Fake cards for daddy's wallet

It was Fathers Day here a while ago, well a month ago. In Finland it's much later, I think in November, so when I realized that it was coming up I panicked. I had been spending too much time planning and preparing Emma's party that I totally didn't have time to think about Fathers Day. It's only few days after Emma's birthday in here.

All in all I didn't have time to make anything for him. I felt rather bad. But we bought him a new wallet and made a few little fake cards inside it:

So now when daddy uses his wallet we're hoping that every once in a while he'll pull out one of these cards instead of the card he would have needed and hopefully it will brighten his day.

Emma really is a daddy's girl. She runs to the door when she hears it opening, because that's a sign that dad's home. She cries when he leaves. She hangs in his feet all the time. Precious.

What's yellow and goes fast

It's my BIKE! Sorry I'm still going on about it, but I just love my new bike. So instead of scrapbooking only about my little miss I thought my new baby deserves a page too. And I'm participating it this weeks get inspired challenge with this too. The challenge was to include something knitted or crocheted.

Ja vielä vähän uudesta ihanasta pyörästäni.. Ajattelin, että hänkin ansaitsee skräppisivun ja onpa vähän vaihtelua, kun kaikki sivut tuntuvat olevan tuosta pikku neidistä. Samalla osallistun inspiksen tän viikon haasteeseen, minkä aiheena oli virkattu/neulottu.

I used this months pagemaps with this, but for some reason I feel like there's too much in it. And I was really struggling with the heading, don't know if I like it or not..

Käytin tän kuun pagemapsiä ja jostain syystä musta tuntuu, että siinä on liikaa tavaraa. Otsikon kanssa taistelin myös aika kauan, enkä oikein tiedä tykkäänkö siitä vai en.

 

The text is dedicated to my amazing husband who restored this bike for me. Now it's just been a bit rainy or we've been sick so we haven't had a ride in a week. But I have a feeling that we'll be riding around town this week again.

Teksti on omistettu ihanaiselle miehelleni, joka kunnosti pyörän eloon. Nyt vaan on ollut paljon sateisia päiviä ja me olemme olleet flunssassa niin että pyörä on ollut yksinään jo viikon päivät. Mutta mulla on kyllä sellainen kutina, että tällä viikolla taas pyöräillään kylän raitilla kovaa vauhtia.

Living room - room to live

I was cleaning (yeah that happens sometimes) our living room when I realized that I haven't shared the before and after pictures after our quick living room transformation.

The project started when I got home from our trip to Finland. I put the suitcases on the floor, had a look around and said: "Now boys we have to do something to this place if we're going to have Emma's birthday party here." I said "boys" because at the time we had one Irish living with us. And to our benefit he's profession is painter.

So off to the paint shop we went and after, what I call very quick desicion, we had our paints picked out. And this is what our living room looked/looks:

The "before" picture is a bit miss leading because I actually forgot to take a picture when everything was still at it's place. But you can still see the colour of the walls, the air conditioning that wasn't working and the hidious couch, oh and the curtains (I don't think there's even a word to describe how awful they were).

Now the back wall is grey and all the others are white, we have gotten rid of the air conditioning and we are baby sitting our friends couch so we were able to get rid of the other one. I also bought some cheap curtains from Ikea and that mirror too. I still want to paint that coffee table white, but we'll see if that'll ever happen.

We didn't do much and didn't spend a lot of money, because we don't have much, but we like the way it looks. Thank you Trevor for the awesome paint job!

Case for my phone, finally!

This time I want you to go and check out the blog Curly Birds! Helen is an amazing woman with two very cute twin girls. The things she creates and makes for her little girls are so clever and inspirational. I think I'm gonna be trying few of her projects as soon as my little miss grows a bit bigger. But for now I want to show a phone case I made following her this tutorial for an iPod case. Her case looks like this:

Amazing isin't it. My phone's been needing a cover for a long time, so as soon as I saw this I knew what I had to buy when I went to the material store. This is what mine looks like:

I have a feeling that I'll be making few more of these for some lovely people. I'm already thinking of different images that would look great on it. So stay tuned and mean while if you want to make one yourself go here.

Wishing you all a great Monday!

