Ode to Basic Grey

I am becoming lazy at updating the blog. I wish I could just access it directly instead of via a proxy, but I guess I should be thankful that there is still some ways to access blogsites.

Your Scrapbook Stash is being very generous this month with giveaways from the latest CHA show for several contests that they are hosting this month. One of them is the Basic Grey Contest. For my very first exposure to this crafty hobby, I bought a door hanger project kit and the papers in the kit were all from Basic Grey. At that time, I thought to myself that this brand of papers is so diffcult to use! I think I was too new then and was not too adventurous with exploring new techniques with my first project. After all, the only thought on my mind is to get my door hanger completed and presentable.

But over time, I grew to love Basic Grey's papers and their recent lines are quite in line with my evolving, scrapping style. I am a little extreme, going for either very soft, pastel tones or loud, vibrant styles. I fell in love with the Wisteria, Porcelain lines and recently the June Bug and Lemonade ranges!!! So I came up with these 4 layouts for YSS's Basic Grey Contest which you just have to use at least 75% of Basic Grey stuff on your layout. Simply love them and enjoying my productivity these days!

1) Look On


2)A for Adore






3) That Look in Your Eyes






4) Almost 4




Finally, I made this bookmark for Adah to encourage her. She has been reading a lot this summer, and most times on her own. I think she feels a sense of achievement now that she can be more independent in her reading. She no longer has to wait for Mummy to read to her or have Asher interupting our story reading sessions and she even reads to him now in her good moods! Only thing is, she sometimes recognises wrong words like 'think' and 'thing' and likes to twist the story in her own way, but who's complaining???LOLs! Mummy is having more free time these days!

Cyber Crop Challenge Giveaway

My part of the challenge will be put up tonight...I asked to do High School Musical. Its Adah's favourite movie. Its amazing how fast and how much she has grown from Barney and Dora (at 1+ year old) to Disney Princesses (3+ years old) and now Barbie and High School Musicals. Adah is so in love with the HSM movies that she knows the lyrics to all the songs in them and can even finish off the lines of the artistes by now! She even has a Gabriella doll that sings to 'Gotta Go My Own Way'!

This is the layout I put together for the challenge. I just started out wihtout any sketch or idea in my head but things just start falling in place.I wanted Adah's jumping pic to be cut out and placed next to the actors. We took that pic when I brought her to watch HSM 'Live performance in Shanghai'. Of course, she was a little surprised to see that Troy Bolton and Gabriella were not Zac Efron or Vanessa Hudgens. She liked Sharpay's character too for all her bling and pink stuff, so she chose to take a pic with her life sized poster. I remember her dancing, singing and shouting out the character's names from where we were seated. It caused me some embarassment but most people were just amused by this little fan!









My challenge- to scrap about a most memorable movie/ theatre performance that left an impression and to include bling/ glitter in the layout! I hope you scrappers like the RAK that I have put together to participate in the crop challenge... All the best!



Close ups...

Butterfly Crafts Challenge #18 and Cyber Crop

Butterfly Crafts is having her very first Cyber Crop over this weekend from the 14th to 16th August. The theme is on movies, so each of the DT members scrapped something related to a movie! Mine is High School Musical, anyone can make a guess why???;-) There will 4 challenges each day and games and points are awarded to participants. The one with the highest number of points wins an attractive prize! For more details, hop on to http://www.butterflycrafts.ning.com. I am also offering a RAK for my part of challenge. I have yet to put together the RAK yet...Time just flew by in the past 2 weeks with the hubster away and the kids in summer camps and me running all over to get groceries, cook, pick up the kids from seperate locations and sending them for swimming/ roller blading lessons. It has been crazy but now that the hubster's back, things are more or less more sane...

I will put up pictures of my RAK asap and all participants have until 21 August to take part in the challenges. Back to Butterfly Crafts Challenge #18- scrap about your best friend. This has got to be the easiest for me so far. I didn't have to think hard, it has to be the hubster. No one else reads me better than he does, and is so supportive of this expensive hobby of mine (he says he rather spend some money to get a happy wife then to hear my nagging and unhappy grunts) and lives with my crazy, emotional, erratic self!







I went quite minimalist on this layout. The patterns on the paper itself speaks wonders...The stickers framing the photograph were from Basic Grey (so pretty) and if you notice, I had added 2 metal rings to symbolise our marriage and the anchor embellishment with a dove to represent that the hubster is the anchor man in our family.

Hidden Journaling is on the piece of Jenni Bowlin journaling card which I had cut out so that it can be 'clipped' onto the photo. It says:

My best friend has got to be the father of my kids. I remember how he would stand by me when I had girlfriends’ issues, how he would just give me his support blindly (despite his own reservations), how he would travel to NTU to visit and stay over when I was mugging for exams. He always brought me whatever I loved/ wanted to eat. He reads me like a book, gave me 2 beautiful kids, is tolerant of my nagging and my obsession with cleanliness, supports me in bible lessons and prayers (despite his reluctance- am still praying for his salvation) and works hard to feed and provide for our family after supporting my decision to resign. He tries hard to help out with the kids even though I sometimes disapprove of his methods. That’s why he’s my children’s father, my husband, my pillar and my best friend. No doubts.

Celebrate

I did this layout for Websters Pages July Challenge. Lots of cutting and layering there, so therapeutic as I snip, snip, snip away. It was fun playing with the Webster Pages and new embellishements that I had brought back form my last trip to Singapore and I am so looking forward to the new paper lines from them already. Its so difficult to decided which ones to get and I wonder how I am going to be able to do it while staying in Shanghai...so sad...

