Cupcaked to death...

Hello!
I didn't think it was possible but I may not want to make cupcakes again for a while... but I certainly am enjoying the left overs! It was Mum and Auntie Julie's 60th Birthday party on Saturday and I made 90 large and 30 small cupcakes to adorn their cupcake birthday tree. I filled every decent sized tupperware container I had, plus borrowed 2 from Felicity and even had to buy a couple more! When I finally iced them and had no other containers to put them in I put them in baking trays to transport! Ingenious {patting self on back}. My cousin Megan's friend owns this cool acrylic cupcake tower so we filled it with as many cupcakes as can be squished on. That, it turns out, is only about 70, so I ended up not even getting to put them all out! Then, because there were other desserts too, only about 60% of the cupcakes got eaten so I sent some home with Mum, Yvette and AJ and I have a mountain left over! Anyone want to come over for cupcakes? I have 4 flavours to choose from- Coffee with Coffee Buttercream, Vanilla with Lemon Cream Cheese Icing, Strawberry swirl with Pink Vanilla Buttercream and Chocolate Mudcake with Dark Chocolate Ganache ! Once again my work friends "score!" some baking {cheering}.
I may have just sneakily eaten a cupcake while preparing dinner- mental note- eating a chocolate mudcake cupcake is not pleasant when your hands still smell like freshly crushed garlic. Ew! I wondered what that odd smell was.
So... Happy Birthday Mum and Auntie Julie! I'm so glad you had a wonderful time at your party, I know we did! And I hope you enjoy your leftover cupcakes too!
:) C

Mr Mojo is back!

Hello Mr Mojo! It's nice that you have returned so soon! Hooray! I did a page yesterday and another one today, so yay to having some creativity back {cheering!}
I realised I hadn't posted this last page I did at Yvette's! I only 1/2 finished it at her house, but I had (reluctantly, cos Mr Mojo wasn't with me) finished it the week we returned but it's been just sitting on top of my album, not even put in there yet! See, I need Mr Mojo for everything!
These sweet cupcakes were something I had been wanting to make ever since I bought the mini-corinthian stick biscuits! I wanted to scrap this pic cos they look so delicious! LOL! I love the pink heart doily Yvette gave me while I was staying in Canberra, I think Mum gave them to her. I have seen bits of them poking out from under Yvette's delicious layers on LO's on her blog recently! I sewed around the edge of mine as I was sewing the paper layers down. I hadn't sewed on a LO for a while, but Yvette inspired me!
Then yesterday I got back to my desk and made this page too! Yay for feeling inspired! I guess cos it was a nice relaxing weekend :) I love relaxing weekends!
These pics are from my Frocks and Fascinator's High Tea for my Bridal Shower back in Feb. I love the pics my friend Dennis took for us! My family are super fantastic when it comes to baking so I had the best "spread" of lemon slice, Lumberjack cake, mini cupcakes, cupcake pops, chocolate crackles, Raspberry coconut loaf etc etc! They were all soooo delicious! I had fun gathering some tea party related scrapping stuff like the gold cake stand and coffee pot rub-ons I got in my last 2peas order, plus the AC "sugar coated goodness" sticker from 2peas too! YUM! Love cupcake related scrapping supplies {LOL}. I hope Mr Mojo stays around for a while yet!
Happy Monday!
:) C
P.S. I just realised the best thing about these 2 pages is their background paper is OLD!! I mean WAY OLD!! Some of the earliest ones in my stash. Hooray!

A Cupcake from my mind...

Hello!
I had this idea for a cupcake a while ago when I spotted these cute mini Corinthian biscuit sticks in Aldi. Oh they were so cute and inspired me to dream up a Strawberry Sundae Cupcake! I used a Strawberry Cupcake recipe from my Primrose Bakery Cupcakes book then "iced" them with Marshmallow I made from scratch (remind me why I did that again?!) then poked in the corinthian stick and Will sprinkled them for me with pink and white sprinkle sticks. I had to rope in Will's help cos home made marshmallow is the most ridiculous thing to try and work with. I had it EVERYWHERE! All over the bench, all over all the utensils, all over my hands, up my arm, on my face, in my hair! I was like a small child with a vegemite sandwich. It was monstrous! I should have just microwaved store bought marshmallow then whipped them really quickly once they'd cooled a bit, but you live and learn these things!
In the end (after Will cleaned up my marshmallow tornado for me cos he's the best husband ever and I had to rush off to work- he got a cupcake as payment) they were really yummy Cupcakes! The marshmallow gave them a little something extra, rather than the usual buttercream. The corinthian stick went soft after 2 days in tupperware though, so best eaten straight away. I loved them , and will make them again!!
:) C

How about some Honeymoon shares?!

