December has completely snuck up on me this year.

Just as it was starting to feel like things were slowing down, it’s the 1st of December again.

So without any real preparation other than a few passing thoughts, I realise it’s day 2 of Shimelle’s JYC. Surprisingly, this doesn’t panic me. This year I’m taking it easy but definitely taking part and over the next few days I’ll be figuring out the best way to make it work for me in 2011 – most likely a small scrapbook format, a focus on photos and an emphasis on documenting the Christmas season as a whole rather than making sure something is completed each day. Some days in December may be rather uneventful, flying away to spend Christmas in Germany will most likely be more interesting

the manifesto…

…this December will be my 4th Christmas season spent in London. I want to remember the day-to-day: the weather, seasonal coffee cups, hats & gloves, pigeon footprints in the snow, mulled wine and everything that’s awesome about Christmas in this city. I want to document my first trip to Germany and capture what another part of Europe looks like at this time of year. I want to mark my last Christmas as a ‘Miss’ (next year I’ll be spending it with my husband!) and record the realities of last-minute wedding planning during the silly season.

Who else is working on a JYC project this year? Looking forward to seeing what my crafty friends have planned.

N x

…i’m starting to feel a little more on top of things after a hectic few weeks

…i’m realising that you if you don’t ask, you don’t get – and often nothing to lose in asking in the first place

…i’m thinking about setting goals, and especially as it’s my birthday month, what my 28 goals by 28 is going to be (28! sheesh!)

…i’m feeling secretly pleased that there’s grey skies above and orange leaves on the tree outside

…i’m thinking about how I can clear some space in my mind to work on everything I want to be doing right now

…i’m looking at my creations so far from my first Design Team kit and kinda liking how they’re coming together

…i’m wondering what the weekend will hold, other than lots of sleeping and rugby-cheering

N x

A little while back I mentioned how super excited I was about being offered a spot on a new design team. I’m absolutely stoked to say that I’m now a member of the brand new Papercrafts.TV design team and I’m really looking forward to receiving my first kit shortly! I’m not 100% sure what to expect, but I’m so excited about having a regular creative challenge to work on over the next year.

Being on a design team has been a goal in the back of my mind for quite a while now, and it’s such an amazing feeling to finally get there. Starting a blog and sharing my scrapbooking projects with other people has probably been the biggest and most important step in helping me achieve that.

So who exactly am I designing for? Papercrafts.TV is a new paper crafting company based in Wales, that specialises in stamping and scrapbooking supplies. They’re a small company with an awesome ethos of listening to customers as much as possible, encouraging input on what they should stock and reviews on products. I read up a lot about design teams before I started applying, and this project ticked all the boxes and feels like a really good match for me. (Definitely check out  Julie’s Tips for the Design Team Curious blog series if you’ve ever thought about applying, I found it really, really helpful!)

To kick things off, I’ve answered a bunch of questions over on the Papercrafts.TV blog about my crafty habits, so if you have a minute and you’re dying to know what crafty tool I couldn’t live without (which I’m sure you must be :p), then check it out

Really looking forward to sharing my first design team creation with you all soon, wish me luck!!

N x

A couple of weeks back, the Fiance and I hopped over to Switzerland for the weekend to attend some good friends over ours’ wedding celebration. The party itself was amongst the vines looking down over Lake Geneva on a stunningly hot blue-sky day. Bliss!

I had a mini-album in mind for the trip before we set off and I decided to take way more photos than usual on my iPhone using the Hipstamatic app…and actually to my surprise I took very photos on my DSLR. I made sure to capture the whole of the trip on my phone – from drinks at the airport before take-off, to the beautiful scenery at the wedding and the bunk beds in our hostel room

With the mini album in mind, I kept a lot of receipts, tickets & such from the trip as I knew I’d be including as many as possible in the album. When Kirsty sent through the embellishment I thought it’d be perfect for the cover of my album, as I’d already paper-clipped a lot of those extra bits & pieces from my travels throughout the book – so the paper-clip feature definitely worked with the cover.

Here’s a glimpse inside the rest of the book…

at Gatwick Airport

funny airport cutlery

swiss train tickets - by paperclip and by photo!

alp horns amongst the vines

highly recommended accommodation at the Lausanne Guesthouse

…and that’s it! If you’re hopping blogs, the next stop on the list is at Lou’s lovely corner of the internet – enjoy!

I’ve been rather busy between celebrating in Switzerland, cycling in the Netherlands, my parents arriving from New Zealand and a quick night’s camping in Dorset – all in the past month! There’s so much for me to catch up on here and I can’t wait to share lots of photos and stories once all this adventuring calms down next month. In the meantime, I’ll be exploring the French countryside

N x

Some might consider it junk, but to me they are treasures waiting to be pored over in years to come, conjuring memories from far away places. As well as for nostalgic reasons, I’ve always thought they had papercrafting potential…

One such item is the standard airline-issue luggage tag. I used to just rip these off my bag and throw them away when I was packing for the next trip but I recently found a couple stashed away in my Shoebox of Random Paper Things Found Overseas (yep, that’s what I’m calling it now).

