Laughter is the best medicine

Hi all,

Well, I for one, definitely agree with the saying that laughter is the best medicine.
I have been absent from this little old blog quite a bit recently, because life is at that crucial stage for me where it throws a lot at you and asks you to cope. School has become very busy. I have been working like crazy to make sense of the madly insane and difficult entry exam I have to do for my Oxford application (which, when you are reading this, I will have just completed this morning!!) When life is this hectic, time to yourself and time spent with others is so valuable, and you really realise that laughter is the best medicine, it changes your entire mood for the better, for at least a short time :)

Anyway, you may ask why I am talking about laughter being the best medicine?

Well, this week, that is the challenge theme over at TPV.

Here is my project for this challenge

This weeks challenge at TPV is sponsored by The Paper Bakery.

They are going to give the lucky random winner $20 which can either be used off any of their single kits or off the first month's subscription price. If you haven't seen their gorgeous kits then do head over to their website to check them out. To win that great prize, create a paper project using this weeks theme and then link it up to the TPV blog here. I'm looking forward to seeing all of your entries this week.

For me, I knew exactly what photos I would scrapbook for this challenge, and I knew I'd need a double spread to fit them on. I took these photos a few months ago for one of CJ's brilliant photography workshops, and I hadn't yet had chance to scrapbook them. Do you remember me making a fuss about finding the moustache hambly screen print at Ally Pally? Well that's because I knew exactly where I wanted to use it and had been waiting to find it before scrapping these photos.

It took me a long time to make this LO, but I am pleased with the finished product, I think I managed to reflect the fun of the photoshoot in the LO which is what I wanted to do. Here are some close ups of the details

I was inspired for this LO after seeing Miss Smith's challenges for last month. One of her challenges was to scraplift a LO she loved, and this got me thinking. When I knew I wanted to create a double LO for these photos, I knew exactly what page I would scraplift.

This is the work of Leeann Pearce, an amazing Australian Scrapper who has a truly inspirational style. I had seen this LO of hers on her blog and in a magazine, and LOVED it. I'm sure you can see the inspiration of her double LO on mine, without me saying where it has influenced me :)
(Leeann, I hope you don't mind me scraplifting one of your LO's, please let me know if you do)

Thanks for looking, I shall be back another day to update you with everything, once this entry exam is done and I can spare a little time.

I thought I would just leave you with a close up of some of the photos in this LO, hopefully they'll make you chuckle and feel better. They were so fun to take, we had such a great laugh.

 ...and a final photo, unfortunately I didn't fit this one into the LO

Bye for now, and I look forward to seeing your TPV entries.

Hannah

Blog award and holiday pics :)

Hi, I don't have anything crafty to show you today I'm afraid, but I thought I'd pop by to blog a lovely blog award and some holiday pictures.

A few weeks ago, actually, just over a month ago (sorry Becky), I received a blog award from the lovely Becky Brombley at the Craft Jar. She has a lovely little blog, and creates a gorgeous mixture of things, from cakes to cards and many things in between, I only wish I had more time to go over there and comment a lot more often than I do. So, please do pop over and see her and her lovely work.

Now, as a recipient of this award, I need to tell you 7 things about myself. Arghhh..... right ok then, here goes,

1. My oldest proper memory (I think!!) is visiting my Brother in hospital when I was 4 and buying him a packet of the magic stars chocolate sweets from the hospital shop. I think it's an accurate memory, although no-one can definitely say that it is accurate, but I like to think it is.
2. Marmite. You either love it or you hate it. My opinion, I HATE IT!! :)
3. I also don't like rice pudding (which is odd as I used to eat it a lot when I was younger) or baked beans (which isn't helpful when you are trying to do a really simple meal when camping).
4. I love notebooks and pens, when I was younger (well until relatively recently actually) I would buy a notebook and pen from anywhere I went with a gift shop. I wasn't interested in toys, take me to a zoo or somewhere and I'd come away from the gift shop with a pen and notebook, and sit scribbling.
5. I hate being told off or shouted at. Luckily it doesn't happen often, but when it does I hate it.
6. I want to travel, and I hope I will in the future. There are so many places I'd like to visit, in the UK as well as abroad. When I get the opportunity to travel, I know I will, I just keep thinking of all of the photos, scrapbook pages and memories, oh it'd be great :)
7. I don't have a lucky number, colour, object, anything, and I'm not particularly superstitious. I count magpies if I see them and work out their meaning from the rhyme, but then just turn around and forget about it, I don't believe in it all.

Wow, so there are my 7 things. Quite random, I've just sat here trying to think of vaguely interesting things and that's what has come up, really very random, but hey ho :)

Now to pass it on to 7 people. There are so many blogs I follow, and I really do love scooting around everyones blogs as they're all so interesting and unique. One thing I would really love is more time, so I could actually get around and comment on people's work, I've really struggled recently, you're all just producing too much great work for me to keep up!! :D :D So, here's my 7, I love looking at these peoples inspirational work.

