Little Corner of Ania

My back aches and the darn snow is to blame (or rather, the briiiiight idea I had that I'd shovel snow in the backyard for the car & get some exercise at the same time :p).
*whinewhinewhine*
That's all I wanted to say for today :p


Title: Telegraph: The worlds best passenger complaint letter?

Hambly is doing monthly product-showcases and this month was about using rubons and red/pink papers. Considering that February is the month of Valentines Day I wanted to use that as my inspiration. Oh, and also - because I love the Marit Larsen song "Steal my heart" where she sings "I love you I love you I love you" and I just simply love it - she sings it with like, the intense urge to say this phrase over and over and over again. ♥

The main-photo isn't all that - hrmf - prefer the closeups :) And I guess I might try rephotograph the layout itself sometime later today to see if it can get any better kinda..
I used Hamblys "Brocade" paper (magenta on jupiter red metallic paper - one of my fave color-combos from Hambly) for the "frame", freehand-cutting it then sewing it on the black cardstock. And as for rubons I used white "Antique frames" rubons and red "Hearts" rubons. I also mounted a white frametransparency over one of the rubon-frames, creating a 3d-doublelook. Me like :) Other stuff includes alphas from Making Memories and Scenic Route :)



I totally LOVED Sashas amazing mini (seen here) and was inspired to put together one of my own using the cute new "Classic Animals" rubons from Hambly along with old and new Hambly-papers..the size is approx 3.5x5" :) If you look close..you can see that I punched one of the cards wrong when making holes...*cough* Bleh. :p Anyways. Another colorcombo-fave here: Hot pink & orange!! Yum!! I like that the rubons comes with the name of the animal too - in English - so I decided to add the norwegian name on the back on the cards with leftover-AC thickers :)


Lagoon blue & red...mmmmm :)

Sorry...this mini goes into the ST Mini Album Idea book :)

In other news...I was scRapped by the ScrappeMania-girls! What a fun surprise - thank you girls!! :D I totally totally LOVE their layouts - they seriously did such a wonderful job scRapping and I love that they all have such diverse styles yet they're all such darn good scrappers!! (and hey I'm in one of those layouts too if you look closely lol)... soooo if you want to join and lift the same layout of mine that the gals did head over & check it out and link your layout to that post :) Feel free to link to me in comments too, I'd love to see what you've done :) :) There's a prize involved too - tags from Shabby Chic Crafts - cool :)

And ScrapScene ran one of their trendspot-posts yesterday and used one of my Hambly-layouts w/birdcages. Cool! :)

And oh, about the problem with the transition from lightroom to CS which I mentioned in my last post - ofcourse!! Thanks Kristine for the tip re. checking the preferences. Duh. I'm so stupid at times ;p Go to edit - preferences -external editing - the upper window is devoted to editing in CS - just pick sRGB as colorspace (mine was set to ProPhoto RGB by default) - & 8bits instead of 16 :) I assume if your incamera-settings is Adobe RGB then you should pick that one...I'll stick to sRGB for now (both incamera & lightroom/adobe), no need messin around hm?

Only two more days till my sis & nieces are here, guess I gotta speedyup trying to tidy the house somewhat for their arrival ;p

Title: Wonderwall - Oasis

Gawd. Why don't I blog more often - now I have like, a looooot to share :p
Right.
The most important things first ;)
Or well. Maybe the layout first, for those here for that - then feel free to skip the rest of the post or somethin like that :p Emilie Ahern guested Pencillines last night, with a super Emilie-sketch. Loved it! Pulled out a lot of old and new Scenic Route for this - Garland and leftovers from my old superfavorites Cape Town & Summer :) Not sure where the chipboardframe is from, got it from Maren...anyways, love that it's base is white - just sprayed lots of glimmermist (Graphite) over the outer frames :)

There's a new camera in town..


Lookie!
Is that a D700 with a hugeass 14-24 f/2.8 wideanglelens?? (and it's friggin HUGE I tell you)
Gawd!


Still learning the ropes of focusing w/the new cam and how to deal with such a wideanglelens..

Lovesit when he does that to her - places small toys on her head unbeknownst to her :p
And lovesit when I can capture the whole thing :D


Did I mention I'm still learning the ropes of this lens?? I find the distortion quite funny and think it's pretty cool.

