Picture updates

The photo upload problem with blogger seems to have resolved for me. So here are the little toots!

LOTW #29 at Made With Love:






Runner up position for Piradee's Patchwork Challenge!




Journalling: Come, cuddle your head on my shoulder, dear, your head like the golden-rod, and we will go sailing away from here to the beautiful land of Nod.

I found this photo which went so well with the patchwork theme - a paper quilt! And the white felt is like my kid's blanket that he uses sometimes.

PP: All scraps! More than 9 squares!
Sewing: on the white felt - both French Knots and back stich
Ribbon: through the buttons.
Thickers (as usual!)

TFL!

Another toot!

Tee hee!

I won the runner up position for Piradee's Patchwork Challenge! Woohoo! Am so honored to be tied with 2 smashing entries too!

It was for this LO. For some reason, Blogger doesn't want to load my photos up!! Really need to figure out why. Can't blog on a scrapblog with no photos, right?!

Toot!

I got featured as the LOTW #29 at Made With Love for this LO! Woo hoo!!

There's something wrong with blogger - I can't upload the pics here so I guess I will have to put the link instead! BAH!

Birthday post

The baby's first birthday was a blast! The only "complaint" I had was that no one took enough photos! I'm always the one who does the photo taking which means that when I am busy entertaining people, no one takes any photos.

Some websites that were kinda helpful.

1. First birthday party ideas
2. Celebrating your baby's first birthday
   

So, gathering experience from the rather chaotic 1st month celebration where we invited the extended family, colleagues and friends, we decided SMALL was the key word here. Just immediate family and people who we really wanted to spend the time with.

There was some hesitancy about the timing since babies' attention spans and energy levels only lasted about 2 hours. But finally 2pm was decided upon and as expected, most people were late which was just as well coz the star of the show overslept (good) and hadn't changed or had his meal till 2.30pm.

I must admit that I spent quite a bit of time perusing and trying to find out where to get the birthday cake. Time and again I was reminded that the star of the show wasn't going to remember it all. But the point was good photos to remind him and to scrap right? LOL... Anyhow, ended up ordering this from Bakerzin:

But ended up with
Looks almost the same but I was really expecting a YELLOW cake and not an ORANGE cake! But having said that, it was a really cute cake and I'm glad I got it! And to add to the icing of the cake (sorry the pun here) it was yummy and the kids loved the pure sugar bumble bees!

I must say that the preparations for the little one's birthday has brought me to some places which I wouldn't have ventured to. One such place was The Verge. We have passed this place many times and it was formerly known as Tekka Mall. And I wouldn't have noticed the name change if it weren't for the fact that many people made fun of the new name and asked "on The Verge of what?"

When I was preparing for my wedding a couple of years back, I had come across a number of shops that sold party stuff at The Concourse. At that time there were rumblings about the people having to move out to some unknown location. These shops sell goody bag fillers and the works at bulk prices. And in desperation I googled "party shop the concourse" and found out that they had moved to The Verge and some to Middle Road!! So I happily trooped down with the hubby and baby in tow to check out the area.

I must say that I am impressed that even in this day and age, we could find fairly good quality goody bag fillers at reasonable (even cheap) prices! Both the hubs and I had a mini trip down memory lane looking at some of the "low tech" toys they sold - "kuti kuti" (similar to some of the embellishments that Maya Road has!) and bird gliders amongst many others.


So armed with the lot of stuff we got from the shop, I went home to pack the goody bags. This was undeniably the most fun part of the preparation process. (At this point, I must say that most of the children were a lot older than the little one so goody bags were appropriate.) Of course, due to my lousy memory, I didn't have enough of some items and had to improvise. So all the girls got a hair rubber band which I made (will post about it one day) instead of a glider. The end product looked like this:

The little book you see right in front is a mini activity book that I made myself using some images downloaded from the net, cut and stapled together. Low tech and cheap! LOL... The girls got a Strawberry Shortcake themed bag and the boys a Cars themed bag. This was not completely by choice but dictated by what the store had. All in, less than S$5 per bag! Very cheap I say!

The party was short and sweet with most of the kids being tired after about 2 hours. This included the little one and the clean up was quick and easy. Now it is time to start planning the 2nd birthday party - the one where he may actually remember a thing or 2!

Southern Ridges

Since Saturdays are hard to come by where we are free in the mornings so we headed down to the Jurong Bird Park. When we reached there, we found that the half of Singapore had descended upon the place and there was no where to park even though we had paid the per entry charge! All the cars were double parked and triple parked. So to make the best of the situation, we abandoned the idea and headed down to the Southern Ridges.

The weather was relatively cool due to the cloudy skies. But that also meant that the humidity was at a all time high.

We parked at the Hort Park and proceeded to make our way down the Alexandra Arches.
And we were faced with a rather impressive sight of this:
I must say it was a bit dizzying looking at the height of the bridge. Especially since the "floor" was like this:

The view was truly breathtaking and I think it is only in the small island of Singapore where you can have both nature and man living in such close proximity.
There were also stairs which allowed us to go down to the Earth Trail but yeah, baby plus pram make stairs impossible and dirt trails even worse. Although the baby loved the scenery and was quiet and well behaved the entire way, watching the birds fly in and out through the trees.

I must say I am a little envious of the people who stayed in these houses just at the edge of the trail. Can you imagine opening your doors to a whole nature reserve in the morning? But of course, like the hubby pointed out, lizards and mosquitoes probably abound in such houses. I love these black and white houses that are scattered around Singapore. They were built by the British back during colonial rule and they have the nicest teak floors and lovely lamps. I think that architecture was better thought out in the old days - the ventilation was always good and the rooms cools without any of the air cons.

We ended the walk in a bit of a rush when it started to drizzle. There are a few more areas that we haven't covered but this was a good way to whet our appetites to venture further down the trail the next time!

Love

Sketch#23 from Inspired Blueprints.

Here, I have cut my chipboard stickers into half and filled in the "holes" with Stickles. The photo "floats" because of the chipboard thickness. Recently, I've been drawn to the color yellow. And I LOVE the citrus color combination! I kept the embellishments simple to allow the die cut paper's intricacies shine through.

Die cuts: K&Co, Crate Paper,
Stickers: DCWV, Cloud 9
Chipboard: Basic Grey, Autumn Leaves
TFL!

Mr Curious

Sketch #22 from 52 sketches 52


I do try to do multi photo LOs but sometimes, unless I am shooting specifically for a LO in mind, I may not have matching photos. In this sketch, I replaced the 2 photos with little layered embellishments. I am so loving the edges of the Sassafralass papers and the bright juicy colors of the Citrus stack from DCWV! Yummy!


Some people ask me how to tie the ribbon on my LO. It's difficult to describe in just words. I'll probably put up a tutorial for it once I have the time to take serial photos. But it is seriously easy and the results are very nice!

PP: DCWV, MME, MOD, Pink Paisley, Sassafralass
Stickers: K&Co, Making Memories, 7G, AC thickers
Others: Dew drops, Stickles, Ribbon

TFL!