Giveaway goodness.

It seemed for a minute there that there were no giveaways happening after Blogtoberfest.  But they are back in full swing it seems!!  Here are some awesome goodies.

ZiBagz
She is hosting an awesome giveaway to win a cute little vintage coin purse.

She is one clever lady.  She also makes other cool things like this...

...and this...

Would be wise to check her giveaway and shop out.

JLJ Designs Crafting Blog
She is hosting a fun giveaway of Scrapbooking goodies with the Fall theme.

Craft with Confidence

There's an awesome opportunity to win a hand made scarf!  It's gorgeous!
 

Good luck!

My creative space... did you miss me?

I didn't post for two days straight.  It felt super weird.

I'm making these at the moment...

They're magnet pegs.  There is 80 of them.  This is all I've finished so far.  These are left to be finished...

I'm not half way yet, but that's ok.  The reason I am making them is I have had something really stressful to deal with come up in the past few days, and I needed a creative oulet to help me deal with the annoyance of it all, and this is super easy and I don't even have to think while I'm doing it.

On a lighter note.. what are you doing next week?

I'm going overseas :)

Opinions please.

Ok so I couldn't stay away.  They say it takes 16 days to form a habit.  It was 31 days so thats pretty much double the time to form a habit, so now blogging is a habit - but without the pressure :)

I am participating in a challenge on Really Reasonable Ribbon to create something in a Wintery: blue, white & silver theme.  Firstly, it's Summer here so that's a weird colour combo to be working on this time of year, but I like a challenge, and it's nice to work for a prize for a change.  Anyway, I made this...

And I don't know whether I should turn it into a headband...

A hair clip...

Or a brooch...

I'm leaning towards the headband but could be persuaded otherwise.  If you have any other ideas I'm all ears.

As for now, I am taking my tired little brain off to beddies.  Big day tomorrow!

Oh, did you win any of the giveaways you entered?  There are still a few more to be drawn that I entered.  So far I've won one.  Fingers crossed for a few more!!  Hehe.

Finale: Giveaway winner. More then you bargained for!

#31

Did you see those magic numbers?  I sure as hell did!  31 posts done and dusted!!

So I have a little suprise for my giveaway winner which I have not yet picked out of my trusty hat.  You know how my giveaway looked a bit boring and there wasn't much up for grabs...?

Well I lied.  What was in that picture and what I have been advertising as the prize all month long is a lie.

Because instead you'll be getting this...

Various cardboards and patterned papers, Stampin Up cut outs and gift box dicuts.

And this....

Fabric in various sizes, 2 doiley's, 4 flower clips, craft rope, ric rac, laces.

And this...

4 Christmas cards, scrapbooking rings, 5 bracelet/earring sets of jewellry, tub of buttons, tub of brads, chocolate gift box.

I have my reasons for doing this.  I wanted this giveaway to be something more for my current followers.  Plus a suprise is always fun.

I didn't want it to be a big "let's join her blog so we can win free stuff" deal.  I just thought it would be fun to keep it smaller and have a nice big happy suprise for the winner.  The winner of which I have not yet chosen!  I wrote all the names down on paper earlier and they are ready to go...

And the winner is:  Karyn from Eva Mei and Me!

I have it all packaged up and ready to go so just email me your address Karyn!  Congrats!

Thank you everyone for entering and sharing your favourite Christmas Traditions.  I will do up a post shortly with all of your traditions with links back to your page so that everyone in blog land has an opportunity to read about the special things you do in your families.

I'm going to have to come up with another giveaway in the upcoming months.  They are so fun!

I was just about to sign off and say my typical "Until tomorrow", but you know what, I might take the day off!!  So...

Until next time!

Last minute Giveaway entry.

I TOTALLY forgot to enter the giveaway over at The Clip Cafe.  So you will probably have no chance to enter yourself by the time you see this, but it necessary for me to post about it so I can WIN the darn giveaway hehe.

Good luck to me!

Calendars and Trains

#30
Well here I am.  Second last post.  I'm sorry, but I am amazing.  I haven't missed a day.  And all of my posts have been half decent.  No cop out poems, or a paragraph about how I'm busy.  I was determined!

But I have a piece of paper to thank for that.  This piece of paper kept me going.  It kept me on schedule.  It was even at times my source of ideas.

My Blogtoberfest Calendar!! Yay!!  It was available at the beginning of the month on Tinniegirl's blog.  I printed it out on day one and have relyed on it since.  Did you use yours?

Now let's talk about trains.

My nephew Spencer loves them.  I decided to do a handmade gift for him this year.  I found a 4 pack of train shaped wood cutouts at the cheap store last week.  I knew I had to get them!  I wasn't sure what I was going to do with them right away, but I knew regardless of what I chose to do, my nephew would adore them and talk about them for hours.

