My Favourite Creations of 2012 :D

Good morning!! I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and some lovely celebrations! I hope also that you enjoy celebrating a new year! We have some families coming here this afternoon and we'll have a BBQ together ... which is perfect for today's HOT weather! lol! Should be good to see these people (most of whom) we see only once or twice a year.. it's always fun to see how much their children have grown since the last time! :D I still have a bit of cleaning up to do first ahh.. so I should stop babbling on and get to the point of my post! I like to look back on the year and see what I've done and remember and share my favourite creations of the year gone by .. and Kellie is once again having her .. Top 10 Linky party :)

I have gone AWOL from my Top 10 (and added 2 more in) again this year as I like to choose a favourite creation for each month of the year... HERE they are ... I've linked them to the original postings if you want to see more about them :) I've done a few new thing this year... CARDmaking yes... some off the page, some more Art journaling and canvases and I sorta picked up that Smashbook bug too... so there's a range of different things below!! 

JANUARY

I love The Greeting Farm and how you can swap and change the different stamps to merge them into a new creation... It makes me want to buy them all (even though I have to do that anyway) to get not one more but numerous more possibilities! I  had  a lot of fun making these Miss Anya's look like the Baby Sitter's Club girls :) 

FEBRUARY

I was thrilled to be a Guest for Sweet November at the start of the year. I just love Amy's creations so was glad to play along with her CUTE little Shrooms... I still LOVE this canvas I created. This is sitting on the bookcase in our study!!

MARCH

I created a little mini album for Guy to celebrate 10 years of marriage! I still am pretty pleased with how these versions of us turned out! :D

APRIL

More altering for TGF... I was pretty stoked (BIG dream always to design for TGF) to be a Guest for the Farm during the year!! I love the colours and my colouring on this one!! 

MAY

Ahhh... cute little Spesch Stamps troll.. I love this one!! 

JUNE

I got (I still BLAME EMMA ;) tee hee) into Smashing and this was my second and still favourite Smash page so far!! My problem with Smashing is the pages are never as good as I want them to be!

JULY

A pixie creation! Still love Kathy's gorgeous Pixies.. I love how the hair came out on this one!!

AUGUST

More Smashing... and More drawing... I have DRAWN a lot more images this year.. I think these Manga Mob are my favs!!

SEPTEMBER

LOVE this Sunflower girl drawn by Ardith/ As the Crow Flies!! I love my COPICS as this girl was yellow and blue but I didn't like it so she became yellow and orange!! :)

OCTOBER

I was thrilled to be part of Kristy's bloggy party celebrations this year!! It was LOADS of fun.. and I love the journal I made for it!! 

NOVEMBER

YES I LOVE Saturated Canary!! I LOVE PURPLE... and PINK and so I do LOVE this card!!!

DECEMBER

Another art canvas... These characters are all my drawings for the new stamps I designed this year... Before I decided to stop my shop - Mad for Markers I set up Hatter's Hope... Not sure yet what I'll do with HH!! Anyway I had a LOT of fun with these characters and this tree! I used a few SOG stamps in there too!! :D 

Thanks for stopping by... I'll be back NEXT year for more blogging of creations and LIFE :D

I might do another post in the new year on reflections of the year just gone (we'll see)!

Christmas and NEW year

Isaiah 9:6

uFor to us a child is born,

to us va son is given;

wand the government shall be xupon1 his shoulder,

and his name shall be called2

Wonderful yCounselor, zMighty God,

aEverlasting bFather, Prince of cPeace.

I just love that passage! Such an amazing child born!! Such a Fantastic God! I am always amazed at his LOVE for us in sending Jesus....His only Son to earth to live and die that we might live! It just blows me away... Its hard to fathom such sacrifice... such mercy and love! Thank you Jesus!

(my production line for cards before Christmas .. I still didn't get them ALL out! ahhh)

I hope everyone had a Wonderful Christmas!! We had a pretty good day...  we went to church in the morning.. not our usual one we went to my in-laws church with M-I-L ... it was a great morning of Singing carols and a Great talk on how wonderful Jesus is ... with a challenge about how we respond to him.. Are we hostile (and violent) like the King Herod , do we hear and do nothing like the Scribes? or do we have exceeding joy and worship him like the Wise Men? I know I can be more joyful in Christ than I  always am... I get caught up in the everyday difficulties and forget to focus on what Jesus did for me and where I am headed long term.

I've not blogged for a bit... life's been a little crazy leading up to Christmas and with trying to sell off my Mad for Markers stock.. now I'm having a little break before re-opening the webstore in Jan for one last BIG sale! I'm a little sad about stopping the M4M store.. but I really do not have the headspace for it at the moment and need a bit of a break... caring for someone with alzheimers can be quite draining so I need a bit of "recharge" time! Hopefully this will mean I get a bit more time to craft and blog again too (we'll see - no promises just yet - lol).