1. Miss Smith of Curiouser and Curiouser.
2. Lisa of Artfull Scrapbooking.
3. Anne of hobby d'un jour.
4. Georgia of Starting to Scrap
5. Tessa of Perfectly Precocious
6. Anthea of Our Life Story
7. Leah of A Musing to Create

Take a look over at their work for yourself, such amazing talent from them all :) Thanks again Becky, it meant a lot to know you enjoy reading my little old blog :)


So, now for some pics of our weekend break camping in Norfolk.

It was the first time we had used our new tent, and we really appreciated the large living area and the fact we could stand up, even James could stand up in it!!

Cooking - It was such good fun cooking for ourselves, it was the first time we have really cooked whilst camping

Some lovely group shots from the hol, we all thoroughly enjoyed it and I think it shows in these pics (maybe except some where James just wouldn't smile nicely :D

James especially enjoyed playing on the beach, as you can see, we all had our feet buried at some point :)

I love this photo mum took, that jumping pillow was such great fun and it was great for posing action shots :)

These are a selection of the many photos I took of the beautiful sunsets. It was World Photography day on Friday, so I had to get the camera out and snap away. All of these were taken at varying times on Friday evening :) It was brilliant to finally get a chance to try the slow shutter speed effect on water :) I was quite pleased with the result.

One of the best bits was being allowed to have camp fires on the camp site.We had a camp fire on 2 of the 3 nights and it was such good fun, although I can still smell it in my hair!! :)

I hope you liked the pics, and I'm so sorry it's been such a great big long post. Well done if you got this far :D

Bye for now,

Travelling with TPV

This week TPV wants you to travel with us.

My LO is all about my love of steam trains, which has developed over the years as I have grown up surrounded by them. My grandad really loves them, so we have had many trips to preserved railways to see them, and regularly go to see them travel on the mainline railway tracks on special journeys.

What can you create with a travel theme? Maybe a bon voyage card, or a scrapbook page about a special journey?
Come over and join in with this challenge, look what one lucky participant will win....

Look at that lovely vintage collection from The Paper Trail, I just love the colours in it :)

So, I'll see you over there :)

Now for some close-ups,

I am quite pleased with this LO, I loved putting all of the layers and elements together, and I liked the colour scheme. :) I hope you like it too.

I am currently sat here absolutely devastated as our laptop will not turn on this morning. We have photos on there that haven't been backed up or moved onto the home computer!! Mum has gone to a local shop to see what they can do, so I'm just waiting to hear, hopefully it'll be good news. All I want is for it to turn on one last time so I can copy all photos across :( Arghhhh :( Sob sob :(

Bye for now, :)

P.S. I am back from our weekend away camping. We had an amazing time, possibly the best camping trip I've ever had. We all really enjoyed it. I took lots of photos which I shall share with you in a couple of days, but if you can't wait till then, pop over to my mum's blog where she has put some of our holiday pics :) I also have a blog award from a lovely crafter to blog about and give out, so I shall be back at some point soon to do that too:)

Also, don't forget the 7th Sept, remember that date, TPV's blog anniversary starts that day, I have started my projects for it and it's going to be a blast, so make sure you're there :)

Happy Mother's Day

To all of the Mothers that are reading this, I hope you've had a great day :)

I'll start with a layout I think this evening (which is a lovely evening here may I add, Mum and Dad are just outside finishing off from their productive day gardening and it's still a lovely temperature outside).
For this LO I have used the Sketchy Thursdays sketch and Emilie's colour challenge #4. I seem to be doing only LO based on sketches at the mo, since Mum's been part of blog land we've both stumbled across loads of lovely challenges. I might have to take a break from sketches soon, as I'm worried that I wont be able to scrap without a sketch soon!!
Anyway, here is my LO.

I'm really pleased with it. I loved the colour combination Emilie gave us but was stuck as to which photos to use with it. I'm glad I settled with these, the colours suit a grungy masculine page. I've taken a lot of inspiration for this page from this blog. I absolutely love her work and realised that the reason I loved her most recent page was the black mat behind each piece of paper, so that's what I've attempted here and I think it's worked well :)
Here's a few close ups.

Here's the sketch and colour scheme I've used.

I hope you like it.

Now, onto Mother's day.

I had great fun making Mum's card earlier this week, I would've posted it earlier but I never know when she's peeking on here. I was really pleased with the card, and she loved it which is always the most important thing.

I stippled around two hearts with Tim Holtz distress inks (I love those inks :D), then tied some bakers twine around the card and added the sentiment and button. The templates/stencils I had used for the hearts looked too good to throw away once I'd finished this card, so I used them on another. I made this card into an Anniversary card as I don't send many valentine cards so thought it'd be more use as an Anniversary card.

At my Rangers group, we made marzipan fruits for Mothers day and decorated a glass bowl for them to go in. I ran the Marzipan fruits evening, as even though I haven't tried marzipan fruits before I've worked with marzipan. The evening went really well and I was very pleased with my results.

Even though the hour and a bit we spent making them wasn't enough to make many, those that I did make I was really pleased with. they looked great in their little bowl.

