A productive Monday at home

I had Monday off after the creative weekend away, and it was so nice to have a relaxing day at home with my hubby. After unpacking all the things I took for the weekend and having a big tidy in my craft room, I challenged myself to make some cards and ATCs using only the contents of my scraps box. I ended up with 5 ATCs (2 are the same) and 4 cards, and here they are -

Went away for a creative weekend

This past weekend I went away to Nelson Bay for a creative weekend under the expert tutelage of Joy Bathie. There were 12 of us, and we are all friends through Yahoo groups. We learnt Joy's amazing layering technique to create beautiful collages, and I was pretty happy with how mine turned out.
We were also taught some fun texture techniques such as toilet paper casting with rubber stamps, stamping into texture paste, techniques with gesso, texture paste through stencils, and using cheesecloth or muslin for texture. Below is the piece I made using some of these techniques.
It was such a fabulous weekend, and being in that creative environment with like-minded friends was just fantastic! And I get to do it all again at stamp camp in a few weeks time!

Wedding Memories

My sweet friend Katie recently got engaged to her wonderful man, Morgan, and to try and get some great wedding ideas together, she is having a giveaway on her blog. To enter, I need to blog about our wedding and share something that made our wedding unique, or a creative idea from a wedding we have attended.

Hmmm, our wedding was on 23 November 1996, that's quite a while ago! But the lovely memories are still (mostly!) vivid. Here's a pic of me before I said 'I do', in my parents' garden.

I am very proud of the fact that I made my own dress! My something old was the jewellery I wore, which included my Nana's pearls, my something new was my shoes (and of course the dress!), my something borrowed was my matron of honour's veil, and my something blue was the garter that I also made.

And here we are, man and wife. Everybody say 'Aaaaah'...


One of the things that was memorable and special about our wedding was having a bagpiper pipe us into and out of the chapel. Being Scottish born, the beautiful music really stirred my soul on our special day. We prepared our own vows, which included me promising to keep Andrew well fed. So far I think I am keeping my promise!

And this is us after all the festivities were over, at the beautiful bed and breakfast venue where we spent our first 2 nights of wedded bliss. My goodness look at the hair! Mine was pretty long too, ha ha!! It's definitely not that long anymore.

Happy planning Katie! I know it's going to be one very special and beautiful day!

Happy Birthday, my wonderful Andrew

Today my wonderful hubby is 40 - he was born the day that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Happy birthday my love, I hope you have had a good day.

Happy 21st Katie!

Okay so I am just a little over a week late acknowledging the coming of age of the beautiful Katie, but better late than never I say! We did go to her fabulous party and acknowledge it in style with her on the day (Sat 13th June), I'm just late blogging about it. Happy Birthday Beautiful Katie Bear, we are delighted and so blessed to know you. You are a treasure and we love you.


We hope you have lots of creating time with your pressie!

So blessed!

What an amazing birthday I had! I lost count of all the phonecalls, emails, sms's and Facebook posts wishing me happy birthday. So I did what I was told and had a very happy birthday indeed! The pic above shows most of the cards I have received - there are another 6 missing from the pic that I have since received. The beautiful flowers in the top left of the pic were from my brother, Rob, and his lovely wife, Mel who live in London - they had them delivered to me at work, which was so cool! I had awesome takeaway pizzas from Rialtos in Epping with some of my colleagues for lunch, and then Andrew took me to our favourite Thai restaurant (Thein Thai) in Ettalong for dinner. I felt very spoiled and blessed and very, very loved. Thank you to everyone who helped make my birthday so special.

Anticipation!

This is the pile of 2 parcels and 27 cards waiting to be opened by me tomorrow morning - and that's just the ones that arrived in the mail! Ah, the joys of belonging to online stamping groups, makes me feel very spoilt indeed. Tomorrow I will be 37 years young and I LOVE having birthdays, not because I like getting older, but because it's my special day!! I'd tell people on the train on the way to work if I thought they'd care. Hmmm, maybe I need to find or make a 'Birthday Girl' badge. I've been reminding my poor colleagues for weeks - not 'cos I am expecting presents (but hey, won't say no if they are on offer!), but I just get so excited about it.

I don't do delayed gratification very well at all, except for birthday time. I have no trouble at all looking at that pile of beautiful mail waiting to be opened and knowing that I simply can't open it till the big day. When my siblings and I were growing up, Mum would always keep any cards and pressies that arrived in the mail hidden until our actual birthdays, and it's a special tradition I have been more than happy to keep.

Happy Birthday to me!