I have managed to do some Instagram posts tho... LOVE that app... so quick and easy and a great record of memories and quirky things seen in the everyday LIFE adventure! Are you on Instagram?? Here's mine .... 
  

 

I will be back later this year to show my top projects of the year .... might be pushing it a bit for some months I think anyway it wil be an interesting exercise!

New challenge at Hatter's Hope

The latest challenge is to use SPARKLES!!!! Here's what I did....

 .... coloured up Fairy LilyRose in Copics and Spica pens :) I stamped her in a light ink so it does not have the harsh outline! Love this effect!!

Check out Hatter's Hope for more inspiration and to enter!!!


 

Hatter's HOPE Magical Tree release

Today is the Hatter's Hope Magical Tree release with images I drew inspired by The Magic Faraway Tree! I decided to make a canvas this time to include all the characters in the one ART canvas... so here it is...

I hope you like it.. I certainly had fun creating it!!

And GREAT NEWS today... I'm thrilled that Guy came home with a box that had the stamps I had made with images I drew!!! So the Fairies are now here! YAY!!!

Here's what the minsized Fairies look like .... so cute!!!

Thanks for stopping by.. I've been madly closing up M4M Copic/ stamp shop and still a few things to do before Christmas! How are you going?? Hope it's not TOO busy!!!

 

a Hol-ODD-day hop with SOG

Good morning!!! Today I  am popping on to LINK up and also to head you all on over the Some Odd Girl holiday Blog hop HERE!!! I've been a bit busy and slow at the moment and so there's not that much time left on the hop.. but enough to get hopping and even whip up a little holiday project too if you are keen!!!

Now about my creation... I got some sentiment stamps this week from Kellie HERE as I LOVE the Aussie Christmas theme to them... I've always loved that old Jingle Bells song.. um yes the Aussie Christmas one tee hee!! So I used them!

I found my Rusty Holden ute pic from a couple of years ago and cleaned it up a bit... mmm.. you might see that going free at Hatter's Hope later this week! :D and then piled in the Holiday Oddies...  Photo Kaylee, Gingerbread Kaylee, Hey Kaylee, Mermaid Mae is the driver and her passengers are Gingerbread peeps lol! Angel Mae is on the top of the bonnet and Deer Mae is on the front! Don't forget the gorgeous little Elves Tia and Tobie.. who just begged to wear the glasses from Preppy pups! :)

Thanks for stopping by.. now wondering what I should do with this masterpiece... :) It's  standing up on our kitchen counter for now as a decoration!! :D 

Anything But a Card :: December Daily

Good morning!! I am pretty excited that December is here... This year I decided to do a December Daily album.. documenting special memories and happenings in this busy season.. the idea and inspiration for December Dailies comes from Ali Edwards .. and she has a great post on this here!  which seems to be quite popular and I loved the idea of premaking the journal then adding stories and photos and more bits and pieces each day!!

Here is a preview of my COVER and each page... although small you can sort of see what I've done... just coloured pages with numbers for each day and some lovely G45 paper!! 

Now... to keep up with RECORDING the days!!

December 1 is a NEW challenge at Anything But a Card so I thought my December Daily pics would be GREAT inspiration for this challenge! I hope you are inspired to create something OTHER than a card and come and enter ABAC this fortnight :)

 

Check out Hatter's Hope ....

a Butterfly Princess

I love Butterflies.. and Fairytales and so... I just love this pretty Butterfly Princess from Saturated Canary!!! ... she's so pretty! Her dress is quite fun to colour!! I was challenged in the last week or so to try some NEW colours.. and this is one of my attempts! I was going for a peachy look.. it came out a bit darker than I first wanted but I think it worked ok!! I need to start taking better pics again too... this was on my phone ... but better a phone pic than no pic???

 

I'm also "trying" to use up supplies .. as I have so many things here that I just never use... so let's see what happens!

The lovely Chipboard is from 2 Crafty :)

 YES I am "TRYING" to clean up and get rid of junk... in my cleaning / moving things around I found my little hairbands that I use occassionally to plait my hair.. so I thought I'd put them to use this morning ... *Random fact* I used to do this when I worked in Afterschool care as I was paranoid about getting nits from the kids and someone told me that they could not get into plaits very easily.. I think it was a myth.. but hey :)

 

Hatter's HOPE Bring on the Bling

Yay... It's time for our FIRST challenge at Hatter's Hope which is to
Bring on the Bling!!

Here are the cards I created... I have used the new images that are being made into stamps.. the Mad Manga Hatter and Alice in Manga :D

  

Hope you like me Alice- themed stamps! I quite like these ones .. should I say that? lol!!
thanks for stopping by

It's TEA Time!!!