So last night I had an idea.  I would paint them into Thomas the Tank Engine characters!!  I'm nothing special with a paintbrush but I figured he was 3 and wouldn't notice my crooked lines, and they were basic enough that I should be able to get it right.  I just had to remember which 4 characters he loved best, but also I knew they needed to be all different colours. 

So I first of all sketched the different trains.

Thomas

Hiro

Percy

James

So that was my starting point.  I photographed the sketches because I knew I'd paint over the details and would need the photos as a reference when it came to decorating later on.  Last night I did as much as I could.  I only had green, black and blue paint.  The rest of the paints and all of the glitter paints I bought from the cheap shop this morning.  I got them all finished up as fast as I could because there was plenty of other things that needed to happen today.  

Here are the finished products.

Thomas

Hiro

Percy

James

All I need to do is pick out some ribbon and I am making a vertical garland, which will go on his wall.  I showed my sister a picture of them and she has confirmed that he will pee his pants in excitement when he see's them Christmas morning.  I'm just glad they turned out!!

Well tomorrow is the 31st.  It is also the close of my giveaway.  And there's a little suprise in stall.  I'm not going to expand on that so don't ask.  You just have to be in it to win it.

Until tomorrow...

Personal touch

#29

I thought I'd share a little about myself today.  I don't think I have before.  And it's probably about time you knew a little more about me.

I am Australian.  I am 25.  I have been married for 1 1/2 years.  I am a Mormon.  I have 1 niece and 1 nephew.  I'm a trained Hairdresser and used to own my own mobile hairdressing business.  I lived in America for just over a year in 07 through to 08.  This is where I met my husband.  He's Texan.

I have a calling (responsibility) at church as the Young Women's 2nd Councillor.  Young Women's is a program we run that is for girls between the ages of 12 and 18.  I look after the 12 and 13 year old girls.  It's HARD work but I love it.

I have always enjoyed crafts, but have only really got stuck into them over the past 6 months.  I have my own selfishly awesome craft room filled with all my goodies.

I work in an Accounting Firm as a Receptionist.  Not my most favourite thing in the world but my co-workers make it bearable.

I love to shop for bargains.  Proof is here, here and here.  These are just three examples of goods I've found this month alone.

And that's the basics about me.  Now for some fun facts that I usually don't tell people.  I have a few quirks.  My husby often looks at me and laughs.  I think he laughs so he doesn't cry.

- I hate odd numbers.  Even writing the word 'odd' makes me feel uneasy.  Luckily I was born on the 22nd, or else we could have problems.  I was born on the 3rd month though, but I ignore that and just call it March.  I never refer to it as the third month.  The volume on the TV and radio must be even.  But for some reason I can accept 5.  It doesn't bother me the way that 1, 3, 7 & 9 do.  Ugh.

- I am obsessed with wearing accessories.  I must be wearing at LEAST 2.  One day I forgot to put any accessories on, and didn't realise this until I got to work.  I was a mess all day.  Most days I wear earrings and a flower in my hair.  Necklaces and bracelets are optional.  The other two, not really.  I feel ugly without them.

- I have super long eyelashes.

I probably should have cropped this photo but I'm lazy.  But it's a good photo of the length of my eyelashes.  Problem is, they shed alot.  I love them, but it makes wearing glasses and sunglasses difficult to wear because if I am wearing lots of mascara, they touch the lens as I blink.  So on a daily basis I barely wear any.

- I hate being tickled.  It makes me angry.  Quite literally.  My husband learnt this the hard way.

- I love tropical everything.  Flavours, fruits, drinks, smells, the whole lot.  My favourite fruit is mangoes.  It is currently Mango season in Australia and it makes me VERY happy.

- I have a really deep belly button.  I can fit my entire pointer finger inside it.  All the way down to the joint.  A few years ago we thought it would be funny to see how many sultanas we could fit in it.  I think we got to around 40, then we (I think it was my sister and me) ran out of sultanas.  There was still room for more.  We peed ourselves laughing.

- I hate Mac products, but own an iPhone.  Figure that one out.

- Green is my absolute most favourite colour.  I want my bedroom to be green one day.

- I can play the piano.  Not as well as I used to, but I can.  Once I got so good, that I could play awesome classical songs like Moonlight Sonata and I also started to steer down the path of Rag music - I mastered Black & White Rag arranged by Winifred Attwell.  It was incredibly hard to learn, but hell I was awesome!  I can still actually play the first part of it. I found her playing it on YouTube but for some reason it won't let me embed the video.  You can watch her play it here, or go here to listen to this arrangement which is more along the lines of what I played.  They can play it a little faster then I could :P

- My parents could have been famous.  My mum sung in the Sydney Opera House and had opportunities to advance in a singing career but didn't.  My dad qualified for the Commonwealth Games back in the 70's I think it was, to do backstroke.  He turned it down after qualifying and decided to focus more on the direction he wanted to go in.  If I remember his story correctly, his personal best time for that particular event in backstroke was faster then the guy who won the Gold Medal at the Commonwealth Games he was supposed to go to.  And it remained that way for a few Games afterwards.

