Snowman

We had snow yesterday and Seren managed to build a snowman by herself., Jon was getting frustrated as his kept breaking.So this morning Jon and Dadi built a brilliant snowman that used Seren's head as her's had broken overnight.

This page is the 12th of 40 pages I intend to complete before my birthday in February 2014.

Dydd Gwyl Dewi Hapus?

Happy St David's Day?  I didn't manage to get a "good" St Daivd's Day photo this year.  When posing it was silly photo day! So Cute! Seren is in traditional dress, Jon in a Wales top and Tom is in his house colour.

This page is the 11th of 40 pages I intend to complete before my birthday in February 2014.

Just Dance

It had been snowing all day and the house was very cold. Seren, Dadi and Mami played Just Dance 4 to warm up.  It's amazing how quickly you get warm by dancing.

This page is the 10th of 40 pages I intend to complete before my birthday in February 2014.

Belle-Vue

There's a beautiful park hiddden in the centre of Newport called Belle-Vue Park.  This layout has highlighs of our sunny afternoon there last September.  I love this Maggie Holmes paper,  I've bought 2 more sheets of it since I made this layout!





This page is the 9th of 40 pages I intend to complete before my birthday in February 2014.

Holiday Disaster

When we went on holiday to Tenby last summer the car broke down on the way, We has to wait a few hours in a small village where the coffee shop and toilets were closed!





This page is the 8th of 40 pages I intend to complete before my birthday in February 2014.

Blues Brothers

This layout is of the boys in new Alvin and the Chipmonks T-shirts that they loved.  The design on the t-shirts didn't last long as they came off in the first wash in the machine. 



Also, this week I played with my new Amy Tangerine Stitching template to create the clouds and the sun.  Love it!



This page is the 7th of 40 pages I intend to complete before my birthday in February 2014.

Olympic Rings

After doing a review in the New Theatre, Andy took the kids to see the olympic rings in Cardiff.

 

This page is the 6th of 40 pages I intend to complete before my birthday in February 2014.

Godspell Costumes

This is Seren in her costumes for Godspell with CentreStage Cymru.  The show was amazing  a real professional performance even though they were all amateurs.  Can't wait to watch their next show, Whistle Down the Wind in October.

 

This page is number 5 of 40 pages I intend to complete before my birthday in February 2014.

Snowy Cones

Last summer we tried a snowy cone at Bridgend Outlet Designer Village.  The kids loved it and and demolished it in 5 mins!



 This page is number 4 of 40 pages I intend to complete before my birthday in February 2014.

Seren's Summer Show 2012

Seren loves her dancing and musical theatre classes and always works really hard in the classes.   Each year they put on a show and here are a couple of pages showing her outfits and being backstage at the show.  As the pages are about the same event I kept the design similar but since there is about a month between the two pages they will not end up next to each other in the album.

 

 

These are pages 2 and 3 of 40 pages I intend to complete before my birthday in February 2014.

Inspired by Shimelle.com

I love watching Shimelle's videos, they are so inspiring and easy to follow.  This page caught my eye as it mentioned Project Life but in the end I just copied the layout Shimelle had done rather than the Project Life page and love the way it turned out.

Thank you Shimelle for all your inspiration.

This page is the first of 40 pages I intend to complete before my birthday in February 2014.

September Catch-up

Back in September I attempted to do Learn Something New Every Day, once again I didn't get very far but here are a few pages from the early days of September.


MUST! have an early night beofre work, makes the morning routine so much easier!

An early night really helps.  Feel good tonight instead of really shattered

I really need to go to Church.  Want to find one that helps the whole family.

A good Church is hard to find.  Keep Looking.

Where did September go?

 Hi.  Please can you help me find September?  No not the guy from Fringe, but the month of September where I'd planned to complete a few mini pages every day!  Somehow it's a week before December and I've hardly completed any and now I'm to busy thinking about my Christmas journal.  I've found a few of the ones I had completed but not blogged so I will be blogging them this week.

Don't start a job until you know you can finish it! Tidying the kids bedrooms today.

Teaching Synchro is going to be quite a challenge. It's very precise! Not like me!

I love my jobs!  I may have 3 but they all give me different types of excitement and fulfillment.

Creative week

With the kids home there's not much time to be creative but this week I've managed to find quite a few quiet minutes to do a couple of projects.

First up is some ATC's I made at the beginning of the week.  There was no real plan behind them just went with the flow. The left one has a  washi tape background and 2 stamped butterflies and the right one

Next up is a layout using some ribbon and thread from the first Crafty Creatives box.  It's really simple at the moment, need to go back through my paperwork to find out when Seren's first Ballet exam happened as I really can't remember, must be about 4 years ago!