Good evening!! It's TEA TIME yes... which means that it's time for the LAUNCH of our new blog Hatter's Hope.... Hatter's Hope will have a new challenge every fortnight and NEW images each MONTH!

The NEW images for today are the Manga mob getting ready/ celebrating Christmas!! I thought I would start a new ART journal where I can create a page for each NEW release at Hatter's Hope and so the FIRST page??? ... is here....

Here are some close ups of the characters...

 

Please hop along over to Hatter's Hope and check out the wonderful Design team's AWESOME creations! It's such a thrill to see other people use my images on their creations... I hope you like them and I hope to be able to see you using these images too!!

I have sent off some designs to be made into RUBBER stamps and am taking a pre-order on those NOW.. you can order them on the Mad for Markers website HERE :) You can see them on Suzi's gorgeous creation on the HH blog... and if you pop back here tomorrow you will see them here too!!!

Thanks for stopping by..
I'm going back to creating my December Daily journal :)

Purplicious Nevaeh

Good evening! How is everyone?? Hope you are all well... I have been in "lost MOJO land" but I'm pleased to say that today I actually made a card!! I was super inspired by the Little Darlings/ Saturated Canary  blog hop... and I'd coloured up this gorgeous image of Krista's beautiful Nevaeh last night (I don't have a problem colouring JUST card making as such I have a large pile of coloured, uncarded images) ...

Here is my card... 

 

anyway it came about when I saw Mindy's GORGEOUS creation with her new Digi papers "Purple Passion" um.. yes if you know me at all you know that Purple is my most favourite colour and combined with pink it's EVEN more purplelicious lol! So I bought it, printed it and CREATED a card!! Thanks Mindy!! I also bought her butterfly papers... so that will be NEXT :)

Thanks for stopping by... I have the NEW Saturated Canary stamps on order for Mad for Markers... can't wait till they arrive as there are some very lovely ones in there!!!

Recipe:
Image: Saturated Canary rubber stamp - Nevaeh Rubber here, Digi here
Papers: Purple Passion Digi paper from Stampin Mindy
Copics: E00, E11, E13, BV000, E00, E30, E31, E42, E55, E33, YR20, YR21, T1, T2, T4, RV00, R81, RV52, RV55, R83, R85, BV11, BV13
Washi tape from The Papercraft Hub
Sentiment Stamp - From The Greeting Farm's "Flutterheart" stamp set... available here!

Some exciting news....

Vulcans, Wallflowers and Darling RoseBuds

OK so this is a bit of a GARDENing post (rant?!?)

 I was never a gardener... My dad is a wonderful gardener - having seen him maintain a vegetable garden all my life all I really thought is that it takes a lot of work... although I do appreciate the results!

When we were young my older sister and I wanted to be gardeners too... my parents told us that if we could keep sections of their garden free from weeds then we could have our own little piece of garden/ rockery to maintain... now I think I just wanted to be like her.. as I remember losing interest in that reasonably quickly... but I know that she kept at it and had her own little garden for quite some time.... she kept going with that green thumb when living in her own places as an adult and always had lots growing ... But I guess I never really saw what the fuss was really about until now...

Now that we have our own garden... I've thoroughly enjoyed watching the plants grow and seeing what flowers bloom up about the place... I still get excited at each new bud on the roses out the front...

Ok so I still appreciate the results ... and yet I am not too keen on "getting my hands dirty" BUT there is something rather therapeutic about turning soil, getting the weeds and rocks out (and might I say our front garden is VERY rocky) and putting in some bulbs... watering them and WAITING for them to grow....

I just planted some Lilies out the front along the front wall ... they had been sitting in the packet a bit long so I'm not sure if they will grow.... I sure hope they do though!!! not much to see here... just looks like a bunch of dirt right.. well we'll see I guess :)

                                                   

I think Magnolia's are just beautiful.. and you might remember Guy and I bought and planted one.. well It's looking nice and healthy full of leaves... Here's our lil Magnolia Tree...

Ok... so I  have managed to do something right so far in the garden... the roses I pruned have given us much joy in their beautiful blossoms... Although our garden has sort of been overgrown with this ground cover thingy... it has pretty pink flowers... still not sure if it is a weed or not though?!?!

the backyard has some STRANGE plants in it put there by previous owners... and one is this bizarre looking thing... it kinda looks like Spinach but not really!?!?

Another STRANGE thing that totally cracks me up is the flowers growing out of the wall ... It's bizarre and yet they are quite pretty! lol

There's  a lot more pics I've taken such as the growth coming up in Guy's vegie boxes out the back... but we'll keep them for another day! I am off to make some cards... I think... I'm not so good at that at the moment though :)