Thinking ahead

It's never too soon to get organised I always think. So when I saw these love coupon freebies at House of 3 I just couldn't resist. Fancy some for yourself? Go here :) It is only a month away after all...

Ninety Five Years Old!!

Today is my Grandad's 95th Brithday. He lives in St Albans and we went up there armed with a cake to sing Happy Birthday. I think that he enjoyed the cake! Happy Birthday Grandad :) Can feel a LO coming on...!

Snow, snow, snow!

Don't you just love this photo? I'm sure by now you all have a great collection of snow photos to use on LOs. Where do you start?!

At Indigo Mill we're having a think about where scrapping is going. There's a feeling that the true meaning of scrapbooking has gotten lost under all the celebrity and bling. Steph has some great ideas for 2010. I like to think that despite my role on DTs and publication in magazines, I still remember why I am scrapping these photos and that is to capture my memories and thoughts about certain occassions that you can't do with a photo album alone especially in the digital age when hardly any photos are actually printed out. I had a digital photo frame for Christmas and whilst I love it, there's no scribbling a couple of notes on the back of photos for prosperity anymore, if you know what I mean. Anyway, I just wanted to give you a heads up that there are some great things coming your way so watch this space.

New Year's Resolutions

One of my resolutions this year was to try and do the UKS weekly challenge more frequently. With that in mind I looked at this week's challenge last week. The challenge was to use Shimelle's sketch, celebration photos and ribbons.

On 15th January we'll be posting our CJs off on the start of the 'Up for Anything' CJ that I'm hosting on UKS. I'm doing a catch up/third year of Connor's journal and sending photos around with it. So my first entry in to that is based on this week's challenge. I've scrapped 'October', the month of Connor's Birthday and although it's only 8x8 I managed to get the sketch to work I think :)

Materials:
Jenni Bowlin Birthday bingo card
Ribbon from Hobbycraft
Doodlebug glitter alphas
Fontwerks label orange

Snow Days

We were well and truly snowed in in Berkshire last week. I took the opportunity on Wednesday, when my son didn't fancy going to play in the snow as it was still falling, to tidy my scrap room and to do a LO. This brought me to the conclusion that I have way too much stash, as it usually does :)

So I thought I'd do twelve competitions and give away some of my stash. On the second Friday of each month I will choose my favourite entry and send you the kit with some papers, embellishments and maybe even some alphabets in, with a monthly type theme. The next day I will publish the challenge for the new month.

The competition this month is a scraplift one. I would like you use this 'Snow Angel' layout as your basis and add a link to the comments section once you're done. Don't forget that you have until midnight (GMT) on February 12th to add your link before I choose my favourite entry. I hope that you have fun with it. I did!

Materials:
Paper Co. cardstock
Adorn it 'Cold weather collection- falling snow'
American Crafts 'Chit chat' white and 'Black tie' white
Papermania vellum from blue pack
October Afternoon lebel stickers 'farm fresh' and 'Road map' and cardstock stickers 'weathervane'
Bobble ribbon from Ifa
Snowflake buttons from stash (papermania I think)
Making Memories coloured staples
Heidi Swapp bling circles icee

And here's what I could be sending you :) Thanks for playing along x

My Turkey Lurkey Layout

At Leigh's on Monday night I successfully completed two LOs. I'm really pleased with both of them but one can't be revealed just yet. I really love this LO entitled 'My turkey lurkey layout' though :) The multiphoto LO shows the story and I've journalled around the outside to tell the story too. We decided that, since we were getting all our veg from our parents' allotment/gardens, we would order a turkey from the farm shop. So on 1st December there we were discussing turkeys with the butcher. I'm not quite sure how but we ended up with an order for a 5kg turkey that would feed 6-8 people, when it was just going to be the two of us! On Christmas Eve we duly rocked up to the farm shop to collect our turkey and found the butcher in a turkey hat (PHOTO OP-ARAMA)!!! Tony was very pleased with the whole experience and it's a lovely photo of him and the turkey in the centre of the page. On Christmas day I stuffed the turkey a la Jamie Oliver (and by that I mean with clementines and rosemary rather than actually mincin Jamie Oliver and putting him inside!!) and cooked him for the required amount of time. As I took the turkey out of the oven Tony got out the Jamie Oliver guide to carving a turkey and by the time we sat down we had one yummy, well carved turkey I can tell you. It was quite possibly the best bit of turkey I've ever tasted. In fact, there's no competition- it definitely was. And I made a thank you card for the farm shop too. The supplies for these are mostly thanks to Leigh it has to be said. Oh, and the LO is a scraplift of a LO I saw on the sassafras blog by the very talented Megan Klauer. Great inspiration!

Materials:
Prima alphas green
White clay alphas
American Crafts Thickers 'Daiquiri' vinyl green
Doodlebug hopscoth ladybug
Bazill cardstock
Sassafras brads 'b is for bug'
Kaiser scrapbook rub on stiching
Basic Grey fibers 'Colour me silly'
Adorn it 'Christmas chatter words' (pp)
Paper adventures 'Snow dotty red' (pp)
fontwerks red label
Junkitz xmas labelz

52 walks with my camera 1/52

There have been some lovely things to take photos of over the last few weeks with the snow. I really enjoy taking photos of the outdoors so the '52 walks with my camera' challenge really takes my fancy. My plan is to upload a photo on Friday every week. So here's Week 1 of 52. I decided to stay local to start off with and that was just as well seeing as how much it snowed on Tuesday night. I knew that the morning would be magical though and I couldn't wait to get wrapped up, put Connor on the sledge and plod around to my hearts content, snap, snapping away. Here is my favourite photo of the day.

And the short list :)