The main-impression... OMG THE ISO! THE ISO!!!! It's JUST AS I IMAGINED AND HOPED!!!!! Omgawd....My old camera is a D70s- ancient by todays standard - and the noise popped out quite readily at like definitely ISO640, usually earlier... and 1600 is the max ISO... well...took the above image of my nephew at ISO800 - it's amazing..... took some sleeping-images of AMalie@ISO2000. 2000! And like, hardly any noise at all to speak of and totally totally totally smooooth compared to my old iso1600-images w/the old camera....gawd!! I haven't pushed it higher yet - but it can go up to 6400 and beyond if chosing uncalibrated mode..

And hot damn I love it when I use my 50mm f/1.4 on this camera!!!! :D

>>> CS/Lightroom-wizzies - please look <<<
Now, I've got one problem - I have started to use lightroom more regulary lately and I love that I can edit the jpgs quite "like" RAWs (ACR in CS3 - and yes I know I can edit jpgs with that too but I can't recall how in the first place *blush* *lazybutt*). Anyways. When I push edit in CS w/lightroom-preferences it automatically turns into 16-bits mode... and when I'm gonna save it back to jpg I have to change it to 8bits-mode and well, thats when things go wrong methinks - the photo (when in proofmode) turns browner, greyer, like when you use a B&W-layer to saturate and get a certain look on the photos - cool when intended, NOT so cool when eh, not intended, duh. And well, proofmode = printmode uh, which means - not good for my photos (see the photos used on the layout above - they're quite muted and brown compared to how they were supposed to be - bright and well, more orangeish :p). So eh, my mainquestion is - and I hope there's any photoshopwizzies out there reading this - how can I keep my lightroom-adjustments AND at the same time be able to keep the dazzlin' colors when saving in jpg-mode in CS??? Or do I simply have to save in .tiff and print those....I assume I'll get to keep the colors like they "are" then, I actually haven't tried *blush*..still....I'd like jpgs not tiffs!

More scrapbook-related stuff:

• I'm a Bella Artista!! :) They are hosting a bunch of guestartists instead of a regular design-team, and I was lucky enough to be one of those guests! :) Look out for me when the summer draws near :)
• I'm so thrilled for Oddbjørg and Tracie!!! Ofcourse the many other talentful & more or less close friends of mine on the team aswell, but yeah - I'm most thrilled about Oddbjørg and Tracie - getting the big honor of being on the Prima Design Team for the very first time!! (okok, Im trilled for you too Ingvild ;p) (and to answer a pretty frequent question; no, I am not on the designteam - you're probably thinking of the PrimaDonna-team, who are the teachers of Prima :) Wouldn't have mind the dt, but hey, there's another chance next year :) )
• Check out the Hambly-blog sometime tonight if you're looking for some Valentine-inspiration :)
• And if you want ideas for Valentine-cards (and - if you're in the States - a chance to win the totally totally lovely collection "Splendid" which is one of my biiiig favorites from Fancy Pants......check this out :)
• From Valentine-inspiration to Retro-inspiration - check out this retro-post by Luxe Designs (and look, a retro-layout from me too :D) along with a giveaway which I am not quite sure wheter is closed or not yet - again - I really need to post stuff on my blog more often :P
  

Just random stuff:

• Sis&her children are coming over this weekend. Can't wait!!
• I have totally totally totally missed being out on town. Last friday was so good and so fun. So good to see and talk to an old friend again. So fun to just drag him out to places where he can make fun of the music I'm going "dance! dance! wheee!!!" to like the good old days. I miss it, and although I know I can't go out like this like I used to pre-children - well - maybe I should try to make an effort to try get out like this at least what, once every two months or so?? (yes I have such a sorry life when I just can't go out on town like any teenager more often than that :p) Anyways. Notes. I still feel too young, especially compared to quite a few guys at the nightclub-section. And I feel too darn old compared to most of the girls I saw going out. Ugh! A lot of the girls wore black. I should take notes. It did however make me feel like I wanna find something RED to wear (I did wear red kinda, so..more red :p). If you go out with holes in your jeans (hey, I saw that's in again now isnt????) you're bound to get a few comments and touches there :p I'll try to be more less of a cockblocker next time to my poor friend :p.
• Just finished watching Mad Men season 1. It's kind of interesting in an intriguing way. Can I just say.. gd fuckin' men?? (and quite litterally too :p)
• Wonderful Coraline debuted to a wonderful third place on the US box office. It's amazing considering the number of theaters (and the nature of the movie -- it's made in 3d - which limits it some when shown in reg. 2d) it opened at. I really do hope I'll get to see the movie in May sometime. :)
  

Ok. I'll quit now. Have a nice week :)

Title: Early Winter - Gwen Stefani

Celine Navarro guested Pencil-Lines last night with such a cool sketch. Here's my take. Or more specifically, my take #2 :p Had sewn on the layout and all before tearing it apart only saving the Hambly-swirl that's now behind the photo and starting anew :p (*wave Vibeche & Eli*) Love this photo of us and I am glad that we have photos from that day.

