Shelly Beach and the Best Creature Competition

We just had a trip to Ballina to visit Mum and Peter, and to the Gold Coast.

On the last day in Ballina, we had a bit of free time, and Mum took us to her favourite beach, Shelly Beach. We crunched in the sand, paddled in the waves, and clambered over rocks.

I announced the "Best Creature" competition - find a good creature in the rocks to enter. You know, crabs, starfish, lobsters...

The entries came thick and fast.

There were these anemones.

Jonathan found a tiny live crab.

Mum found a huge not-live crab, who agreed to pose very nicely.

Then mum entered again with a cool jellyfish.

And I took the time to enjoy watching the birds. The terns were doing that thing where they flutter into the wind, then dive for a fish, and come back up again.

I pointed this out to Jeff, and I assumed he'd join me in enjoying the pretty sight. Instead, he called Jonathan and Thomas over. "Watch this, guys". He made a gun out of his hand, trained it on a tern, and watched for the moment when it folds its wings back. Then he shouted "BANG!" as the bird plunged.

And the three of them spent the next fifteen minutes "shooting" birds. Sigh.

They are so quick...

...but I do like catching flying birds in my photos. On a windy day at the bird hide, I noticed the swallows were going pretty slowly flying into the wind, so I managed to snap a few.

The new IT crowd

Both our clever sons have been offered places in an IT degree at a really conveniently place university (bit of a luxury, studying twenty minutes down the road). To get them properly prepared, our university fund has stretched to two new, shiny, pretty laptops. Here is Jeff, getting Thomas (next to Jeff) and Jonathan set up.

I'm trying to remember, and Jeff is too, who it was that helped us set up our first laptops for uni. I guess I must have been my mum.

Behind the Yart, 2016 edition

I've just had some artwork publishing in "Cardmaking, Stamping and Papercraft" - it's been a while since I've done that, so I'm pretty pleased.

The project features Dina Walkely's gorgeous bird stamps, the ones I insisted Michelle (of Mixed Media Art) get lots of for selling at Picture to Page, the fantastic papercraft show she was exhibiting at. And she runs the whole show too, so, you know, she doesn't have to do what I say. But she stocked upon bird stamps, and wow, were they popular!

So I decided to do a project with them.

The ideas for what project started when I made this birthday card:

The background of that main picture is printed with a Gelli Plate and a stencil from Julie Fei-Fan Balzer. The awesome honeycomb background is a die from Sizzix, and I've picked out some of the hexagons to have decorative paper, and text, showing through. Yes, all of that was an awful faff.

So, I decided to make a project featuring the birds. I decided to leave out the gelli plate idea, because that's good enough for another whole project.

Here's on of my play sheets. I cut birds out of this, using the Stampin' Up Project Life dies (nice even rounded rectangles every time). Later switched to adding those background stamps AFTER colouring - the lovely Jane from the magazine warned me that colouring with alcohol-based markers over dye-based ink can be bad news for your markers, so I'm not going to recommend bad methods!

When I'd made my "bits", I spent ages shuffling them around, and had fun taking photos of the arrangements. That turned out to be super practical - I could walk away and review my work on the phone or tablet. It gets you thinking about composition.

Here's one of my compsition tests. There were lots.

And if you want to see you it turned out, maybe you need to grab volume 22, issue 6 of Cardmaking, Stamping and Papercraft! Here's a sneak preview:

Gingerbread Houses, Melbourne style

We make gingerbread houses every Christmas, usually as a fun way to mess around with the cousins. 

Of course, everyone's getting bigger, and this year we weren't even with the cousins. 

But we still made gingerbread houses! 

Here's three made by me, Jonathan and Thomas.

Here's Jonathan working on his. We all worked out that the cool slope-sided pattern was pretty hard to bring together. But we all managed.

And here's a tiny house, with a lego monkey for scale.

Annual tomato brag 2016

Well, luckily, I set myself up last year, so that this year, my bragging about tomatoes wouldn't take so long.

Refer to last year's post for the template, then insert this year's data, as follows:

DATA 2016

tomatoes

small

edible

not growing very many

kept calm and carried on

very small tomato sandwiches

Summer in Melbourne

We didn't go to Perth this year - rather fewer than usual relatives to visit this time, with nana and pop in Canada for a white Christmas.

So we enjoyed summer in Melbourne. Here's Jonathan keeping protected from the sun on Frankston beach.