Note to myself: stop and play

Too often we (meaning my husband and I) get frustrated with Emma when she hangs on us and it's difficult to get things done. I took a picture of one of these instances and as I looked at it later I realised that instead of getting frustrated we should realise how much she would want to see what we're doing, learn while watching us and wanting us to spend time with her.

Excuse this house

Some homes try to hide the fact that children shelter there.

Ours boasts of it quite openly, the signs are everywhere!

For smears are on the windows, little smudges on the door.

I should apologize, I guess, for toys strewn on the floor.

But I sat down with the children and we played and laughed and read;

And if the doorbell doesn't shine, their eyes will shine instead.

For when at times I'm forced to choose the one job or the other,

I want to be a homemaker - but first I'll be a mother.

I don't know the author of that poem, but I read it from a book "I hope you know how much I love you" by John Bytheway. I love it, I think of it often and it sums up pretty much how I want to be. And sometimes I need to remind myself of that. 

One thing I like about scrapbooking; you can write your thoughts to your children, yourself and who ever you're doing the page to on that page. And at least for me it helps me to think about things, put them in perspective and then be reminded of the important things in life whenever I look at them again.

I'm sorry how blurry both of the pages are, but if you click them bigger you can read the text and it should be a bit more clear. I shall go now and play with my beautiful little girl who's mumbling is starting to sound more like words, or maybe it's all in my head.

Little artist

Just a quick note to say hi to you all. HI! We started a new tradition; birthday art. So whenever Emma (and any future children) turns one year older she can make a painting. This is what she did after her birthday:

I'm sorry that there isn't any pictures of while she was painting, but it was too messy for all of us and was done rather quickly. I can't wait to see what sort of painting she'll make next year.

Getting inspired #177

This weeks get inspired scrapbooking challenge was You and me. I've had this page lying around a while and now I finally got inspired to make it into a page.

Ja suomeksikin välillä :) Tämä kuva on mulla lojunut jo tovin aikaa ja nyt vihdoin inspiroiduin ja sain skräpättyä sen, kun aiheena on sinä ja minä.

I'm don't use flowers too often in my pages so I tried to get rid of some of my flowers by putting a lot of them in this one. And it's the first time I've hid the journaling behind the picture. The text says:

Always remember your roots. 

Your great gran is amazing lady 

who is crazy about you.

I hope you inherit her kindness 

because you can move mountains with that.

En käytä kauhean usein kukkia sivuissani, joten yritin nyt käyttää mahdollisimman paljon, jotta pääsen pikkuhiljaa eroon niistä. Kuvassa siis Emma ja Emman isomummi.

Road trip

What do you do on a Saturday when you've got nothing planned? We did a road trip. We've done these before, but not in a long time. So as we woke up to a new and bright morning last Saturday, we decided to be spontanious and hit the road. This is where we went:

The idea of the trip was to drive from Cape to Cape. Now if you look at the map above you should find Narrogin, the start and end point of our trip (it's not inside the red circle) and depending on how good your knowledge of Australia is and how good you are in maths you might be able to calculate that that trip was about 750km. It took us a bit over 12 hours.

We saw...
...two lighthouses = we went from Cape to Cape,
...two different oceans,
...lots and lots of flowers,
...rain,
...sun,
...grandad.


We heard...
...crying and wining from the back seat,
...laughs and giggles from the back seat,
...many songs,
...a lot of quiteness after the battery went flat from the iPod.


And we took pictures of our feet.

Scripture cover

Remember how I said I wanted to show you what awesome things I've found in the blog world. And then I also said that I wanted to try to make it myself if possible. The last one I did was about window art, ring a bell?

Well this week I want to share the blog delia creates, which is fairly new to me yet really amazing. It captured me straight away and got me hooked. One of her first tutorials was scripture cover tutorial and it was perfect for me since I needed a present for couple of wonderful young people getting baptized. So I'll just show you the finished products and if you want the instructions on how to make one head over to delia creates.

One girl version and one boy version. I really love how they turned out and I'm planning on making myself a one too.

Hope you all had a wonderful weekend and now a great start of the week!

Our new pimpin ride

I FOUND THE CORD! Well actually all I had to do was to ask my hubby who reminded me where it was. (If you don't have any idea of what I'm talking about go back and check this post.)

Now I can present you our new family member. My awesome hubby went to the tip while I was in Finland with Emma and got this bike. He restored it and painted it. Got new parts and made it shiny. Do I need to say more, I love it!

