Well done Colin

After school Colin produced a school certificate and proudly announced that the award was given out to about 25% of top academic students in his year. Well done Colin we are very proud of you, keep up the good work. He sees it as an incentive to achieve an even higher honor by the end of the year. School has centainly been good for him and is taking up each and every challenge.

Well another dog layout I'm afraid. Isn't it cute, we took Corey to our good friends Kim & Geordie a few weeks back, who have Tess and she is about 5 months older than our boy. Well, we can't even mention Tess's name infront of Corey as he just gets too excited and starts to cry and howl. Very cute I know.

LO credits: papers Pawprints - LorieM Design, paper cluster - DaniellaYoung Designs, frame - Tout_simplement by ImagineByFran, altered dog WordArt - Elegant WA by Bethany

Our boy, GIMPed

Finished this layout of Corey over the weekend, quite liked how this layout turned out. I must be in a dog layout frame of mind as I already have another one on the go.

The weekend was reasonably quiet too, though we saw it in with sharing my new batch of mulled wine with the JamieGees on Friday night. I have a new favourite recipe which is a favourite with everyone, so will be making sure I'll bring up the crockpot on our ski trip. Must have mulled wine for apres-ski of course!!!

The latest is that the Wins are joining us on the ski trip so it will be a full house, hopefully we won't be experiencing blizard conditions like poor Matt & Joanna who had to spend the night up on the mountain as they closed the road earlier on Saturday and having returned their rental gear where stranded with only the clothes on their back! As you can imagine they'd spend it very cold.

LO Credits: LoriM Designs PawPrints Addon, twoboyz00 papers, ScrapGirls frame

What a GIMP Geek!

I've been playing around trying my hand at writing a GIMP script, well not quite a brand new one from scratch. I decided I wanted a script that does both a blur border and copyright text in one script. So found a separate script for each so created/merged the two into one. That was still a bit of a mission as I'd never looked at a script before, let alone actually make it work. But I did it, 2 days later. And it still works with allowing user input for border colour and copyright text/colour/placement etc. I thought it was pretty cool that it worked in the end.

Oh, and what do you think of those gorgeous blooms, a surprise gift of hubby on my birthday of course!

Happy Birthday to ME!

I'm officially one year of the big 40 - ahhhh! Have the day off work as I think everyone should and have a totally me day, so that I have time to blog, scrap and shop. The day so far has started of well, with the opening of numerous birthday cards from family including one from Brian, who included a Bid Wednesday Lotto ticket and some Kiwi scratchies, so keep your fingers crossed for me! Then had breakfast out and am at home for the moment to post these lovely photos of my orchid that was a gift from my Mum - isn't it stunning??? Tristram came by first thing this morning with a birday card that included a voucher, so will be of later to have a go at spending it ;) Thanks Char, Barry & Tristram - you guys spoil me...

Our next skiing holiday is now booked

Yeah, we are going skiing again. Accommodation all booked out for long weekend next month. This year we have got a place in Ohakune it self, so we will be visiting Turoa Ski Field. The plan is that Brian's sister and family will join us too, but we have had to change their preferred date from early September to late August. Hopefully this will still work out for them, if not we will have spare accommodation as the place sleeps 9. Just as well we are getting this for a good rate. As you can imagine we are all so looking forward to this.



LO Credits: MBblogfreebie kit by Mandy Mystiques Design, Fonts: 2Peas Blocks - Winter and Rockwell Condensed and my own GIMP tutorial to create the curved text.

A Beautiful meal to finish the week with a glass of Black Chook

We went to our good friends Lynn & Barry for dinner last night. Having had a very busy week at work again, not having to cook was soooooo good! Lynn must have been busy all day preparing and had made us all individual Beef Wellingtons. My Brian being a typical bloke, ate his first all by its self as he just loves a good steak and pastry is his next weakness! Then potatoe bake and he nearly got away with not eating any vegies! We brought over our last bottle of Black Chook and saved it too have with our meal, just simply DEVINE. Make mental note, must order some more....

some layouts again



credits lo1: All Work in Progress alphas by Vicky at http://vicki20.blogspot.com/,
Love in Paris kit by by Mhulshoff for SYTYCD at http://scraporchard.com/
credits lo2: papers by digitreats, scrapalinquent, imaginebyfran, twoboyz00, NSD template by Kami at ScrapOrchard, bracket from Duval Street kit by scrapalinquent

Sunday morning bagels

Yum yum, remember these Connor? It was so cold here over the weekend that even with the oven on the temperature in the house still felt like a fridge for most of the morning. Never mind, the wait for these gorgeous bagels was worth it.