I've already gotten into the swing of Scrappin some Honeymoon pages! I know I have to do it while the holiday vibe is still with me, before work saps out all the happiness and wonderful memories {giggles} no not really... well, maybe a little bit.
I started out with one of my fave pics from our Honeymoon, one I took on my phone and texted to Felicity. I didn't want to just journal "here we are at the Statue of Liberty" cos that's kinda obvious so I wrote how excited I was to come home and find this pic in a frame on our dining table! Felicity had printed it, framed it and put it on the table with a note to say there was fresh bread and milk to help with the jetlag.. AND had blown up red, black and white balloons and filled our lounge room with them! It was so awesome to come home and still feel like we were super special! Thank you so much Felicity!! I have been hoarding this apple paper for about 3 years waiting for the perfect page.. there is no more perfect place to use it than for a page on the "Big Apple"! The glitter button was a RAK from Yvette during her recent "glitter everything in sight" phase- thank you {wink!}

Have you heard of Magnolia Bakery? They are the most famous Cupcake bakery in NY, and I was pleased to get a chance to indulge in a Banana Cupcake with Chocolate Caramel Buttercream frosting. It was delicious! I didn't see any celebrities there though {sigh!} In fact, the only "celebrity" (I use that lightly) we saw on the whole trip was one of the guys off the Thredbo ad, he's now on a Maccas ad, and he was sitting across from us on the plane back to Australia! Bummer! We did see Jerry Springer and Steve Martin on the big screen at our baseball game, does that count? When they put Jerry on the big screen, our whole section started chanting "Jerry! Jerry!" All we needed was a bitch fight between a midgit and a trailer park ho with no front teeth, and we would have really felt like we were on the set of the show! LOL! Back to the page... isn't the cupcake sticker the cutest? It's Martha Stewart, but I did accent it with some of my long-hoarded stash like the flower lace cardstock, the journal spot and the tab sticker! Oh I love to use up my stash! Well, I have to anyway seeing as I bought like 40 papers in the US! How can you turn them down when some were 65c??!

Catch you later, I think I'm going to go create now!

:) C

Scrappin with like a million photos.

It's been a long time since I scrapped a page with lots of pics. I have been leaning toward the single photo or just a couple of pics pages for while, then I did these 2 pages lately and broke back into my many-pics-to-a-page mould! This first page is of an outing Will and I took together to The Entrance. I'd never been to The Entrance before but Will goes there fishing all the time. We had coffee and cake then fish and chips sitting beside the lagoon. Afterwards I layed on a rug reading my book as Will did some fishing. He only caught tiny bream but did have a major effort of hooking 2 small bream at once! It was fun to get out of Sydney for a while and have some time chatting and relaxing by the water. I hope we get more time to do that after the wedding is over (it's a little hectic at the moment!)

The second page is all about my new Cupcake book and having fun making some cupcakes from it (BTW Mr Puffy and friends are making a cacophany of Kookaburra laughs outside at the moment! He makes me happy!) These cupcakes are much bigger than the recipes in the Woman's Weekly Cupcake Book which I also love and there are also different flavours. I love baking and I wanted to capture that on a page, but I had to include that ridiculous pic of me with the icing gun! Hillarious.

The great thing about these 2 pages is using up the old papers before I go to the US! I'm on a scrapping roll at the moment, I did another page yesterday! I think it's a great outlet during the busy-ness of Wedding plans!

It's my last day of work today for almost 5 weeks! Hooray! I'm so looking forward to it. I've only had 2 annual leave days since we went to Japan in May last year so I'm in desperate need of some time off! Luckily Mum is coming to stay for the week before the wedding, hopefully she makes sure I don't wear myself out before the big day!

:) C

I Love you Tivo..

Yep I got my Tivo.. finally!! Remember it's how I wanted to stimulate the economy after KRudd slipped me a couple hundred $$ way back in April for being an awesome tax payer?! Well I didn't get it then cos I thought I had to buy all these fancy connections to get it to work, but after a quick trip to Dick Smith on Sunday I came away with a Tivo and some cheap-o connections from the crap shop down the road and I'm in business!! So the past few days have been an enjoyable sea of TV shows I actually want to watch. Yeah!! (FYI- it's basically a HD Recorder for normal TV but it does cool stuff that allows me to free up my own memory, like you can set it to tape a whole season of a show with only a couple of clicks and don't have to remember to set it every week, you can pause live TV, tape 2 shows at once while watching a 3rd and it acts as a set top box too cos I didn't have digital TV before.) Also it does this way cool thing where you put in an actor's name (such as Jason Statham) and it will tape anything that he's in!! Cool hey! Also you can log on to it via the internet so if I'm at work and forgot to tape something I can log on and do it! Yeah!! Happy me. Thanks KRUDD!!