Here is a compilation of photos of the individual fruits. I was pleased with the clementine and apple the most :)

Hope you all have a great evening and thanks for popping by. It's our last week at school this week and then we are off for 2 and a bit weeks for Easter, which will be lovely :)

Bye for now, Hannah :)

Mum

It's been lovely being at home today, working hard but in my own environment and spending the day with mum. We both went out for a dog walk this afternoon before James came in, unfortunately the sun went in as soon as we got out on the walk, but it was still a lovely walk. We took the camera and I actually had the camera in my hands for the entire walk!! There was a reason though, Mum has started her own blog and wanted a nice photo of her to put as her profile image. I love taking portrait shots so really enjoyed taking them.

Mum really loves both of these and I feel very proud to have taken them as she normally doesn't like photos of herself. I'm so happy with how they've come out.

Mum and Rolo in our lovely local woods, it really is starting to feel a bit warmer and almost like spring :)

Mum has wanted to start her blog for a long while and has finally decided too. Please head over and take a look. (click on her blog header to take you there)

P.S. I hope you like the blog background and header I designed for her :D

Bye for now, I hope you've had a great Valentine's day
Hannah

Lots to catch up on!!

Wow, it's been quite a while since my last post and I have a lot to write about, so be prepared for quite a long post. :)

I'll start with the things you'll be most interested in, crafting.
I came second in the photography self portrait vote!! I was very pleased with that, it meant a lot and was a brilliant photography confidence boost. Here is the lovely prize that arrived through the door a couple of days ago.

I've seen this in Paperchase a couple of times and thought it was so cute, so it was lovely to receive it as a surprise in the post.

So today I have scrapbooked my self portrait, and I really love the final page.

Here are a couple of close ups

It's been great to scrapbook again, it's been quite a while since I've had time to scrapbook. It's also the first page I've ever done with a Christmas theme to it, thanks to my 12 days of Christmas course.

I've been being quite crafty recently,I've made all of my Christmas cards and thanks to discovering Helen's blog, I've been inspired to make all of my friends Christmas presents.

Here is the gift for the girls, a make-up emergency kit.

And for some of my friends that aren't into make-up

Now for the boys, something to target their sweet tooth, a jar of sweets (it was great fun doing these, I was very proud of the result).

This is the design I had for this year's Christmas cards, an idea based around some felt tree decorations I found in Paperchase which made the perfect topper.

This Christmas I have been inspired to make decorations for around the home after looking at some amazing Christmas magazines. This weekend Mum and I have been decorating the house and seeing which decorations we could make that would look good where. So far, this is the garland we have made to go across our fire.

We have another in the production line for another room. I'm really having a handmade Christmas this year!!! :D

The 12 days of Christmas course has finished now, we have been left to go it alone over Christmas and see what we come up with.
Here is my work from the last few days of the course.

 I've never tried to photograph candles before, but this was great fun and I love the result.

This task was to differ the focus between the foreground and background, and I like these two comparison shots.

These photos were taken to capture the reflection in the mirror, something I would never have thought of doing without the course.

And these were such fun to do, light trail photos, I shall definitely be trying these again.

I really enjoyed the course, it was brilliant and I'm very pleased I managed to get a place. I would advise that if CJ runs the course again next year you join it, it was brill. :)

So, onto family stuff and home life.

Like many around the country, we have finally had our share of snow. We were out for a dog walk yesterday when it began to come down and we luckily got home before the snow became thick on the roads. Rolo absolutely loves the snow, and it's deep enough so he has to jump everywhere. Here's a quick photo Mum took of him earlier after his walk.

Aside from the snow, two weekends ago we had a very special weekend. It was my Grannies 80th birthday, which is special in itself, but what made it even better was that we had a massive family gathering. Over mine and James' lifetime, we have only been as a whole family once before, 5 years ago at my Aunt and Uncle's wedding. One of my Aunt''s and Uncle's live in Australia with two of our cousin's, so as you can imagine it is quite rare that we all get together. So my grannies 80th was an amazing weekend, all 7 of us cousins together for the second time in our lives. As you can imagine, it was an occasion well worth capturing on camera, and here are some of my favourite photos from the weekend.

We had a big family meal, with extended family and Grannie's close friends at this amazing manor house (I mean AMAZING, a wedding photographer's dream!!). This staircase was so grand, and as the day fell very conveniently with a group shot for my 12 days of Christmas course, I had to use it in our group shot. I love this photo, it's sooo special, not only because it's all 7 of us cousins, but because everyone, including James, is actually looking at the camera!!!

One of my cousins is a keen photographer and has a lovely DSLR camera, so I cannot wait to see how his photo's turned out.

A special event called for a special outfit, and it was great to get my Prom dress back out of the wardrobe, and especially nice to have the chance to pose for the camera in such a grand location!!! :D

And finally, a photo which was just the icing on the cake for a fab weekend, a glorious photo of me and James (doesn't he look all grown up and smart!)  :)

Sorry that's been such a busy post with thousands of photo's, now I'm on my Christmas hols I should be able to find time to blog, although I have a lot of revision to do ready for AS modules in January!!

Hopefully the snow wont cause too many problems this week for us, and please al of you be safe in the snow. If you are reading this Louise or Richard, I hope your journey across the country isn't too hectic and you make it to Shrewsbury for Christmas day, xx.

Bye for now,

Hannah :)