Well...basically I love just about eveything on the LO. Adah and her innocence at age 3.5 years. She still had some baby fats then, her cheekiness, the verse (Matthew 6:21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will also be), the brown checkered background paper which matches the design of the bench Adah was sitting on (amazing!!!), the trims, the pearl stickers...In one word to sum up how I felt after doing this LO, satisfied! Not the prettiest LO I did, and there are many more talented scrappers out there, but this is one LO which I did because I felt like it and not because there was a submission DT or challenge dateline. Of course, it was later on that I discovered the July Challenge for Websters and submitted it in. So I am enjoying my SB hobby more because I am back to the basics of why I am scrappin in the first place- to record all these precious moments and to leave behind some memories for the kiddos!

Bolster Layout for Butterfly Crafts Challenge #16

This is the layout I did for Butterfly Crafts Challenge #16. You have to scrap something about your quirks and idiosynscrasies. Things that you do that make you special, maybe a pet peeve or a fuuny habit. It can be weird or normal but basically anything that's you!

I decided to scrap on Adah's love for her bolster which we call it her 'Chou Chou'. It means smelly in chinese. She just grew so attached to it around the time she was 8 moonths old and will simply hold it around the house wherever she goes. (Thankfully she never asked to bring it out when we had to leave the house) At first, we thought she just loved to cuddle it but later on I discovered she was obsessed with twirling the little label on the side of her bolster cover. It happened when we ran out of covers during a period of stomach flu and vomiting. We were out of covers after washing them of her vomit and tears and I had to use one which came without the side label. She started fussing and crying and tried so hard to explain in her toddler language what she was looking for!

I sprayed the hearts cut out from KI lace cardstock with Glimmer Mist (shared half from Annissa and brought back from Singapore!) and had hidden journaling in the accordian sticker (with a moon picture) attached with a brad. I went easy on this LO and wanted the focus to be on the photos so I tried not to over-embellish the page and fill it up every where. Paper is from Sandylion which I bought off Taobao here in Shanghai at a super good deal!


It says: You have to hug your bolster with you since you were 8 months old. When you will younger, you will kick up a fuss and throw a tantrum if you can't have your bolster when you were sleepy. I had to buy a few spares just in case you threw up or dirtied them, but all you actually cared about was the feel of twilring the small label on the side of the bolster cover when you needed to fall asleep! I had to have covers specially sewn for you with a ribbon similar to the white one in the LO when the manufacturer stopped producing these covers and had to ravfe about how pretty the pink flowers were in order to get you to accept them!

Cards Designed for Simon Says Stamp

I have been on such a roll in the last fortnight! Since our return from Singapore, Adah was plunged into a full-day sumemr school program. Since the school has a no-nap policy, Adah was sent to bed around 7.30 pm every evening and she hardly argued about it because she was so exhausted by the end of the day. By the end of the first week, her enthusiasm for "summer school with no nap" weaned off and she was beginning to hanker for her "luxurious afternoon naps" and began whining for school to end. And I took advantage of the situation to train her to fall asleep on her own without having me to lie in with her. She hardly bargained as she ws so exhausted. By the second week, I also started Asher on sleeping on his own. He took some time to get adjusted and falls asleep later than his usual these days as he is constantly coming off his bed to "check on me", but he hardly protested or cried (which surprised me!!!) He probably picked up the cues from his sister and was pretty good with adjusting to fall asleep without Mummy by his side.

So all these freed me up and now that I dun fall asleep while lying in with the kids, I have more time in the nights to scrap! And I am so enjoying it. I finished almost an LO every night in the first week and over this past week, I came up with the following 5 sets of cards for my DT assignment with Simon Says Stamp after collecting my stamps from Singapore during my last trip. I am not going to start again on how my post keeps missing in Shanghai but I am so happy to hold my SB kits and new papers and stamps that I spent a few nights just going through them over and over again!

These are my cards to share! Will be putting up my new layouts soon also... ...

1) So Happy For You




2) I Have You in my Heart




3) Just Saying Hello




4) Sending Warm Wishes (Set of 4 Gift cards)


5) Just Saying Hello (Tri-fold card)

Ramblings....and a few toots!

I still can't access Blogger directly because blogsites and Youtube are still being blocked by the government here. Now with the Xinjiang riots, even facebook and google has been blocked! It really bewilders me to how much and the extent the government here can block...after all, the internet is almost non- exhuastive and the anoymous proxies and search engines available...

I am updating my blog via a proxy. It does not allow me to upload photos so I can't share some of the layouts I have been up to, playing with my new purchases from my last shopping spree in Singapore! But I really want to share some good news here. One of my layouts 'Motherhood' was chosen by our LSS (Made with Love) forum as the Layout of the Week #33. Another 'all of 2 months' was voted as the favourite layout over at Lotus Paperie and last, hopefully not least, my 'Fun in the Sun' layout was also chosen as the winning layout over at {Create}!

It is really exciting and thrilling to know that your layouts are appreciated and it does give me the motivation to continue to create. However, at some point, I was beginning to feel a little tired of scrapping for the sake of joining all these challenges. Not that I dun enjoy it, I really do but it can be so draining and meaningless, just churning LOs after LOs just to take part in these challenges. So now, I scrap sometimes for my own pleasure or when I am inspired and when mojo strikes or when one of the themes or challenge focus really strikes a chord in my heart like the one from Scrap Inspire Create which got me started on the 'Motherhood' layout. I wanna scrap to leave a momento for the kids, so I feel that they have to be meaningful...But but but...if any of you readers can access those blogs that I am talking about above, please pop over to take a look at mine and many even more talented works available...that was what got me started in the first place. I am totally amazed by the beautiful works that can be churned out from paper alone!