I've been creating mostly "pure" DT-layouts lately - as in the sense that they've mostly been made w/only one manuf - I've sortof missed mixing it up more w/diff manufs so I decided it was about time :) Papers from Sassafras & Hambly (swirl & circle), transparency & rubons (love how the birdies turned out :)) from Hambly, selfmade pin and felt-heart (my first and uh, for now, only try on needlefelting ;p), tulle (lovesit but you might have guessed that by now ;p) and I LOVE the pebble from Prima :) (I've had it for months -- and not been able to use it cause I've loved them so much that I wanted to save them forever - and then all of a sudden I've used two in like two days :p) and ofc - glimmer mist on the corrugated board & tags (vintage pink and suede).

For closeups, see my prev post.

PS! Check out the winners for my sketch when I guested Scrap in Japan in January!! They got in 76 submissions (amazing!) and I went over and over and over again trying to pick my favorites (try to pick favorites from so many layouts...it took its time :P)!! So fun, thank you SO much for having me and for joining in! :D Check them out here :D :



Title: "Trouble is a friend" - Lenka (love the vid, check it out :) )

Love this picture of Amalie (ok strictly speaking the focus was/is on the bowl but I love the blurry peek of her behind it ;p) - as I was taking photos of some layouts she came up to me asking me if I was hungry. Um. yeah. Love her yummy plastic doughnuts ;p Just love the color of the bowl here, the little spot of blue paint on her finger and the headphones on her head :)




The last of my Fancy Pants layouts for January - with an image from the airport when we were going to Oslo for Christmas. The image itself ain't all that I guess, yet I love it - it features my kids duh :p Am really loving to use tulle these days - and combined with the brown paper (inspired by Kine :D) - looove :)

Fancy Pants stuff used: "Arctic Chill" & "Splendid", the "love" stamp is from the new clearstamps from Winter CHA ("On a whimsy") and the felt heart is from one of their older felt-stuff :)


Title: Hell no - Sondre Lerche & Regina Spektor

I have scrapped - but I am such a slow scrapper these days - just finished an unfinished layout that's been lying around (and torn apart to make a new one :P) for a week or so - and have two more unfinished ones to wrap up before I kind feel I can dig into my loooovely FP stash wo feeling bad for the other layouts which have been lying around for weeks cough (yes the box arrived yesterday, yayyyy :D) Scrappingwise I got a nice mail yesterday - yay - excited :)

Anyways - peeks for the just finished layout - will post it on sunday or monday for Pencil-Lines :)

Time for another friday fave I guess..right Dena? ;)

1. Glue Dots Pop Up
   What would I do without it??? Lovesit. Mine are in the size of 1/2" and gives the perfect dimension to my transparent stuff :)
   
   
2. Jem
   A Welish singer who's amazing :) Love her tunes - "It's amazing", ultrasupercool "24", "They", "Come on closer"....
   
   
3. Bad habits.
   Here's to bad habits. New Year is all about the shedding of these...well, I kind of might have gone the other way around. I've started drinking coffee. I prefer Cáfe Mocha, but as long as there's enough sugar and maybe even milk I'm fine.. might have picked up another bad habit but I am hoping that's only temporarily...well, apart from when I'm with my girls ;p
   
   
4. Lenka
   Another new music-fave. "The Show" is too cute :) She's Australian afaik :) LOVE the visuals on her site!!!!
   
   
5. Guinness
   Craving a beer (or two) with an old friend. Next weekend. Only a week to go.
   

Title: "It's amazing" - Jem

Pencil-Lines #119 with the swiss (hm...do you type it like that...a swiss person? uh..) & exciting Sabrina Bonnet - love her very cool style and the way she combined the sizes of the photos :) :) Myself - I cannot seem to scrap Christmas 08 - these are from 07 like the last (and only other) Christmas-layout I've done this year. Behind much? :p I've focused on my mom here (hi mom!) - using photos featuring her..

