Party season has started!

I know, I know, I have been a VERY BAD blogger, but I promise I will try to do better. It seems that with the warmer weather starting, everybody in South Africa has a child that is having a birthday party. I have been very busy making invitations. Trust my friends to wake up the day before the invitations have to go out and then phone me in a panic for help.
It has been so hectic that I literally made the invitations with mom waiting and grabbing them as I finish, so unfortunately there are no photo's of the Dinosaur or Lady Bug invites.
These ones are for a friend's 11 year old daughter. She wanted an Ice Skater and it had to be blue. Problem was I had no stamps with an ice skater. After a long search I found an image on a children's coloring page. She was resized and coloured with my Copics. The snowflakes, her shoes and swirls were glitterified with stickles. All paper is Bazzil. No dp this time. I had to make 10 invitations and here they all are.

I have been very busy as I said. It was Tertia-Lee's 4th birthday last week and we had two parties. One on her actual birthday, just for family and one on the 9th for her little friends.

Here she is, my beautiful girl blowing out her candles. She insisted that since she is 4 now, she needs to cut her own cake. Just look at the concentration and joy on that little face!

Have a great Friday everybody, hope to see you soon!

Mini Hanna & the real Hannah - Who's cuter?

I recieved my Pixie Cottage stamps in the mail last week and just had to colour them immediately. They are so cute. She is called Hannah, just like my granddaughter and I think she is almost as cute as my Hannah!
The first card uses cardstock that was left over from the Convention, I think it is by American Crafts. The dp is Melissa Francis. The ribbon, flowers and butterfly are all from my stash. She was coloured with my Copics.
The next card is very unlike my style. Halloween is really not a very big thing in South Africa, but this little Hannah in her witch costume just cried out to be used. The dp is from my scrapbox. The ribbon is velvet with purple bling - really gorgeous IRL, the flowers are Prima and some very dark purple roses I found at the Chinese store. The butterfly is from my stash.

And now for the REAL Hannah! I could not believe it when I realised it was Monday morning. This weekend just went by in a blur. I had my two granddaughters for a sleepover and we had so much fun, I didn't even notice how the weekend flew past. We spent the whole day on Sunday making clothes for the fairies in my garden.
Step 1: You beed to find exactly the right leaf or flower for your creation. This takes a lot of concentration.

Here she is - My Hannah - told you she is cute!

Step 2: You now have to make sure that the flower or leaf that you chose will fit the fairies. This requires very precise cutting.

This is Tertia-Lee, cutting a flower that became a dress for some lucky fairy.

It takes a lot of concentration to cut a single leaf into a fairy coat.

Step 3: When you are done, you have to leave the clothes in the fairy house in ouma's garden. (If you don't believe there are fairies in my garden, ask any one of my four children. There is a magical place where the fairies live - they have all seen them when they were little!)

Have a great week everybody. Hopefully the week will be a little slower than the weekend.

First day of pre=school - little one doing well, mom's a mess!

Today was my youngest granddaughter's first day at pre-school. We were bracing ourselves for hysteria, because she has never been away from mommy. Mom owns a nursery school and she has always been with her. It started off with her refusing to put on the school uniform, because it wasn't pink! Eventually Ankie convinced her that it was very pretty and that blue was actually a very nice colour. When it came to the shoes, however, she point blankly refused to put them on. They are very ugly according to her... well, actually, they ARE VERY UGLY!!! Can't say I blame the poor child. As you can see, I couldn't bring myself to photograph those shoes, just in case they end up in a scrapbook and come back to haunt the poor thing one day. Apparantly she promptly announced during breakfast that she was a big girl and that she was ready to go to school immediately.

How cute is she? I was waiting at school to take photo's and she even gave me a brave little smile.
Mom, on the other hand, was a blubbering mess. Seeing her one and only one in school uniform just about finished her off. I wonder what she is going to do when Tersie leaves home one day. LOL.

I told mom and dad to leave, before she started crying and said that I would stay with her. As soon as they were around the corner, I told Tersie that I had to go and teach the big girls now. There were a little bit of tears, but it stopped before I even got to the door.

After the school day, she couldn't stop talking about how nice it was and declared that she would definately be going back tomorrow. I think mom is a little bit dissapointed that she wasn't missed a little more, but isn't that how we all feel when our children start growing up?

I can finally share.

A while ago Audrey, from the Scrapping Studio in Boksburg, my LSS, asked me if I would be interested in designing a home studio kit for the store. I was very scared, because I have never done anything like that before, but decided to not let my fears and insecurities get to me and agreed. They gave me everything that would be included in the kit and I could do with it what I wanted. The only rule was that I could not add anything from my own stash.
Sounds exciting and pretty easy, doesn't it? Not on your life! I sat for a whole week after I collected the kit, staring at the papers. I would unpack all the papers and lay them out in front of me while we were watching TV at night. Every now and then I would look at the papers from a different angle. Eventually my DH could not stand it any longer and he asked me if I was planning to look at the papers untill they finally dissapeared.
That is when I decided to stop trying to design the 'perfect' layout and just do what I normally do - PLAY! That is exactly what I did, I played with the stash in front of me and I actually really liked the final product. I think the women who normally buy from Audrey must have liked it too because when I went to pick up my page today, I wanted to buy a kit to give to Tertia-Lee's granny who is visiting from England, but there was not a single one left over.

I used all the papers in the kit, but can not remember by whom they were made. The kit had a large swirly stamp which I used on plain Cardstock to make the background paper. I used household bleach to get the effect that I wanted. The large flower was made with 21 circles. I found the instructions for it in one of my many magazines. The flowers were also included in the kit and are amazing! I think I used about half the flowers in the packet. The kit costs R130 and I think it is incredible value for money. If you would like to get your hands on this months kit, contact Audrey or Sarah at the Scrapping Studio. Have a look on their blog: http://www.scrappingstudio.blogspot.com/ to see the new kits.

Awesome random photo.

Have you ever wondered if people actually stage some of their 'random' photo's? I have, that is untill this photo was taken.

Daniela and Tertia=Lee came over to school to give me something and spent a few minutes in my class. Tertia-Lee is my little 'shadow', everywhere I go, she follows, everything I do , she wants to do - much to the whole family's amusement. The first words from her mouth in the morning, Daniela tells me, is: 'where is my ouma?'. When they come to visit, she doesn't want to leave and cries her little heart out whenever they put her in the car. No better feeling than having a grandchild that loves you that much! I never realised just how much she mimicks me untill this day.

The title of the LO is Mirror image. Every letter is a rubon on a mosaic mirror tile. The journaling reads as follows:

Tertia-Lee and Daniela came to visit me at school one day. I could not understand why the girls would not stop laughing and start to work. Then Daniela got my attention and told me to look next to me. There was Tertia-Lee, a perfect mirror image of me. The body language exactly the same, the little arms on the hips and even her little feet, planted firmly on mother earth! No wonder the girls were laughing.

Cardstock is Bazzil, patterned paper EKSuccess, flowers and rubons by Making Memories and buttons from my stash. The photo is not very good quality, because it was taken by Daniela with her cellphone, but it is such a wonderful memory it just cried out to be scrapped.