I have managed to get some time of next week, being the 2nd week of the school hols here, so no work for me this Monday and Friday, YEAH, two long weekends in a row!

GIMP Digiscrapping Tutorial - "Creating curved Elements"

I don't claim to be an expert on writing a tutorial of any sort, but hopefully you will find this useful. Let me know how you found it as I'm curious, especially how you applied it to your LOs.

I am not a designer, so have created this tut with other people's handy work. Thanks to Gratefull4U kit, yellow Duval Street paper by Elizabeth Quintana and photo frame by by Viviane at http://viviane07.blogspot.com/

Step 1

Open the background paper of your choice in it’s own layer. Create a new transparent layer, use the create new layer button on the Layer dialogue for short cut.

Step 2

From the GIMP main menu, select white as the foreground colour. Select the Rectangle Tool next and click/drag your mouse to draw a narrow rectangle. Fill it with white Foreground colour.

Step 3

From the Filter menu, select Distorts then Curve Bend

Step 4

Click points along the straight line and drag points to represent the desired curve. Select the copy button, this will ensure that the curve is copied to the lower edge of the rectangle, then select OK.

Step 5

Change to the Fuzzy Select Tool and select the white of the curved layer. From the GIMP menu select the 2^nd red circled mode, and with your mouse select the space under the white curve and fill with white Foreground colour.

Step 6

Duplicate the solid white curve layer in the Layer dialogue. Add new paper to the layer stack above the duplicate curve layer. Cut new paper from the shape of the duplicate curve layer and Merge Down layer.

Step 7

To create the thin white border between the curve and background paper, select the white solid curve layer. From Layer Menu select Autocrop layer. From GIMP menu select the Alignment Tool, set Offset to -20, and select bottom right Distribute button.

This tutorial can be applied to curving text and other elements such as straight stitching too.

You want a GIMP Digiscrap tutorial?

I read a PS article on how to bend/curve and element and wondered if I could do the same in GIMP. The answer is "Yes we can!" So then tried to do a step-by-step tutorial so that my little Gimp friend Sam out there can follow. I am nearly there, just thought to post this to see if I would get any interest out there. Leave a comment if you think a tutorial describing this is useful to you or you want a specific GIMP question answered.

The little digger that could!

I nearly forgot I had done this LO last month. Brian was very keen to get working on shaping the free fill that got delivered over a week's time. I can't remember how many loads we got, but 10 small trucks for sure! So Brian decided to do the job himself by hiring a digger from our local Hire Pool. On the first day of driving the digger, Brian found it took the whole morning to get the hang of it again. So of he went driving and digging and I carried on with other jobs as Brian looked comfortable handling the digger. Unfortunately the digger had the last word, trying to even out the fill, the digger launched forward as Brian was driving over the uneven surface, and he fell forward out of his seat. Then the digger right itself, but Brian was still falling forward. His head got cut in the process, colliding with the digger arm. As you can guess, nasty gash and lots of blood. Just as well I was handy near the house, we stopped the bleeding with rags and medical kit supplies as Brian didn't want to end up at A & E for the afternoon while having forked out for digger hire. Men!
After a clean up and patch up by me, he went back on the digger to get on with the job he started. Only damage done his split forehead, and I a stress headache watching him for the rest of the afternoon...

Bye bye PowerShot A85, hello Canon D40 DSLR

OMG I have a new toy, it's my early birthday present and I totally love it! Brian and I went shopping 2 weeks ago to look and see what was around and came home with this awesome baby. As you can guess I have been playing lots and my early manual SLR days are coming back, but I still need a lot of practice. Just as well I have a 1 and 4 Gig memory card!
My work has been totally stressful so not as much scrapping done as I would have liked, but having the new camera sure makes me want to scrap again.
Life has been hectic, Brian has been busy cementing retaining wall posts and installing the kitchen splashback. Unfortunately after only 4 hours on the wall, one small piece decided to crack by itself while Brian was admiring his handy work, bugger! We ensured that the same piece this time was toughened, so the 2 cut outs weren't going to give us the same trouble.
Now for some new camera photo shots...