The Last of August

The last day of August, the last day of Winter here in Australia, three quarters of the way through the year. I am convinced the years are speeding up, despite my very logical husband assuring me that it's not so. Pffft, don't try and bamboozle me with logic, I know it's going faster! ;-) I need to do something substantial in the next few months, so that I have something to show for the year. Let's see... game plan... eh... Oh, I know, recover the sofabed! It's been on The List for a long time now, so maybe it's time to cross that one off, and that would definitely make me feel as if I had achieved something. I'll keep you posted.

Apart from that, I will be doing more scrapping. I recently had 300 odd photos printed, so I have to. Here's one I did today, in between making a delicious dinner for guests, going shopping, and cropping photos for my flower sale. More on that later... first the page:

This is my Dad. I don't have many photos of him for some reason, but I like this one. He looks nice and relaxed, and he was. I was staying with them for a few days and we were having the regular afternoon balcony time. This page is for the Step By Step Challenge on the Home & Scrapped facebook group for August, by Julie, who was challenging us to step outside our normal limits and get busy with patterned papers. I used a mixture of old and new papers from my stash, and some items from a swap I did online with some fellow scrappers last year. I like it for a change to my usual white background pages.

If you are interested I happen to know that Home & Scrapped is happy to have new scrappy friends join them and play along, so come and check out our happy little group.

For the last few weeks I have been busy making flowers in my spare moments (and my stolen moments), and I am finally ready to share my creations with you. I am having a sale, starting on 1st September, on my facebook page Heather's Handmade Flowers. I have all sorts of shapes and colours available, so happy with them! I am going to love seeing them on pages and cards here and there. Here are a few of my sets:

Now I may be biased (ya think?) but I think they're rather yummy. Go on, you know you need some :-) 

Here's another few, just for fun. 

 Don't you just love that piece of driftwood I photographed all the flowers on? I found it on a beach walk recently and just had to bring it home. It's an old piece of fence wood I think, not very big, but so deliciously worn and textured.

Have a wonderful scrappy week, love Heather x

One of the happiest moments in life is when you find the courage to let go of the things you can't change.

August Sketch

To celebrate starting my new blog (which still needs a lot of work, but I will get to that this week), I have made this sketch to tempt you to spend some time scrapping this week. This sketch would work well for a single 4x6 inch photo too, and there is heaps of background space there for some creative play if you like that sort of thing, or maybe use one of those lovely background pages with fancy corner designs. I hope you like my newest sketch and find it useful.

And here is my page, that I just put together today, using the sketch. 

The people are my lovely nephew Jacob and his beautiful new fiance Paris (though in the photo we were all still waiting for him to pop the question) at my mother's 80th birthday party. I used my new mini punches to make the banner pieces, and crumpled them to give them a little life. The flowers are all my own handmade ones, from various dies and punches. The rest is just stuff from stash, some of it gifted to me by my scrapping friends. 

love Heather x

Live like someone left the gate open. 

New Beginnings

Sometimes we just need to take stock, remove the old way of doing and being, and make a fresh start. I was in a terrible rut with my old blogs, not getting anywhere fast, eh... in fact, I was not blogging at all :-( After some months of dithering and not getting far, I have decided to bite the bullet and start over. Yay for starting over!

Life can never be stuck or dull for long, as long as we can start over now and then. Mistakes, miseries and changes of direction can all usually be put right with a change of attitude or scene, by forgiving yourself, getting over it and taking some positive action. If you have found me here, I'm glad. Come with me on my journey, telling life stories through scrapbooking, and playing with paper and glue... lots of paper and glue...

love Heather x