Ella Spring Training Day 3

Day 3's challenge on the Ella Publishing Spring Training was to do a photo shoot. The first was of your subject in a doorway to your house including posed closeups and whole body shots:




The second exercise was to take candid photographs of your subject doing everyday things. I took some photographs of Jasmin messing around in the kitchen experimenting with food (which she loves to do). Today she made afternoon tea - a combo of sliced apples, strawberries, honey, and strawberry milk powder (surprisingly it tasted really good). I love how she experiments in the kitchen!




In this last shot she is writing her recipe into her school holiday journal.

Ella Spring Training - Day 2

Day 2's exercise for Ella Publishing's Spring Training was to create a layout using single sentence journaling.

I decided to create this layout using a picture that I really love of my two girls and their three boy cousins. They get on so well together.

The layout uses some chipboard lettering which I altered using rub-ons to make them a little more exciting:

Spring Training with Ella

Just registered for Spring Training at Ella Publishing, so looking forward to 12 days of scrapbooking lessons on different topics.

Todays lesson is on signature style. Something which I have actually been working on over the last month, ie. defining my style. Figuring out what it is I like to put on my pages. It certainly has made scrapbooking a lot faster, easier and less stressful. So it's great to get the chance to put this down in words on the first day of the training.

Here is my style statement, and and example of a layout which shows my style.


1. I predominantly use white, nuetral or lightly patterned backgrounds with a fair amount of white space.
2. I love to frame my pages in some way - either a whole page frame matching the elements on my page, or a top/bottom border, or side borders.
3. I use lots of punches on my pages - either border punches or shape punches or both!
4. I normally use 1 - 3 cropped photographs on a single page layout or anywhere up to about 10 cropped photographs on a multi-page layout.
5. I use medium to long titles on most of my pages, using multiple sticker types on a single page, and normally with one word standing out in a larger sticker.
6. I predominantly hand journal on my pages now (its much faster) and I hand draw lines under my journaling. I love to tell a story with my journalling.
7. I normally do asymmetrical layouts with clusters of elements on the page, but I also like to do the occassional grid style layout - normally with lots of white space on the page still.
8. I also love to hand cut elements from patterned papers to add to the page.

Tennis Lessons

Just for something a little different this school holidays we decided to send the girls to tennis camp. Eliza is in Pee Wees (4 - 7 yo's), which only goes for 2 hours, and Jasmin in the half day camp which goes for 4 hours. They so enjoyed themselves (esp. Jas as she got to catch up with a old school mate that no longer goes to her school), that I booked them in for next week as well. To top it off, Eliza won the tennis ball container full of lollies (203 of them to be precise), as she guessed the correct number of lollies in the container! She said she would share them with Jasmin, because "I might puke if I eat them all by myself!"


To my great surprise, Eliza cooked dinner the other night. She is all of five years old, and insisted that she could cook us all dinner (including Nan who was a little skeptical). Well I am glad to report that we are still all alive, and she did in fact cook a great dinner. She has a bit of an obsession about cooking with eggs so she made a fritatta (only had to add the milk - otherwise it would have been more like a giant omelette!). She then chopped up vegetables from the fridge including carrots, zuchinni and capsicum. I thought the pieces she chopped were probably a bit chunky to cook through, but in the end they were just right - very rustic. She also made a tossed salad and some chicken flavoured couscous. All in all it was a great dinner, and I have decided that I will let both Jasmin and Eliza cook once a fortnight each... should be interesting. I don't let them stir on the stove yet or handle hot dishes, but I do let them chop up stuff with a steak knife (I only have to chop the end bits where there is not a lot to hang onto).

Have been beavering away creating layouts, mainly to include in course notes. Here is a sample from the last couple of weeks:











I've just got back from the park with the girls - its suddenly turned chilly, its a little early to start dinner, so I will sit and relax with a glass of wine and watch the girls bounce on the trampoline.

Our Weekend ...

was great. Took the girls to see Rio the movie on Saturday which they really enjoyed. I would really like to go there - the scenery looks amazing (the animated scenery did anyway), they showed some of the poverty in the movie, but it looked like an amazing place anyway. Today we took the girls to the circus - Webbers circus is showing at Belconnen near the lake. They enjoyed this as well. This is the first "traditional" circus they have seen, as opposed to the Cirque de Soliel type circuses.

Had trouble getting Dave and Jas to come to dinner tonight they were too busy doing this:

Dave is busy turning our eldest into a Nerd Girl - she really loves playing Magicka with her Dad at the moment! Tonight they were playing on line with her cousins. I think its funny that she gets the huge LCD to play on (not that Dave's screen is that small!)

Here is a couple of layouts I have done this week, mainly for the purpose of demonstrating something for course notes on journalling:
(All layouts use new Crate Paper product lines)





I have also managed to finish "Beastly" book by Alex Finn (very light reading) which has been turned into a movie. Have also finished Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson a SciFi Cyber Punk book, and I have now started reading "Matter" by Ian M Banks (Sci Fi), and "Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro (author also of Remains of the Day, not sure how I would classify this book as yet have heard it has a twist that verges into Sci Fi).

A beautiful day ...

It was such a nice day today here, that we decided to get out of the house for a while. We drove our beautiful little girls over to Lake Ginninderra, parked the car near one of the play areas, and then walked part way around the lake to buy some lunch - which for three of us consisted of this: (mainly because we couldn't find a sushi place which I must of imagined existed around that side of the lake!)

We had to then walk off the said burgers, and walked back to the play area along the lake's edge got some cool pics such as this -

and this

and this

We found an area near the lake we hadn't seen before - which consisted of exercise equipment - we thought long and hard about doing some exercise but after three chin ups from me, one almost chin-up from Jas, and some general climbing over the equipment by Eliza -

we gave that up as a bad idea and headed off to the real play-ground areas:


I must admit that I love Autumn leaves, and the leaves are all changing into beautiful shades of green, yellow and orange - so the mummy papparazzi got some more pics:



After some climbing around over the rocks near the water, we headed back home. After a quick pirate board game (which Eliza won - I thinks she cheated!), Eliza and I made some yummy cookies (went a bit over board with the pink food colouring in the icing me thinks!):


while Dave and Jas my gaming duo headed off to Dave's study to play Back to the Future on the computer (must really get Jas to watch the movie - I am sure she would love it):

After we feasted on some cookies and milo for afternoon tea there was much jumping on the trampoline before heading off to the bath - we bought a gorgeous smelling grapefruit bubble bath cake from Lush (there's one now in the Canberra Centre - we came out of there smelling like the shop yesterday after Jas tried all the roll-on perfumes on us).

My gorgeous daughter then decided she was going to cook dinner for us all (Yay!!!!), so she headed off to cook Parcels of Fish and some veggies with a little supervision from mum. She manages quite well using just a steak knife to cut up the veggies that need chopping! At eight years old she can cook basic meals (which is more than I can say for the husband - still waiting for him to cook a meal - I'd better not hold my breath waiting). Anyway - Jas manages to make me feel a bit special when she makes me coffee and does little things like helping cook dinner!!!


Okay - so here are some more layouts I've done recently:









I have also managed to finish the EPIC Peter Hamilton Book - Pandora's star.... it's like reading 4 huge books! I have also read Linger the sequel to Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater's and Book 2 of the Wolves of Mercy Falls series. I have started reading today "Beastly" by Alex Flinn, which I really wanted to read prior to the movie being released, as I want to see the movie. It is a nice read, and I have already finished half the book! I am also reading "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson which is a cyberpunk novel (I haven't tried a book like this before so it's quite the novelty). On that note, I'm now heading off to bed to do some more reading.