First Blog....First Post....

Well as you can see, I am very new to the world of blogging.  So here goes.....  I hope my blog gets a damn sight more interesting then this otherwise I am afraid that it will be lots of time wasted.  As you can see in my profile I am also new to the world of scrapbooking and as such I would really appreciate any tips, comments, suggestions or even suggestions regarding what sites to look at etc.  I have already posted a list of some of my favourite sites (yes no surprises that some of the most renown ones are there but for the moment they are the crutches I lean on whilst I navigate this new, beautiful and highly addictive new hobby.

Over the past month, I have been working on a number of projects.  My biggest one by far is a guest book/album for my nephew to celebrate his 21st Birthday.  The album however, is still in construction as I am waiting for all the photo's to be provided so that I can complete the album.  My nephew is addicted to illustrating and he is excellent at it, so I used colour and black and white copies of a number of illustrations from "Scary Girl" by Nathan Jurevicuis'.   This is the end result:

The front of the album is featured above, whilst the picture below depicts the back page:

I was pretty happy with the overall result.  But I did have a couple of hiccups.  For starters the mod podge remained tacky for quite sometime as a result the 21 became somewhat glued to the cover page.  In the end I just affixed it in any case.  Not sure why that was...any clues?

I can now also say that I have completed my first few scrapbook pages...yippee following some great tips learned in the "Easy Scrap 1" course I have been attending every Wednesday morning at the Erina Scrapbook Store (my thanks to Roz and Odette for their continued patience and assistance).  The store has some excellent classes and I am a regular to most now.  The following pages are my the pages I have been working on:

The page above was my first.  I had so much fun creating it and the photo's really lent themselves to a fun theme.

On my second page, I enjoyed the challenge of continuing the them whilst also working out a fun way to include some journaling.  In the end I decided to add a flip down on the tree I created to allow for this.

I tried a different theme for my third, just to enable me to play with some different papers and journaling blocks etc:

Over the past few weeks I have also been trying out some card making.  The following pictures are a few of the cards that I have been pumping out:

The 3D cards were made using templates and guidelines printer in the latest issue "Card Making with Paper Sculpture" Magazine and where lots of fun to make.  I was really pleased with the results.

I have also attended a number of other classes and the following photo's are of the projects that I have completed:

"Grunge Rose Box Album" This class was lots of fun and was taught by Sarah Schwerin at The Erina Scrapbook Store.   The class was run last month.   Sarah's classes are really fun, but watch out fellow newbie scrappers...they are very fast paced and I often feel like I need a glass of wine afterwards, which actually is not such a bad thing..haha...is it.

Sarah is also currently running the card class which resulted in the following cards:

Again a very fun class, which taught me some great stamping techniques and in fact got me so motivated that I went straight home to play with some other papers.  I came up with this variation on the theme, but I am not so sure that it works that well...What do you think?

All that is needed is a greeting stamp, but I am currently waiting for my order of the Darkroom Door "All Occasions" rubber stamps to be filled....can't wait for that one!

Lastly, I also attended a class which will help me utilize my Cricut and was run by Dawn Lewis and held at, yes you guessed it, The Erina Scrapbook Store.  

This was a fun little project, that I can't wait to adapt and utilize for our next family gathering. Thanks for this one Dawn, it should make our tables look rather fun.

Anyway, the time has come to end this, my very first blog. To all my friends who have been practically ignored whilst this new hobby takes over my life, my sincere apologies and I hope you enjoy looking at all the things I have been creating. In time you should be on the receiving end of some of my projects.

To everyone else, thanks for stopping by and reading. Happy Scrapping :-)