Layout about last week - 7-13 May

This layout is a paper layout using Stampin' Up! retired paper.  The chevrons are some photos I had printed off a couple of weeks ago to use in a layout but they were the wrong size to use, so I just saved them & punched the colourful leaves with the Stampin' Up! chevron punch.

I have decided that the two elements that I want to retain throughout this year's album will be the chevrons down in the right hand corner and the date label in the top right corner.

The journalling is mostly from blog posts this week, except for the 8 May journalling that is an extract from The Press about the decommisioning flights of the Iriquois helicopters that happened.

7 May journalling can be found here

8 May journalling is:

The distinctive sound of the Iroquois helicopter rang out over Christchurch for the last time on Thursday. 

Veterans of Vietnam and other missions where the iconic aircraft operated were invited to take a final flight on three of the choppers at Wigram, the RNZAF's first operational base, before the remaining 14 aircraft in the fleet are decommissioned on July 1.

The choppers were in service for 49 years.

As mentioned above that is courtesy of The Press.

I actually saw those helicopters on Friday 8 May so Thursday wasn't the last time the distinctive noise was heard, but I wanted to document the fact that were gettting decommissioned, because as I grew up I remember hearing those helicopters a lot when they were based at Wigram.

12 May journalling can be found here. 

There is no journalling for the other photo, the one of the TV.  On Saturday 9 May we bought a new tv.  There is a bit of a story to it, now I think about it so maybe I will actually do a layout on this new tv to be the facing page to this page.

FMS Photo a Day - Day 16 - Clean

Today's prompt was clean.  I love the look of the eucalptys trees when they have lost their bark.  They no longer look a stragly, moulty mess.  Underneath that old bark is beautiful clean, smooth bark, that looks so white from a distance.

Further to yesterday's photo of the stuffed toy in the swing, that toy still hasn't been claimed.  Today it has been moved from the swing to up a tree.  It's still in the same park, I wonder how long it will stay there.

FMS Photo a day - Day 15 - I Found..

Yesterday I went for a walk through our neighbourhood park to go to the bakery.  On the way through the park I found a stuffed toy left on the swing.  There was nobody else around so it must have been left behind by some child.  I only hope they come back and can claim it.

FMS Photo a day - Day 12 - Eyes

The photo prompt for Tuesday 12 May was eyes.

I am very lucky that when I am doing the dishes at my sink I have a flowering cherry tree out the window that I can look at.  It looks wonderful in spring, and now it is autumn the wax-eyes have come to get some insects off it.

FMS Photo a day - 7 May

The prompt for 7 May was key.

This key was always an interesting key to me because it was the key that unlocked my mother's jewellery box.  I loved looking through that box as a child but we didn't get to do that very often.  I now have the jewellery box but I find the actual tag attached to the key of more interest now.  It brings up questions about whether that box always was my mother's or did it get handed down to her, or given to her as a present?  The even more interesting is that the tag attached to it says it was my father's tag to get into the races.

While I was growing up we never went to the races and my father hated having anything to do with horses or "horsey people."  The fact that this tag was for him makes me wonder what happened after 1972.  I was born in 1969, my sister in 1972, was there no longer time for mum and him to go to the races?  When he was a member did he go to the races very often?  This is a part of my parents' life that I know nothing about. It is very easy to forget that they might have lived a different kind of life before kids, but why wouldn't have they, Scott & I certainly had a different lifestyle before we had children.

Now mum has died and dad has married again, he and his wife are regular horse racing attendees.  Is my father finally able to reclaim part of a life that my sister and I inadvertantly put a stop to? 

None of this I even thought about until May 7 when I was asked to take a photo of a key.

Scrapping Last Week - 30 April - 6 May

This layout is a digital one because there is a long panaroma photo on it.  It was nice getting to make a digital layout and trying to get used to using my new Photoshop Elements 13.  Previously I was using Photoshop Elements 8 and the difference is very noticeable.  So not only have I not used PSE for a few years and I'm rusty but this new version is different too.  I've decided I will have to spend some time creating more digital layouts to get used to PSE again.

I am pleased that I found a tutorial on how to round the photo corners and I figured out how to use some of the elements that were part of My Digital Studio (Stampin' Up!'s software to do digital work) in PSE.  The date label came in a MDS software and had coloured ends so I worked out how to remove the colours and make it transparent.  The chevrons was originally just one chevron & it was coloured.  I was very pleased to work out how to remove the colour, make it transparent & then create a group of 5 of them to form an element that I could then clip my background paper too.

