An Extra Long Weekend

Hi!

I missed my usual blog post yesterday, and here's why.

We were at the beach.  It's Adelaide Show time and a lot of the schools give the students a day off to go to the show.  Both schools that my children attend gave them two days off, so we decided it was the perfect opportunity to take an extra long weekend to relax and play together. We took the kids to the beach on Sunday and they decided they had to go for a swim, well a paddle really as it was a bit cold to go in much further than knee height. It seems that my crazy children think that a trip to the beach isn't complete without a dip, no matter what the season or weather!!

I hope you had a wonderful weekend too, and I'll be back to normal blogging tomorrow.  For now I have to go and wash all the sand out of our clothes!

Bye for now,

Tina

Happy New Year!

Hi!

Welcome back! It seemed fitting to make my first post back on the first day of 2013. I had a wonderful, restful Christmas break and I hope you did too.  I'm back at my craft desk and ready to create up a storm.  I have got my hands on some of the upcoming Sale-A-Bration products and can't wait to have a play with them.  I've also seen the soon to be released Seasonal Catalogue, and it's fantastic! Lots of exciting things from Stampin' Up! this year as it's their 25th Anniversary.

This was the photo I gave to my family at Christmas.  I was thrilled to take such a gorgeous photo of my gorgeous children (with a bit of editing help from Photoshop!) My photography skills are certainly improving as a result of doing the Camera Creche course. I highly recommend doing it if you live in Adelaide.

Bye for now,

Tina

Snickerdoodles

Hi!

Last week I ordered myself some Sweet Pressed Cookie Stamps. I chose the Special Events set that includes a flower, star and present design.  The Cookie Stamps come with two different recipes, but I stumbled upon one for Snickerdoodles while blog surfing on Dawn Olchefske's blog. You can find her recipe here.

My monthly stamping ladies were my guinea pigs and they gave them the seal of approval.  Judging by the rate my kids wolfed them down they also gave them the thumbs up!

The photo was taken in Manual Mode as practice for my photography course.  The technical details : ISO 400, f4.5, SS 1/25. The photo is straight out of the camera.

Bye for now,

Tina

Something Different

Hi!

No papercraft project for you today, instead I thought I'd show you something else that's been keeping me busy.  I was lucky enough to win a place in a photography course run by the brilliant Lia and Isabel at Camera Creche. Yesterday was the second day, and the first day we started to 'play' with our DSLR cameras in Manual Mode.  Very scary to turn the dial away from Auto Mode, but exciting too!

Here's one of the photos I took while playing. It's straight out of the camera.

So thrilled that I was able to get a crisp bauble and the blurred background!  For the technical among you here are the settings.

Camera: Nikon D3100
ISO: 1600
F-stop: f/5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/40 sec

Bye for now,

Tina