So last week I also did some scrappin and I'm really knuckling down now and using up lots of my old scrappin stuff that I've had for ages. I consider something old if I got it more than 18 months ago (isn't that sad! I have so much stuff!!) and more and more I'm reaching for this stuff to use it up and only using a bit here and there of new stuff. Plus, I haven't gone scrapbook shopping for ages! You proud? I hope so, I am {wink!!}

My new fave shop is called Cupcakes on Pitt, and although there must be one in Pitt St in the City I've only been to the one at Parramatta, and BOY IT"S GOOD!! I saw a man come up the escalator with a box that had the logo on it and I ran down the escalator and chased around like a mad woman until I found the shop!! I was in HEAVEN!! The cupcakes are $2 each (can you believe it?!) and are just SO SO SO SO good. Yvette, you have to come to stay just to try some! I loved the Lemon Merangue on the left- there was a ball of lemon tart in the middle and the soft fluffy merangue on top was to die for! The Black Forest on the right was also really good: the ganache was just soooooo delicious! I have since been back for another Lemon Merangue and a Peanut Butter cupcake, also wonderful! So the OLD on this page is the PP, fozz felt, chipboard letters, the pink metal tabs, the pink slide frame (cut in half above the pics), the journal spots, metal flower brad, the cherry sticker and the white rub ons! In fact the only new thing is the jewels! LOL!! Yay me! And Yay for delicious cupcakes too... oh I'd love one right now {licking kips!}
:) C

Project 365 Collage #11

Wow, can you believe we are now past 100 days into the year? That's unbelievable! This year has already flown past.. quick grab on before it passes you by! So, another 9 days have passes (actually this collage was due last Tues, so forgive me!) and there are some of the more every-day type things happening this time: I am lucky enough to have a boy who likes to cook! He is especially fantastic at Fried Rice, it is so so delicious! Here he is demonstrating the tradition Chinese method of eating rice called "Shovelling"; chairs all lined up at the Market Research night I did for 3 mobile. They called me 4 times to make sure I was coming and insisted I not be late- I arrived on time and was only one of 2 people, everyone else (including the moderator) was late!; Yvette's birthday card {owls=love!}; two of my favourite things for winter- tights and my new Boots from Target- an absolute bargain on sale for $32, gotta love them!; no overtime means time to paint my toenails, Yay!; Samira's birthday party in the city (there's my cool new dress!); yeah it's time for "The Great Bedroom Clean Up" which I'm proud to say happened and now I have a whole floor to walk around and lay on etc, not just a path through the middle, hooray!; delivering Easter Pamphlets to local letterboxes for church; me in my new favourite Little Red Riding Hood T-shirt I got last weekend. Isn't it the sweetest?!! Actually, it's probably a little too small to see here, but trust me, it's way cute :)

Thanks Yvette, but I wasn't fishing for complements in the last post when I said I didn't like my pages at the moment! I am planning on getting a bunch of pics printed this week so that I can have some more inspiring pics to scrap, and therefore make pages that i like! I did this page this week and I do acutally like it. I think the green and purple combo will be a fresh addition to my album and it suits the pics from Jacaranda last year! The purple paper is so bold IRL and goes nicely with the more muted green. I had fun doing the journalling straight on the PP with hand-drawn white pen lines underneath. The artisan frame I got as a thank you when I bought some stamps off ebay. Awesome! I have used up all but one piece of about 9 that the lovely lady gave me. Hurrah for freebies!

I've had a pretty constructive day today, getting up early and heading off to Ofis, the Harvey Norman Officeworks-type store that is closing down. I got some cool bargains, like a 4GB fast speed Memory Card for my camera for only $20. Bargain! Plus more scissors for my Stampin Up kit cos I never have enough and some pretty paper and envelopes. Then it was off to Parra Westfield to exchange money for Japan (only a month away!! EXCITEMENT!!) and get Linh a present. And I found my new favourite store there.. Cupcakes on Pitt. DELICIOUS! I know I make my own cupcakes but these looked so cute and were only $2 each and came in a cute carry box so I had to try 2 out! I got a Lemon Merangue and a Black Forrest Cupcake. I have to say the Lemon Merangue one was totally delicous! Oh so fluffy merangue and delicious lemony taste!! Heaven! The Black Forrest one was also nice, but honestly, it's not hard to make a delicious chocolate cupcake. I recommend Cupcakes on Pitt! If you're looking for them at Parra they are on the very bottom level in the walkway that leads from the bottom level food court over toward the station. Try them! You'll love them too!

