photo.



This one I made in Lainey's crop. It is my daughter on the first day back to school. First class. Her class. And so is she.

Aleida

Aleida Franklin, one of the heart&souls of the Studio Calico forum and DT member of Scrapping the Music, died yesterday in a car accident.
She was a talented scrapper, a funny and caring person but more importantly a loving wife and mother of two.
RIP, Aleida

Lainey's crop and Kiki's flowers

I had a great time at Lainey's class & crop in Donnycarney today. Got to see again lots of nice people and met Lynn face to face for the first time.

Also surprised myself by almost finishing two layouts while I was there. There is still the journaling of one to be finished - I'll post them during the week.

Sometime ago, I send some prima flowers to Kiki. And she, with her usual generosity, sent me about 20 for each of the flowers I sent her. There were a number of orange ones, and I decided that I was going to make a monochromatic layout. It is a change from my usually style (photo at an angle, shock!) but I am happy with the result.

Some for my boy's scrapbook

I've done more scrapbook pages of my daughter's than of my son, as she is much more willing to pose for the camera and of course there's much more yummy papers for girls than boys. But I am determined to get the count even so here's some for my boy.

On the first two I use the super cute double sided Cherry Arte paper which I got from Craft Supplies. I still have another sheet from the same collection and I think I've already have a project for it.

He doesn't even know how to play the Nintendo but is mad about it! Scary....



This is him again, now playing with is sister's stamps... Sigh...


She throws a bucketfull of cold water in his head, he thinks it is fun!

Labels or how long it takes to complete a simple project

When I was about to cover my daughter's school books, I thought it would be nice to make personalised tags. I'd get her to write her name, scan it and make some labels. Easy, yes? Well, you tell me:

a. DD wrote her name & class and drew some pictures.
b. I scanned the drawings.
c. DH had some Avery sticker labels sheets, so I resized the scanned images to fit it.
d. Downloaded sitcker label template in Word from the Avery site.
e. Also added background to make a bit more colourful.
{so far so good, then things started to go wrong }
f. Printed a test page, the background was too dark, making it difficult read. Fixed it
g. Now the handwriting looked too thin, difficult to read again. Fixed it.
h. Moved to DH's computer, because I don't have Word in my laptop
i. Printed the labels in the sticker sheet. Template didn't match labels - my prints went over the edges of each individual sticker - ARGHHHH!!!!!
j. Tried to fix the Word template. No luck.
k. Remembered that I had a Xyron sticker maker, so decided to print labels in plain paper, cut it out and make stickers myself.
l. When I tried to stick the label on the books, I realised that while they looked OK in the plain notebooks, the small labels "disappeared" against colourful cover of the books.
m. Resized the labels and printed them, cut them out and made stickers out of them.

Give me a complicated project any time! :-)

BTW, after I stuck the stickers and covered the books, I realised that I forgot to erase the scribbled over bit between the "maths".



{note: I erased her surname in the labels }