Big up to Helen Tilbury (my fellow Saffa) for starting a new challenge blog. And it looks like it's going to be a huge one!

As I am typing this I realised that it is actually rather co-incidental that I used SATW's very first challenge to commemorate my daughter's very first blog post.



Her blog's name is “Life According to Karla” but the first post was titled “Hello my name is Karla”. The same photo was used in the post.



I started with a hand drawn circle, using Distress ink and blotting with a paper napkin for the distressed effect.

For the title I used some yellow Amy Tangerine thickers, which I coloured black with a Faber-Castell Big Brush Pen.



The fence and doors were painted with a white acrylic dabber by Ranger, giving it some subtle texture.



I used a variety of flowers (paper, crochet and wood) for my clusters, adding to the texture on the page.



I laced a string of fine beads through the tags for some added interest.



Here is the sketch and mood board from SATW.

These 2 people really are the loves of my life. Where would I be without them?

When my husband asked me this morning what I wanted to do today, I thought, “oh no, does he want to go out”? It is Mother's Day after all. He seemed pretty happy when I replied, “nothing”.
We spent a quiet day at home, having chicken braai leftovers for lunch. Karla and I did some scrapbooking together and I manage to do 2 layouts.

This was the first of them:



I used the May sketch over at Paperhaus for this layout.

Oops, I completely forgot to blog about this one! I finished it over a month ago.

I loved this lesson by Danita about painting over a printed image. It's really that simple! Take a magazine photo (preferably almost full-page) and, starting with watered down gesso, followed by colour (not necessarily “life-like” colour), paint over the image, creating a masterpiece. See, I painted Liv Tyler!



Now I just have 10 more weeks to catch up on before Monday. No biggie

Guess what! Another photo of the cousins at Blouberg Beach. I'm just not getting tired of these photos, they are SO great! Aaaaannnd... there's more to come!

This one was taken on my sister-in-law's birthday. We had lunch at Onse Huisie and sundowners at Blue Peter. What a perfect autumn day!

I came to realise that I have a LOT of Blouberg Beach photos... all taken on different days. Most of them are of Karla and her cousin Juan. They both love the beach and make the most gorgeous photos, playing and running and just being awesome kids!

This photo was taken on a sunny afternoon in February when I took the 2 rascals to Blouberg.



Here is the photo I used.



I love how the title came out.



The layout was based on the current sketch over at Stuck Sketches.

For Karla's birthday in March we invited 3 friends and went to Mouilli Point for a day of putt-putt and picnic. After quite some time in the Cape Town sun we went home for a swim. What a day! Four 7-8 year old girls can be very cute together but boy!they DO fight over the silliest things. Still we had an amazing day with awesome weather.

This photo was taken at the putt-putt.



Here are some closeups of the cute elements.













I have been having a real tough time with Karla's blog between Nucleus and Bloglovin. The title link is simply not linking. The blog link works perfectly. If anyone has a Nucleus blog linked up with Bloglovin and you have overcome this hurdle, please give me some tips. I am getting desperate. I have now also tried Networked Blogs and it seems to give a whole NEW list of errors, so I gave up after the first 5 seconds. Hubby has been searching the internet and changing and updating things all over the place and not been able to find a solution either. One of those moments where you go, "weeeeeelll, if YOU can't fix it, how do you expect ME to know?! HA!

I took Karla and a friend to Cape Town during the school holidays in January. We had such a fun day feeding squirrels and pigeons in the Botanical Gardens, visiting the museum, watching a show at the Planetarium and ending off our day with a visit to the Castle of Good Hope. I love this photo of the bell tower.

For the background I used a paper I created when I first discovered Tim Holtz, distressing, stamping and masking. I played around with some techniques and left the page laying around for some time (a few years). I think the colours worked pretty well with the rest of the layout.



Here are some closeups:







This is the sketch I used by Sketchabilities.