These labels have huge scrapbooking potential! They have a pattern (the stripes), in colours that go with everything (black & white), with an adhesive backing (aka, it’s already a sticker!) and best of all: they have some connection to a trip I’ve taken somewhere and I think it’s quite a subtle way to use travel ephemera in a scrapbooking layout or craft project. Oh, and they’re free, which is always a bonus

So here’s a couple of ways I used 2 different airline luggage labels that I had lying around…

{ the tag }

With the first one, I started with a kraft shipping tag and just cut up the label so I could just use the stripey barcode sections. Because they’re already backed with adhesive, they’re super easy to stick down and use as a base for the tag embellishments.

The next step is to layer on other patterned or coloured papers. I wanted to make the most of the barcode base instead of trying to disguise it as something else, which is why I added this striped paper in shades of blue and green. I decided to include another element of the airline baggage tag and cut out the AKL airport code for the destination because I knew I was going to include it in a layout about my trip back home.

Lastly, keep adding other embellishments until you’re happy. I stapled on a short piece of blue ric rac and another strip of patterned paper and then I was done…

Here’s how I used the tag in a layout (not my usual style but I like it)…

{ the layout }

With the second airline baggage label I wanted to use it directly on a layout in the same why you might use a sheet of patterned paper. Because the label tags are obviously much narrower than a normal sheet of paper, I decided to use my paper in strips, as it’s much easier to incorporate than trying to use larger blocks of paper (which is what I usually do).

As you can see I cut the papers to the size of the starburst sections on the Sassafras page. I had to use 4 separate pieces of the baggage label to fill the section on the right hand side of the photo – basically I used some post-it notes to create a pattern and then cut the barcodes out from that.

I think the barcode pattern works well with all the starburst lines on the Sassafrass page I’ve used as the base, as well as the lines in the photo. Any stripey paper could have worked in this layout, which makes it less obviously barcode-y I think (barcode-y is a word, right?!)

I keep thinking of other ways I could craft with these baggage labels, so I’ll try and use them in a few more projects.

Here a few other ideas:

• If you’re making an on-the-go scrapbook album during your travels, you could save the baggage labels, cut them into tape-sized strips and use them to stick down receipts or other bits & pieces into your album.
• Depending on where you’re flying, you could use the destination code section of the label as part of a layout title (I used it on my embellishment tag but that wasn’t really part of the layout text). I’d love to use it with some smaller coloured letter stickers as part of a longer title to brighten up the black & white lettering of the tag.
• If you were flying to a few destinations as part of one holiday, I think it would be fun to use them as tabs in a mini-album. I’d cut a larger rectangle around the destination code section and then fold it over the page edge in the album to see the different sections of the album (and a reminder of everywhere you visited!) at a glance.

I’m hoping to try out a few more of those ideas next time, I just need to book a few more flights first so I can collect some more baggage labels

Would you ever use one of them in a project? Or are they are bit barcode-y for you?

N x

You might have noticed I took a little impromptu break from blogging for a few weeks. I’ve been feeling a little overwhelmed with a few things going on right now and one little niggle was that this blog isn’t exactly what I want it to be at the moment – both the design of it and the way I balance everything I want to write about.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want this blog to be, and I’ve made one small step in the right direction which you also might have noticed – I’ve changed my header image and after hours of frustrated searching online I managed to make one tiny CSS tweak to fix something that was really bugging me, yay! Would love to know what you think of it!

So this is what I’ve been up to over the past couple of weeks…

…met up with the lovely Zoe, another Kiwi blogger who’s just moved to London from Germany. We wandered around Portobello Road and then finished up the afternoon in a nearby Garden Bar.

…lots of lying on the grass in the park, staring up at the sky & daydreaming with the Fiance about plans for our ‘Big Trip’ as we watch planes fly over the city.

…spent last weekend in Switzerland, enjoyed the amazing 30+ degree sunny weather, went to the wedding celebration of some good friends of ours who live there, visited a castle (as you do) and ate my fair share of cheese & croissants (lots more to share about this weekend & I’m preparing to make a little mini-album of the trip!)

…trying on wedding dresses, eeep! I’ve been to three bridal boutiques already and I’ve tried on quite a wide range of dresses which has been an interesting and overall really fun experience. I pretty much fell in love with one I tried on at the first place I went to but I want to try on a few more before I 100% make the decision to go with it (and it’s a little more than I was planning on paying so I definitely want to be sure about it!)

…counting down the days until my Mum & Dad arrive in Europe. SO EXCITED!..that is all.

…counting down the hours to my next trip away, this time it’s a cycling trip in the Netherlands which I’m also incredibly excited about.

