The night before the night before Christmas

Only 2 sleeps to go and all the presents are wrapped, yay! Been busy the last few weeks so had no time to update. Wishing you and yours a very merry and safe Christmas and happy holidays!

Christmas craft

So lately i've been collecting a whole lot of Christmas craft ideas that I've been wanting to try, just haven't found the time to do any of it of course. Until last week.

I've admired those cool button trees and other types of trees around ever since I saw this one by Tia Bennett. How cool are they? So I thought I'd give it a go but discovered that the pins I bought were too small in the head - they just let the button slip through. Turns out you need the pearl head pins. So anyway I thought maybe I'd try it with all those little Prima flowers that I've got sitting on my shelf gathering dust and I really like the result. I added a bead and a sequin onto the pin before putting the flower on.

And thanks for the comments about becoming a Fiskars Ambassador. It turns out we made it onto the Scrap Scene blog so that's pretty cool!

Big news!

And its rather exciting - I've been asked to become a Fiskars ambassador along with these fab ladies:
Beverley Warwick
Donna Meuli
Evana Willis
Jo Burney
Lesley Cooper
Lianne Gray

So its all rather exciting. I get to play with awesome tools and products and you'll see me post on the Fiskars blog too. Can't wait to get stuck in and play!

She's 2!!!

Well Isla's birthday has been and gone for another year. We had a really enjoyable day. Isla had a lot of fun opening her pressies and she's now reached the age where she knows how to get the paper off. The tearing the paper off is a lot of fun and even better there's something inside - bonus!!! lol. So here's a few pics from the day.

Playing with her new doll. She's a real girly girl and loves to tuck her dolls into bed and feed them.

The new easel - she really loves drawing and painting. We had to go and buy paint the next day as we didn't have any, duh. I took these photos from behind because i wanted to show her Maisy sticker on her back which says "I am 2".

Looking cool in her new shades. This is the first pair she's had tho not sure how long they'll last as she tends to bend the frames a bit. These are from Pumpkin Patch, i think next time she'll get some real cheap ones, lol.

Looking gorgeous in her party dress and crown. She actually wore this dress for her 1st birthday but wanted to wear it again and it still fits, yay! I think it looks so lovely on her. I made the crown last year as well - her head is now a bit bigger so it might need to be adjusted soon or I suppose I could make a new one. This was really funny. She was unwrapping this present and once she got the wrapping paper off she stomped on it. Good thing it wasn't fragile, just clothes. Rofl!

And the cake. Have to say that it turned out great and I'm rather chuffed with it. And it passed the taste test of Isla. She got her finger into the icing straight away and picked off as many pebbles as she could. We lit the candles and she blew them out straight away so we lit them another couple of times so we could get pics of her doing it!

Well that's it for another year!

Some layouts

I did these 2 layouts a few weeks ago but hadn't got around to sharing. I really like them.

The first one is using BasicGrey Mellow range plus the letters are Making Memories Noteworthy and they're flocked too - i love them!

The second one is actually a lift of Jamie Waters - love her stuff and don't forget she's coming to NZ to teach at NZ Scrapbook in January. I know the classes are filling up fast. Isla's grin in this one is a bit cheesy but hey its the best shot of us in a long time. Might have to put it in my banner I think.

Busy weekend coming up. It's Isla's 2nd birthday tomorrow and I'm baking a cake tonight so hopefully it will turn out to be edible, lol. Wish me luck!

Dec update

For lack of a more interesting title I am going to call this post "Dec update", because its December and its been so long since I blogged. Lots of fun things have been going on since my last post.


We were in the local Santa Parade with Isla's Playcentre. Was so much fun. All the kids had reindeer antlers to wear and Isla actually wore hers, yay, she was so cute!


Nana and Grandad came to watch swimming so we got some photos which was nice. One of her favourite things is the shower afterwards!


Daryl's boat is getting closer to being finished. He is on a fast-encroaching deadline as he wants to sail in the Nationals over New Year. We'll see! Fingers crossed for him.


Isla has an advent calendar for December this year. Nana made it last year and this year its filled with lots of yummy and fun things. The first day it was up we soon realised it needed to be up higher, a lot higher cos little hands can reach high these days or they can get chairs to stand on, lol. And also having to wait till tomorrow for the next thing is not so easy to understand.


And today we went for a visit to the zoo with Playcentre. Here's my little tiger.