I'm off to the city again tonight, this time for my friend Linh's birthday. We're having Brazillian BBQ this time which will be interesting, I haven't had that before!

:) C

A little creativity today..

No OT today so the plan was to finish off some things for Mum's Craft Sale this Saturday. I started these cute little cupcakes about 2 weeks ago, felting them with hand dyed wool roving I got at the Alumny Creek Markets in Grafton, but that's as far as they had got. So today I set about sewing the button and beads on, stuffing and blanket stitching the edges and... it took FOREVER!! So much for them being fun and quick {feeling stupid now}. I was supposed to finish off 2 birds I have felted too but I can't be bothered, how bad is that!! They are actually quite small, only about 5cm wide, so were very fiddly. Why did I make them so small? I dunno!! I made up the pattern from scratch cos I thought they'd make cute little hangers, and I also stitched a pin on the back so you can pin it onto bags/shirts etc.
I have sequinned these cute little Christmas Puddings for Mum's sale too, which I find actually very theraputic to do in front of the TV! As long as you take note not to drop any pins on the lounge cos they can be quite painful to sit on. I did sequin them in bed watching TV the other day and woke up with a sequin stuck to my face {giggling}. The hazards of crafting!
:) C

Pink Free Week is Officially over!

That's right people, I survived Pink Free Week (PFW)! I managed 4 scrapbook pages and 6 cards with no pink! What an effort! {happy dance}. I didn't realise just how many of my papers have a little bit of pink on them until I began PFW. Whoa! It was challenging! So here are the last few cards for PFW:

The first is using my new October Afternoon Owl stamps {quietly hugging these stamps}. I LOVE them. So cute! These 2 owls look so sweet together :) I'll stamp the "whooo loves you" sentiment on the inside too cos it's for my parents (hope they're not reading this).

This second card is using SEI papers that I got in a pack of 24 for $12 from the Darling Harbour Craft Show. I bought them really quickly (as you do at shows) and thought "oh yeah, I could use most of them".. well when I got them home and actually looked at them I loved them all! This is the reverse side of one I thought I would use first, when I looked at the back side I loved it even more! It was such a bargain. I used one of Fliss's frames (the negative left from the nestabilities- called Fliss's frame cos my sister Felicity loves to use this part probably more than the actual piece you cut out!) and mounted the cupcake directly on the PP. The paper looks so pretty coming through the frame. The Cupcake is by Hero Arts as is the Birthday Saying.

And here is the last page from PFW. Ok... the title letters look a little pink but they are very much like SU's Rose Red which means they're red so I'm not cheating (give me a break, it's the last day!!).

I love these pics of Will and I getting ready to go out to the city. Will is so cheeky! He grabbed my sunnies and kept pulling faces. What a cutie! This paper is by SEI also and notice I've used my 2 fave things at the moment- Lace cardstock and thickers! I think the nestabilities should be added to my fave things list too cos I LOVE them too :)

Hope you're having a good weekend! I'm still not over my flu so am feeling rather sorry for myself. Maybe I can get inspired and create some more. And now that PFW is over.... where's my pink.........?!

:) C

Same Layout, 2 Cards

Yay, I managed to squeeze in a little play time before work!! Woo Hoo!!
I had to get some more girly cards in my card box and I just LOVE these Cupcake stamps I got off ebay. You can scroll down to a few posts ago and you will see the big cupcake from the same set, and now here are 2 others. The set also comes with the "delicious" sentiment plus a few others. It is such a fun set to use, glad I bought it!
I coloured them using my SU inks and blender pens and stuck a Kaiser Jewel as the Cherry on top. The background card is more pink IRL (it's Purely Pomegranate) not as red as here.


So I've gotta start work at 12 and wanted to make more than 1 card (cos that's not such a great effort for a morning!) so I decided to make the same layout, same papers and everything, and just changed the image.
I pulled out a Bella, coloured her to match the paper, attached Prima flowers (cos for some reason I can't do a Bella card without them!!) and voila- card #2!! Yay! 2 cards in under an hour and still time to get ready for work! Lol.
I hope y'all have a great Friday!!
:)C