I think my face in this photo best sums how I’m feeling right now…

…it is quite possibly the most excited I have ever looked in a photo before (actually just the most excited ever, not just in a photo) and I think I look rather hilarious & chipmunk-like. In case you’re wondering what the heck I’m doing, this is a wading pool in downtown Lausanne (in Switzerland), it was insanely hot so we decided to walk through that instead of on the footpath, which was an excellent decision. The Lausanne triathalon was happening that weekend and this pool was right next to the area of stalls, markets, etc that were set up for it.

Before I put my coffee cup away and head off to work I want to say thanks for being patient with me over my unannounced blogging break

N x

A very simple page in my Explore album but easily my favourite entry from Week 1, most likely because I used this amazing London map paper from October Afternoon & a quote from one of my favourite bands that pretty much sums up my thoughts on moving to London.

Here, in my place and time,

and here in my own skin,

I can finally begin.

Deep Blue – Arcade Fire, The Suburbs

At school and then later on at university I often felt like it was something I just had to get past before doing what I really wanted to do, move to London and go travelling. I had this idea that my life wouldn’t properly ‘begin’ until I was off on my big adventure. It’s a great reminder for me to appreciate the everyday aspects of living in London. After 3 years here it’s easy to get caught up in the daily grind.

But in the end, I am here. In London. In my place and time, as they say.

N x

Happy Friday!

Today is especially exciting for me, because I have a guest post (my first ever!) up on Pretty Zoo, about some of my favourite London spots, including the place where I got that lolly cake in the photo. Please hop over and read my post here.

Have a wonderful weekend,

N x

As you all know by now, photography & travel are two things I’m really passionate about. I find ‘travel photography’ to be a pretty broad genre within photography. In my opinion it’s about capturing a place, a culture & a moment in time – and that could meaning shooting portraits, wildlife, landscapes, architecture, macro shots of small details and everything in between – but all of these are areas of photography expertise in their own right! This makes it a tricky type of photography to practice and improve on, which is what I’m all about right now – getting better, taking more photos, and coming back with more photos I love after each new trip I go on.

So I’m going to record a few of the lessons I’ve learnt along the way, as an affirmation that I have indeed learnt and improved – and if you haven’t already made the same mistakes as me, maybe I can help someone else avoid one or two of their own

One of my all time favourite photography subjects when I’m travelling is stray cats and dogs. As an animal lover, it’s heartbreaking when they so obviously need a home but sometimes they look perfectly happy and well-fed and it’s not so bad.

I stumbled across (almost literally) this gorgeous little kitten in Morocco, on Christmas Day in 2008. We were hiking around the Todra Gorge and had to walk through this tiny mountain village to make our way up the hills behind it. I spotted her sitting on some steps (she looks like a ‘her’, don’t you think?) huddled into a corner as this big group of people walked past and because I pretty much always have my camera in my hands I just dropped down, took a few quick shots and gave her a quick pat before quickly re-joining the group.

She even looked straight at me as I cooed and clicked away and yet this photo is completely ruined because I didn’t check where my autofocus points were set before taking the photos. I now have four photos of an adorable Moroccan kitten and not one image where the kitten’s face is in focus.

the lesson…

If I had taken just one moment to check which autofocus point my camera was set on (which was a point somewhere around the bottom left third of the frame) and change it to the centre of the frame, I might have only had time to take one photo – but I’d rather have had one perfect photo than four not-so-great ones.

In saying that, I still really love looking at this photo (not for it’s technical photographic perfection obviously) but it still takes me right back there – seeing that small, vulnerable little kitten that no-one else in our group noticed to stop and take a photo of and having just a moment to pat her.

the happy ending…

So, did I actually learn my lesson? Well I’m happy to report that just about a year later we went back to Morocco (only to Marrakech the second time) and I had a chance to photograph another stray kitten and this time I didn’t blow it. I took a moment to make sure I had her uber-adorable face in focus and although I only had time to take one photo, it was one that I would definitely be happy to print…

Have you ever ruined a potentially amazing photo because of it being out of focus? I’m sure I’m not the first to make this mistake!

N x

The overall theme for my Explore project is to focus on my big adventure that started three years ago when I moved to London – both the big memorable trips away we’ve had over that time and the day-to-day adventure that is happening now, living overseas.

When it’s just another routine day – waking up, going to work, coming home – it’s easy to just go with the flow and accept that as my normal everyday life. I find myself so much happier and positive when I stop to notice and appreciate the interesting things about London life, the things I now take for granted.

So my self-portrait is in the reflection of a tube window – something ordinary and routine for millions of Londoners – but something that was new & exciting to me when I first arrived here and something I’m bound to long for when one day when I find myself relying on Auckland’s sub-par public transport :p

After days of rain, the sun is finally out in London so I’m feeling optimistic about a blissful weekend in the big city & maybe an adventure or two

N x