The journalling this week is nearly all Facebook posts.

April 30 at 8:44am · Christchurch 
Yikes it's windy out there. Driving the boys to school this morning and there was a loud bang on the windscreen, apparently it was an acorn hitting it.

April 30 at 9:15am · Christchurch
James Criglington had his first badminton practice yesterday. Apparently it went well & he was told he's not too bad at badminton for a first timer. He's in the junior Christ's College team playing at number 4. He's really happy about it and I think he is enjoying doing a new sport that he has never done before. His first match will be next Wednesday so it will be interesting to hear what he thinks of it after having played a serious match.

April 30 at 9:20am · Christchurch
Brent Criglington is competing in the 48Hours film festival this weekend. He organised the wardrobe yesterday and will be involved in the filming on Saturday.

May 1 at 11am - Christchurch
Pedicure at Astonish Hair & Beauty
 

May 2 - Christchurch
We are back to having the laundry hanging inside so it can dry out overnight.  It’s starting to get dewy at night now.

May 3 - Christchurch
Scott cooked dinner.

May 4 at 11:38am - Christchurch
I ran 5.91 kilometers with RunKeeper

May 5 - Christchurch
The Kendal Ave shops have a new bakery, Mrs Dentons.

May 5 at 12:20pm - Christchurch
I walked 1.94 kilometers with RunKeeper

May 6 at 10:00am - Christchurch
Usually at 10am I am on my laptop catching up with emails.
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May 6 at 11:19am - Christchurch
I ran 3.71 kilometers with RunKeeper

Mother's Day card

Sunday was mother's day so I made a card for my mother in law.  It's the first card I have made in a very long time.

The card is a swing z-fold card. When it is open the front panel is only attached to the left hand side of the card.

This card is made of all Stampin' Up! products.  It has some Dazzling Details Silver Sparkle (a liquid silver glitter) on the stamens of the Stippled Rose stamp.

Last week - 23 - 29 April 2015

Last night I was able to scrap a layout and this time I thought I would scrap current photos.  This layout is the result.

It has a mixture of cell phone photos (the smaller ones) along with two of my favourite photos of the autumn colours that I took earlier in the week on my camera. The journalling is my blog post from earlier this week, along with my facebook updates.

ANZAC day was part of this week so I made the poppy from two oval punches and a black circle punch.  I did buy a poppy but I got the Australian one which is made of fabric and will not squash nicely for a scrapbook.  We did not go to a ceremony but we saw the Harewood memorial on our ingressing trip of the weekend, there is actually a portal at it.

Scott and I did some ingressing over the long weekend at Riccarton Bush, it's lovely to see that Riccarton House looks really good from the outside and I can't see where or if any earthquake repairs have been done.

The boys started back at school, but I forgot to take a photo of them in their suits in the rush to get them and all their gear back to school.  They started back on Tuesday which is always a terrible day.  It starts off with me getting up at 5:30 to get James to swimming by 6am.  I then come back home make breakfast for Brent, myself and James and then take Brent with me to pick James up from swimming.  We then travel straight to school and James has his breakfast in the car.  So in actual fact it is quite difficult on a Tuesday morning to get a photo of the boys, it's dark when I take James to swimming and then they don't want to be seen with me taking photos of them at school.

It was while I was doing a pick up of the boys that I saw the tram. The journalling below the photo of the tram says that it is nice to see the trams running again after they had been stopped due to the earthquakes.  They only just started up again recently.  I know James thinks it's funny when he steps out of Christ's College to hear tram drivers talking about his school over the speaker system and saying that there is a Christ's College student, pointing him out.

I love that I can use whatever supplies I like to make these layouts, the restrictions in place when I was a Stampin' Up! demonstrator meant I could really only use Stampin' Up! products and because I was trying to make sales I had to use current product.  This layout uses mainly Stampin' Up! product (all except the little stamp of the tram which is a Club Scrap product) most of it retired.  It's nice to use up my old stash.

In other news last week I sent away 12 layouts to Artscow to get them printed.  They arrived yesterday!  They look great however they came in a tube so now they are sitting under my heaviest scrapbook album to lie flat.  Another job for me to do later today will be to actaully put them in their correct album.  I think I am going to have to keep a spreadsheet on file as to what I have scrapped and which album it is in.