Saturday photoshoot

The girls wearing thier fun new skirts.
Which btw Mika dislikes. But I've told him that unless he actually WEARS their clothes he has no say about them. I have two very style confident kids.





Which one is your favorite?

Challenge page #2

For Cara's Scrap' Ac challenge.
Using the required three patterned papers.
I had a hard time with this, I kept wanting to add more pp...LOL.
But then I solved the problem by using a transparency, ha!
And from three different manufacturers also: Chatterbox, Autumn Leaves and Scenic Route.
That blue sequiny flower is not that BLUE irl... my scanner hates anything iridescent.

Title= Yeah it is!
Journaling: Cold that is...
The park pool water is changed on mondays. It is freezing.

I have to go by downtown today. I'm having a really hard time locating art postcards... but I know the store I used to work at should carry them. Wish me luck. I need them for a project I'm working on. I'm liking this particular project.
*grin*

Such a tease!

Found the october CK in my mailbox today.
I got a bit of a surprise when I got to page 154...

I happen to think this little thing about printing names is such a tease.
What I'd love to see is the title of the LO on there too. That way I'd also know which particular layout of them all caught her eye...
Hey, at least they spelled my name right...heheheheeeee...

I better go submit some more pages.

Gingerbread

I got some questions after posting my 'Lighthouse' LO about this gingerbread project from last December.
It all started off looking like this:

A 3D puzzle.
I did have instructions for a different kind of lighthouse, but I opted to take another route called 'winging it'.
The boat was made by rolling a piece of aluminum foil under the dough while it baked in the oven.

Here it stands before decorating it.
The decorations were going on mostly to hide the crookedness of me 'winging it'.
Ha!

And here are some close-ups of the details:



Please feel free to ask questions.

And if you are wondering who the folk habiting the lighthouse are, it's the Moomins.
Good books.
My personal favorite is the Moominland Midwinter.

Paper and photos, photos and paper...

This is how my pages start.
I grab my photos.
Get out all my patterned paper and go through it, pulling out pp that I think would work. They go in a pile and I pullout the one I feel like working on.

Three of these LO's are now finished.
You can see I didn't use all of what I got out. Those were just suggestions to get me going.
For the journaling, click on the link below the pic :o)

- lighthouse -


- with enthusiasm -


- the bearer of spring -

And to read the journaling on the 'mine' LO of a couple days back, go here.

today

I'm sick with a cold so I can't do much...

Thinking how innocent the world still was five years ago at 3pm my time. It took just one and a half hours more to change.
9/11 is the Kennedy assasination of our generation.
The 'where were you when?'

I was at home with the kids.
I turned the tv on at 5pm for the kiddie programs. They never interrupt those here. It's a sacred 45 minutes.
The news come on after them.
I was feeding Niina in the kitchen when the news anchor talked about the attack. I thought I must have misheard it.
Went into the living room and froze there just staring at the images.

The evil minds of people never seize to amaze me.
They can't assume of getting sympathy from attacks like these, can they?

Last night I watched a BBC/HBO documentary about the terrorist attack in Beslan. Just two years ago terrorists held over a 1000 people hostage in a school in Russia for three days. Women and children mostly. The few men were rounded up and shot the first day. In the end, 344 civilians dies, 186 of them being children.
This one made me sick to my stomach.

The documentary was very powerful. No narrator. Just the children who survived the hell talking about what happened. One of them said they aren't kids anymore, they all grew up that day. The once happy city is now a sad shadow of its past.

So many sad events in the past five years.
The Madrid train bombs.
The Moscow theater gas attack.
Beslan.
London subway and bus bombs.

It all makes me even more grateful to live this far north, in a country not all people can even place on a map.
No tornados, hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanos.
For now, I feel safe.
Even if my mind is restless.

As requested

Photos of my renovation progress.

There's a stucco effect all around the house now, looking like this:

I'm loving the yellow livingroom.
I had to remove the window to get some of the painting done...

