Jordärtskockor

Nu är våra jordärtskockor skördade. Vi har ju odlat två olika sorter, Bianca, som är den som hinner blomma här, och en annan sort, som jag inte har något namn på.

Idag kokte vi av båda för att kunna jämföra smaken. De är goda att äta råa också och då var Bianca klart godare, den är sötare. Men när de är kokta så föredrog jag den andra sorten för det är mer smak i den, medan maken nog föredrog Bianca här också.

 

 Här blommar min Bianca

Så nästa år kommer vi att odla båda sorterna igen och betydligt mer än de fyra plator vi odlade i år! 

En liten koriositet, stammarna på Bianca är röda men knölarna är vita, stammarna på den andra sorten var gröna, men knölarna är röda.

Too much colour

I like colour on my pages, that is not any news to anyone who knows me, so it kind of surprised me when I found myself thinking "Oh, too much colour!" about some scrapbookpages I´ve seen in magazines. Now why would I think like that?! And then the answer came to my mind "It´s the pink!" I don´t like pink, at least not most, sertainly not bright ones. A little soft pink here and there kan be nice though.

Let´s search my albums for some really me!

I love green! Green is my absolut favorite scrapbooking colour.

Red and yellow are also favorites of mine. And brown.

And tan and kraft is really nice backgrounds. And a splash of blue is nice.

How come I like even bright pink flowers?! Well, I don´t even have a good answer myself to that one. Colour is so much emotion, so I guess we just can´t exlain it all.

More Christmas album stuff

Here are a few little somethings that might make it in to my Christmas album.

The small tags on the right says "Merry Christmas" in swedish, I think they are so cute. It´s hard to see but one of them has a Christmas tree on it, maybe perfect for the day when we put up the tree? And the one at the bottom might be nice for Christmas eve.

Here´s another one with softer colours.

Out of these I think that the one with the tree all dressed up will for sure be in the album. And if there will be snow (I doubt that it will not, but you can always hope!!) some of the others will probably be used too, most likely the one on the bottom right.

Just a little more than a moth to go - yay!!

Preparing for advent

I´m preparing little things for my Chistmas album and have been, as usual, borrowing idees from other folks. First I have these little things inspired by Ormolu...

It looks pink but it´s kraft cardstock. I really love this idee and you can by yourself do whatever motif suits you and your story.

I´ve also made these...

Which I have also made in black...

 

They are 6"x6", like my album and I made them after seeing Allison Kimball use them for her Daily Dose minialbum, where she used just the same American Crafts album that I´m using here. If I remember correctly she got them from Making Memories, but that´s a few years ago. Go check out her things, she is SO talented.

The last flowers

Picked this beautyful little sunflowers today. In fall, like in spring, you rejoys in much smaller things than in summer when everyting is in such aboundance. Because of this I think seasons is such a good thing for us humans, they make us much more grateful.

I have a little tip too. This movie is so wonderful! If you haven´t seen it, please do! I tells the tale of Beatrix Potter´s life, the mother of Peter Rabbit. It´s kind of sad, but at the same time hopeful. It´s english, of cause, with such good actors. Great Britain has so MANY extraodinary actors, you never stops to marvel about it.

Have a happy new week.

Good old friends

Say hello to my good old friends at Coopers Crossing, New South Wales, Australia!

I just love The Flying Doctors! I´ve watched them for decades and they are truely my good old friends. And now, finally, the series have come on DVD so I am slowly collecting them all.

They used to be shown on TV in the afternoon here for years and my youngest daughter would always sigh and say "not again" when she came home from school and found me sitting in front of the TV, since her mother never stopped enjoying watching them... But now I can meet with them whenever I want and Miss I can have the TV to herself, not that they have been showing it on TV for years, though...

So hello mates, glad to meet you all again!

Take one

Shimelle´s friend SJ has a little challenge on her blog which she calls Take one. I think it´s a very nice one. It´s about looking through your own scrapbooks and choose one favorite layout and let yourself be inspired by it and take one thing from that layout and transfer that one thing to a new layout.

I chose this layout...

and the one thing I took from it was the photo of the road. I really like such photos and I happened to have another one, taken on the same road, but from the other side of our home. We live right were the road ends in this picure, up to the left. And when you come from the other direction there is this other smaller road leading up to our house and that´s what´s seen in the photo on this new layout.

The first layout is about me driving my boy home from the nersery for the last time, after him going there three times a week for two years and in the fall he would go to pre-school and ride with the school bus.

The second layout is about how happy I always am to turn on to the road leading to my home when I´ve been away.

I love the original layout and I love the new one too, they´re both very much me.

Christmas-ready

Well, at least my small Christmas album is done, so now I just have to wait for the first Sunday of Advent. It´s just 6 weeks come this week end. Yay!

My album is a 6x6 American Crafts album, my favorite album and here´s how I´ve transformed it.

I painted all the edges both on the outside and the inside, like this....

...and then I glued patterned paper on the inside like this.

This is the front. The paper is a swedish brand with different words and phrases that´s Christmas related. The back has the same paper.

This paper is a cut from a 12x12 paper from Bo Bunny.

The white heart is metal and I bought it last Christmas in a decorating shop. "God Jul" means Merry Christmas.The green ribbon goes  around to the back too. The little closter is better seen in this picture.

The big button is an old one I found in a thrift store once, the metal one I bought new. Both of the buttons and the cute little charm is threaded with linen yarn.