- I have less sensation in my finger tips then a normal person.  All those years of hairdressing must have killed off some nerves.  I probably should have worn gloves more often.  Oopsy.

- I don't really have any friends.  I have lots of acquaintances.  If you want to be my friend, you're most welcome too.  I miss having friends.  The trouble is I'm opinionated and not afraid to share it.  And there is no such things as grey to me.  Either it's black, or white.  No inbetween.  It's either right or wrong.  The end.

- I don't like gold jewellry.

- I hang my clothes in colour order darkest to lightest, each in their own category.  My husband has given up trying to put my clothes away for me.  He puts things on coathangers, then puts them on the doorknob ready for me to put away.  My shoes used to be like this, but then I got sick of bending over.

- I hate ironing.  I have stopped buying clothes that require ironing.  I have a shirt that I bought about a year ago.  It required ironing.  I think I've worn it 3 times.



And that's me.  I'm full of quirks, but I like me.  So it's all good.

Hope you had a creative day!  I'm excited to see all the giveaways I'm going to win over the weekend.  None for you, all for me!! :P

It's the FINAL COUNTDOWN *dun na na na, dun na na na na*

#28

After this post, there are only THREE left to do.. and technically my post on the 31st will be announcing the winner of my giveaway so there is only TWO more blog posts I have to come up with.  YAY!!!

Well I finished the box.  It is slightly more amazing then last time.  Some of you know the story, and others may not.  Basically I bought the plain wooden box and painted all the edges a Antique White which turned out to be a darkish cream colour and then glued the paper on, and then distressed with brown ink.  The colours don't show up too well on the camera but all three colours/designs clashed and I hated it!  So here is the before.

And then came the not so fun part.  Getting it all off.  Hello lactic acid in the arms!!

The cream paint was THICK.  I did SO many coats of the stuff.  It started like this..

And I sanded it down to this...

It's hard to see the difference but I pretty much got it back to the original wood.  I did this to all the painted parts of the box.  So the rim around the top (in the picture), the underside of the lid, the interior of the box, and the trim around the outside of the box.  It took forever.

Then it was time to spray paint!  Luckily for me the sun was shining nice and bright and it only took about 10 mins for each coat to dry.  So it was all done in about 30 mins.

But there was already a dilema.  I used cheap and nasty spray paint and on the trip upstairs I managed to chip paint off in three places.  I immediately felt discouraged, but got over it quickly and came up with some solutions.  Next was glueing the paper down.  Last time I just cut the paper to size, put PVA on the wood and stuck the paper on top.  This time I wanted to seal the paper in so it couldn't be water damaged.  So I put PVA over the top aswell.  As I stuck down each piece of paper, I used my hairdryer to dry the glue before putting on the next piece.  This made the process 10 times faster, but the sound of the hairdryer going for about 2 hours gave me a headache (which isn't hard to do).  But I just ignored it because I was determined to finish the darn box!

The paper rippled.  I did my best to smooth it but in the end decided to get over it and pick my battles.  This was a battle I didn't have the patience to deal with.  I'm glad I ignored it too, cause in the end you can hardly see it.

Next came some sanding in random spots, distressing with black ink and a sponge, and then a coat of glitter paint to seal it all (so there is no more white paint being chipped off!) to finish it off.  I did this on the underside of the lid, the trim on the lid...

...the interior of the box, and then the bottom trim of the box.  Then I glittered the rest of the box and dryed it.  And I ended up with this!

But I wasn't done yet.. I still needed a knob on top.  I thought that I'd love a glass or clear plastic knob, but when I went to Bunnings this afternoon, I quickly discovered it wasn't going to happen.  I could have ventured to craft stores to find the exact knob I was looking for, but I felt sick, weak and hungry and decided to just get this handle..

It's a kitchen one, but I like it.  There were SO many to choose from but this one was my absolute favourite.  Now all I need to do is wait for hubby to attach it.  I'm not game to use his brand new manly power drill yet.  I know how to use them.  It's just his is new and he probably doesn't want ME to use it hehe.  But isn't it SO MUCH BETTER now!!  Yay!!  I'm so glad it turned out this time :)

All this fuss is for this little angel..

Who loves vegemite :)

Next on the list to get done before our trip in TWO WEEKS (woohoo) is for my nephew.  I need to paint Thomas the Tank Engine characters onto these 4 wooden train cut outs I bought.  Then I'll make it into a garland to put in his bedroom.  My nephew loves many things.  Thomas & Buzz being probably the main two, closely followed by being a Kangaroo carrying his Joey.

I'm thinking of making him a pouch and tail next year.  He loves to dress up and use his imagination.

Well that's all from me for the day.  Thank you all for the lovely comments you leave on my blog every day.  It is so nice to be appreciated and to get to know all of you and what you get up to in your spare moments.

Friday tomorrow!! YIPEE!!

Until then...