That yellow with the walnut stain on the wood... pretty.

These are the giant popsicle sticks.

I used the clay tiles I had originally made for the kitchen in the two fireplaces. I just glued them on and used the walnut stain to tone them down.

New kitchen floor made from Cernit oven clay.
And yes, this was a pain to make...

But it does look so very nice.

I used the modeling paste (mixed with acrylic paint) to paint the kitchen walls. It gives a great look for an English cottage.

So the downstairs is done (except for the doors).
I moved upstairs on Saturday.

This is the bedroom.
I think I'll leave the floor as is.
Still thinking...

Friday fun

This LO is for Cara's challenge.
The idea was to use two languages on your page, I pulled up the 'confidential' tag so you can see the finnish on there too.
Bit of a silly LO...but I had that photo hanging about...heheheheeee...

I'm enjoying working on the dollhouse so much.
Tonight I'll finish the kitchen and wallpaper the rest of the livingroom.
I have to say you have very odd angles to work in. You should have seen me today... one hand in the kitchen painting a wall I could only see by peeking through the window...on my knees...doubled over...

Pizza's ready.
Bottle of red opened.
Have a good weekend!

1:12 scale renovation project

This is it.
The Glencroft.
I always wanted to build a dollhouse. So one year while visiting the US, I used a 40% off coupon to buy myself this beauty. It appealed to me.
Sure, I could have gone for The Beacon Hill, but that would have needed a room all its own...
I don't know why I never properly finished it. I have tried.

As you can see, I've had a bad choice of wallpaper upstairs that had to be ripped off.
Also the paper parquet in the livingroom was a bad idea. I'll be building a plank wood floor out of jumbo size ice cream sticks.
And I'm trying out that tan color for the kitchen wall...

I tiled the fireplace floor last night.

And got grass growing on the front yard. Next up, painting the picket fence.

These two are wondering why the front door knob is on the bathroom floor...

Scrap-related product in use. I realized I could get a stucco finish with some modeling paste and a stipple brush! Middle of the night lightbulb idea :o)

The owner of the house, the disorder is just too much for her.
Luckily she has family nextdoor.


This is Saara's dollhouse, The Orchid.

I'll leave you with this comic from my newspaper this morning... I got the giggles.

-Umm...dad?
-What Jaana?
-When you've finished uploading your dinosaur blog, would you help get my horse from the tub?
-mmm..sure. But how did it...
-It's called a NEWSPAPER!!!!
-whatever..

Mini world

Inspired by Heli's dollhouse project, I dug out my unfinished tudor house.
Things on my mind right now:

-why did I only make 2/3 of the kitchen floor tiles?
-how do I get a stucco finish to the walls?
-have to go pick up a couple wallpaper samples, big ones ;o)
-I'm insane
-this might take a couple weeks...

I'll update tomorrow with photos.

Inspired by color

If you've seen any of my scrap pages you know I like color.
I'm slowly trying to incorporate more color into our white-walled home, but that takes time. Not to mention a little convincing...
We did get that blue chair a while back and now it looks like we won't get it re-upholstered after all, but instead get a pillow in that same blue for the couch. I enjoy the vibrancy.

Which brings me to my favorite color inspirations.

I saw this ad in the monthly magazine that comes with our newspaper.
I was wowed.

If I could pull off that outfit in the big picture...
I love the reds, oranges, indigo and the green. Mmmm..and the plum.
And I simply love the floral border.
I ordered the catalog yesterday just so I could flip through it.
If you'd like one of your own, go check out Gudrun Sjoden.

My other big favorite is Designers Guild.




Just last night I was imagining my dining room chair seats upholstered with one of these cushion fabrics. That pink and green combo is delicious.

Niina and I were looking at the Pottery Barn catalogs online (oh how I wish they shipped here...) looking for color ideas for her room. We'll be repainting it within a year.
She picked out these:


I need to put my thinking cap on...