Finally, yesterday i agreed to bake with the kids, and 3 kids mean 3 different requests.  Therefore the order of the day was: make biscuit dough and leave to rest in the fridge for at least an hour, make small cakes and leave to cool!  Once cooled, Jon used half to make cake pops, and then Seren iced her biscuits and Tom iced his cakes. A long but rewarding day in the kitchen. Here's the finished cakes before they were eaten!

Have you managed to be creative this week?

Baby layouts

Since my third child was born I've had little time to scrap. All the layouts I've been making have been current events about them as they are now. I realised in May while doing Shimelle's Cover to Cover course that Tom doesn't have any baby layouts of him. So one morning last month I rectified this and got 2 layouts made in about 2 hours!  Here they are Tom's baby layouts.

Burnham on Sea Mini Book - Amy Tangerine Style

I've loved the Amy Tangerine Day Books and taking inspiration from this post by Louise I decided to try and create my own. Last month we had a weekend away so I pre-made the mini book with the idea of using my PoGo printer to print photos in the caravan.  I had hoped to get almost all of the mini book completed while we were on our holiday, but unfortunately the printer didn't play ball and I only managed the first few pages.  The rest were completed a few weeks after the holiday and I'm really please to say it's now complete.  

Album Re-organisation

Yesterday was the first day of Shimelle's new class Cover to Cover, an online course designed to help you with album organisation.  I need a lot of help with this as I have postbound 4 albums with layout's in them, S has 2 albums and we also have some Creating Memories albums from when I first got started with scrapbooking.  At the moment I have 1 postbound one for Seren, then there was supposed to be one for Jon and one for Tom but the boys have been put in one together and I have 2 with random layouts in them.  

 

After reading yesterday's prompt and seeing this post from Leanne today I have decided to re-organize my albums chronologically.  Here's a pic of all my layouts on the bed, ready to organize.  Wish me luck!

Feel free to let me know how you organize your albums, I could do with your help.  Thank You.

Cutting trees

One last page for Shimelle's challenges as I won't get any more time tonight.  This was the quickest page ever, made with 1 sheet of patterned paper (Amy Tangerine's Work in Progress paper) which I cut of the strip at the bottom of the page which is the green paper hiding the join, then cut a strip approx 4" in and used the yellow side for most of the page and then the coordinating side for the rest of the page.  I added my picture and some Amy TangerineThickers for a title and some journalling.  This description has taken longer to write than the page did to make!  I made it for the Two Patterns challenge.

Document 2012 cover

As stated in this post I had planned to do Project Life this year.  I have my friends and family give me Amazon vouchers for Christmas and my February birthday so I could purchase the page protectors and the Turquoise core pack when they launched in February.  I couldn't wait and spent most of January planning the way it would work for me.

Then the debacle happened. Project Life instantaneously decided to change the way they would sell the product to their own website and delivery methods. They announced the products would go on sale at 4pm on the Wednesday afternoon but they web site immediately crashed and didn't come back up before I had to leave for work.  By the time I returned home, the site had sold out of all available stock for February and March with a product wait for May delivery and this was the case for the products I wanted.  The prices seemed quite reasonable until you went to check out your basket where VAT and shipping was added.

Eventually I decided against doing Project Life and started work on Document 2012, based on Shimelle's Document 2010. I'm using American Crafts divided page protectors from Sarah's Crafts and some 12x12 page protectors I already have.  I'm currently working on January and February as, if I'm honest I spent about another month in crisis trying to decide between them.  So far I'm finding Document 2012 really easy to do as I'm using the Evernote app in my iPod to make notes about what happens each day and the albums function in Picasa to store all then pix I want to use.

So to tie in with Shimelle's colour adventure challenge I created this title page for Document 2012.  Can't wait to show you January and February pages when their complete.

Use your Scraps with Amy Tan Layout

Having spent a fun week with the Andy and the kids doing lots of things - reviewing the show Out of the box and the accompanying workshop, visiting Carmarthen and going to Llansteffan Castle I came home exhausted late Friday night.  So yesterday, when I should have been putting the clothes away I had a couple of hours scrapbooking, here's the first page I made to tie in with Shimelle's online crop challenge of Use your Scraps with Amy Tan.  Here I've used a picture of my Grandmother (Mama) and my mum with the 3 kids and added some of scraps from the pages I made last weekend as well as some scraps that are older with some of my favorite Washi Tape.  I love it!