When we got home, we went to buy some helmets and a seat for Emma. Now we are the coolest chicks in town cruising everywhere with out brand new ride. Pictures are from our first ride with Emma. She loves the bike as much as I do.

Australians are very different to Finns when it comes to riding. In Finland almost everyone has a bike and most of them actually use it. In here it's different. Australian's like their cars and go everywhere with them. I have felt ridiculous going to town with the car when it's only few minutes away. So I'm very very happy now that I get to go with the bike. I still use the car when I have to go food shopping but everywhere else I trust that the bike will transport us there.

Thank you so much husband (who's going to be a cop by the way!!!).

More of those scrap pages

I'm feeling very non talkative, if you know what I mean. I don't have much to say of these pages. I feel blank. I suppose I could mention that I used pagemaps in both of these pages. I like the first one a bit more than the second one. And I think I was feeling a bit blank when I was making these pages, because the texts in both of them seem very uncool.

It's obviously very blah day so in a way these blah pages fit it very well. Hope you're having a fabulous day and not a blah one.

It's only a sneak peek

Do you ever feel full of inspiration and you want to do everything right at that second and then something happens and you can't? (And then other days you can't find inspiration anywhere...) I am having that sort of day, the full of inspiration one and yet nothing seems to work out.

I would have liked to show you this project:

...but I can't finish it because I can't find my piece of felt anywhere.


I also would have wanted to tell you about this:

...but I cannot find the cord anywhere so that I could get certain pictures out of my phone.

So do I give up? Usually I would, but today is say NO. I will go back out there and search for my missing items. And that's why this is just a little sneak peek of what you'll be seeing in a (hopefully short) while. And next time when you feel like giving up, because it's just not your day, say NO and keep pushing. Make it your day, because only you can! Even on days like these:

Yeah this 'not giving up' thing is probably more to myself than to any of you. But I'm hoping you're all having a wonderful day!

A year ago

A year ago I was...
... enjoying every minute of the day of a wonderful miracle, our baby girl
... recovering from 6 days of labor
... realizing that I was born to be a mother
... singing in the middle of the night trying to make the baby understand the difference between a night and day
... pondering names for this precious new package and refusing almost every suggestion

I love to go back in time in my mind sometimes and try to remember what I did then. I haven't scrapbooked in a while and then after Emma's party I got excited again. I wanted to make a few more memories for her to remember. Things she did during her first year and people she shared it with.

 

I'm still learning and my pages are fairly simple. But then again I like it simple.

I'll show you more of those pages I made in a little while. In the mean time, if you can't read the text, click the image and it will get bigger.

Window art

I love blogs. I get a lot of inspiration from what other people have made. So I thought I'd share every once in a while an idea that someone has done and then hopefully I've tried it too.

So today I want to share the blog The Artful Parent with you. Jean is amazing mother to two girls and shows in her blog all sorts of artful things that they do together. I love her blog and I love all the projects they do. She's an inspiration to me and I want to try to be more like her.

My inspiration was this flower door. Now my little miss is still a bit too young to do this sort of activity and I don't have a door like Jean does, but that didn't stop me from trying this out. I sometimes pick up my friends kids from school and have them around until she gets home from work. And these kids were just perfect to do me some nice window art.

Oh it was so much fun, and so quick. The kids loved it and I agreed with them that the result was amazing. And since it's spring time here, all the pretty flowers are everywhere. I don't know how long they'll stay good on the window but I think it's all worth it even if I get to see the pretty flowers on my window for only a week.

 

Hope you're all having a wonderful Monday and a good start of the week. We're enjoying the beautiful spring days!

Spring is what? GREEN!

That's right, I love when nature is green! And it's green here right now. I'm trying to take it all in as long as it lasts. Love it love it.

It's amazing how much green changes the nature. I feel peace in my heart when I'm in the green nature. It relaxes me and gives me strenght. It makes me run even though I'm very much unfit. I can't feel that I'm unfit because the nature makes me feel young and strong. Nature, what would I do without you. I enjoy the rain, I enjoy the sun, I even enjoy the cold. I wish I could find a place on this earth where it would be this weather all year around and that would be my kinda place. Thank you Australia for your beautiful spring!