I very much like my little album and it will be a joy to fill it. I won´t do an everyday effort this year though, just on those days that I want to and feel I have something to say. Maybe I end up doing most days, who knows, but I don´t want to have any pressure on me doing something for every day. And the thought with this album is that it shall last for several Christmases, the years I intend to do an everday-thing I will do a seperat album, it´s fun doing that every once in a while.

Small things around the house

Just wanted to show you this and that in my world right now.

My in-laws gave me this wonderful pumpkin. I love pumkins but the ones I grew this year was quite a failure so that´s kind of sad. But that made me so much happier for the one I was given.

This is what you can see in my kitchen window right now, one beautyful flower and a plate with seeds I´ve taken from my flowers in the garden, they are lying there to dry before I put them away ´till spring.

My one and only corner just for beauty... Most of the space in our house is just for needs, but this little corner is for beauty and I´m so happy about it. The small figures looks like this...

I found it in a shop shortly after our daughter had died and it looked just like her and her little brother. She now being our little angel and whatching over her beloved little brother. I cried right there in the shop when I saw it. It is one of my most presued things.

This is my new calender for next year. Isn´t it wonderful?!

It looks like this on the inside. I like that it doesn´t look buisnesslike. I just need a little one to keep track of our private things and I didn´t need such a fine one but being a scrapbooker I couldn´t but see what a lovely little minibook it could be made into in 2013!!

I hope you will have a ice week!

Joking

My youngest daughter has a great sense of humor and on her sisters birthday she joked around with her father giving him a really small plate for the cake. She went to the doll-house to find it! And since he likes a good joke he made the most of this photo oppertunaty too!

Nicholas Sparks

I resently bought this book...

..when I really wanted something new to read. I had wanted to read his books for a while, since I so much like the two films made from his books that I´ve seen, Message in a bottle and Dear John.

So what did I think about it? Well, the story was good, the people easy to sympatice with, but still it didn´t touch my heart. I really don´t know why, but I guess it has something to do with his writing. But on the other hand many people like his books, so maybe it´s me, I don´t know.

Since I so much like the movie Dear John I really have wanted to read the book, so when I saw it at the bookstore yesterday I actually read the end of it there (shame on me!) and I´m glad I did, for the ending wasn´t as in the movie, that is happy and I want happy endings!! I guess the movie Message in a bottle is more true to the book since it ends bad too... But even if it does, the rest of the movie is so very good that I still like it. But I just couldn´t stand if Dear John had ended as in the book, those two people touched me such much that I´d be cruched if they didn´t end up together in the end!! The actors are so very good, they make your heart brake.

I´m quite sad that I didn´t like the book, since I really wanted to find something new to like, but not much to do about it. I will make a go for In Austenland by Shannon Hale next, I believe that will be in my tast.

Sunshine girl

Here´s my sunshine girl on her 14th birthday.

14 is an interesting age... People change and kind of like becomes another person. But I´m lucky, for even though my girl is not really like she use to be she´s still such a lovely girl and tries really hard to be good. I´m so glad I´ve chosen to be a stay-at-home mom with all my kids, so that when they grow up we´re not not used to talk to each other. I love my children, they´re such nice people. I am truely blessed.

Dressing up my book

Some time ago I made a book from scratch, inspired by the Smash books. Not that it´s very much like a smash book, but still, that´s how it started. You can see the base here.

I used my husbands drill to make the holes in the cover and that didn´t really go the way I wanted to, so it´s not as nice as I´d wish... I think I want a Crop-a-dile for Christmas!!

Now I have decorated all the white pages with different patterned paper, some of them really old. Since the width of both the pages together are more than 12" (30,5 cm) I had to be creative with some matching papers, but I think that only makes it more interesting. I´m really pleased with the result so far. Now I just have to figure out what to use it for!!!

My starting page. Doesn´t look much now but here I have it all figured out what to do.

I knew right away that this house would go here, it was part of the original planning. I have some other things that also has a special home in this book but haven´t been put in place yet. Here I obviously will talk about home in some way.

Here I used a strip from a My Minds Eye paper as decoration. This will be something about my family. 

The paper continue on the next spread, that´s kind of nice.

 I have some page protectors here and there in the book too and I´ve put some more neutral papers on the pages surrounding them, so it won´t be too difficult matching what´s in the page protectors with these papers.

This has to be something about writing, don´t you think?

This is a paper I really love (I love sunflowers) but it´s so hard to use on a page for me. How I will sort that thing out here is yet to be seen... The same goes for the paper below, as well as the blue, red and cream some pages down.

 

And since this paper has a dress pattern on it it has to be something about sewing here.

Here I made a pocket on the right, to put "something" in, I have no idee yet as to what that someting will be.

And here´s the last page. I´m not sure I will do anything here at all, it kind of speaks for itself.

Starting point

When I scrapbook happenings my starting point is always the photos. This is documenting the happenings in our lives and I want to show as much as possible of the people and the scenery. We have lived in some different places and having the homes and surroundings showing in all those photos means a lot to us. It helps us remember. So a lot of photos is almost always the thing on these layouts and with a lot of photos the embellishments stands back.

Here is my latest such layout, about my daughter and son-in-law making a beautyful fens in our garden last easter. They used a whole day doing this and the result was great, just what I wanted. It screens off the new vegetable growings from the other part of the garden.

This week has been really lovely, summer came back for a few days. It´s been wonderful. Getting these days of sun will mean a lot when winter is here.

Have a lovely weekend!