My style is all over the place atm and that's kinda the way I like it too :p

Materials include Hambly Screenprints papers & rubons and MM tiny alphastickers and 3dfoam for the circles. Oh, and thank you so much for the borrowing of the punches Eli ;p


Spent yesterday playing badminton with Adrian (and Amalie...she ran all over tryin to snag the shuttlecock and going eenie-meenie before giving it to the "winner" :P), whippin' out the camera again (had fun with the shuttlecocks above (why do I keep giggling when it comes to the english name?? :p) - playing with the apertures (@ f/8 I can clearly see the dustspecks on my sensor :/). The above is @ f/2.8 - I think I like it the best of the ones I took from f/1.4 to f/8.0 witht he latter as a close 2nd...wish I didnt do so much space above the shuttlecocks tho, but rather captured more of the mirrorimages on the table instead), drinking yummy café mocha and cheering Simen on (he played @ the local badminton-tournament). It's quite enjoyable watching him do something he really enjoys.


The punks sitting still (one of the few times they actually did) watching daddy play his match..rest of the time? All over the place.


Todays title: "Basket Case" by Green Day

Soooo I know it's technically saturday. Well, duh, it is.
Still.
Ms. Coe reminded me that I was still very much alive (I guess I am) and that I should get my ass back on track with FFF. A very much needed kick, thank you! (and I miss you too :) ) :D

1. My kids. My silly kids. I haven't pulled the camera out as often as I would have liked lately. Which is just as well I guess, considering the unnecessary (???) space I usually spend on them on the disk :p And I hate the (lack of) light and stuff. But ohwell. Still. I need to be reminded how silly they can be at times. Like when Adrian claims that Amalie can fly with her butterflywings. And a little bit of help from him ;p Love you :)
   
   
2. Wine.
   It's been a while since I purchased wine just for "fun". Like, a glass or two (or three) in the evenings at the weekend. Yum. Much needed!
   
   
3. SO excited about the new Hambly stuff!! Check out the wings and little circles here!!! YESS!!!! Lovelovelove the old mod circles - but have secretly wished they would make some of the patterns into fullfledged patterns kinda like, in addition - and yay!
   
   
4. One of my fave new stuff from Fancy Pants must surely be the Mixed Media books. Can't wait to play around with these myself! And Im so in awe and jealous of the fellow DT-girls who have gotten around to play with the new stuff already. Me wanna too!!
   
   
5. World of Warcraft. Have really enjoyed playing more again lately. I do enjoy the pve-stuff, am not and have never been much for pvp..enjoying raiding and instancing with friends.. hope they'll put in some new instances soon :)
   
   
6. Oh, adding a 6th - CHA is here and I love the peeks all around -- I haven't been following the new stuff closely as I have used to, but I did note that I surely would not mind most of what Sassafras, October Afternoon, Prima, Pink Paislee, Websters Pages and actually Basic Grey comes out with too (have a love-hate-relationship to their papers..but theyre really too darn awesome this time). Oh, and did you see the new Fiskars-punches?? Must-have!! Some KI aswell, and I simply love the boldness that is American Crafts :) *sighs*
   

So what else is new?
Not much.
Keep having the house full of kids - friends of Adrian dropping by all the time. Lots of noise. Cute boys and girls though, and Amalie loves to try and hang around them :)
Listening to the Cranberries atm. Enjoyed listening to Tori Amos all evening yesterday while sipping wine and raiding. I think I'll do No Doubt tomorrow. Waiting and longing for the new releases from Hambly, Fancy Pants and Luxe to arrive - the two first ones have been sent, while the latter will be sent next month. I'm so bad when it comes to waiting. Feels like I can't do much now when I know new stuff will be arriving soon :p And I need to get started with ordering new Prima-samples for future classes - but darn how am I supposed to be able to pick what I want to work with -- their new stuff is just amazing :D Got another mini-book picked up by Scrapbook Trends. Yay. Oh. And I spent 35minutes on Wii Fit yesterday, yay me ;p My tummy aches now tho *cough*

Todays title: "Zombie" by the Cranberries

Monday. Ugh.
Well. Baking focaccia should help. Having a friend over soon aswell (sharing is caring, blah blah ;p). Speaking of sharing, I'm supposed to post a Pencil-Lines layout today, but after much thinking and staring (can't help it, I'm supercritical) I decided to pull that layout...it totally sucked. Bleh. Ugh. Feel free to drop by the girls though, they did fab work as always and our guest today was Åsa Bergstrand, a superfab swede with LOTS of creativity in so many areas :)

So right, am gonna share a simple Luxe Designs card instead (fluffy cupcakesticker by MAMBI I think) - Adrians attended the bday of a close friend on Saturday and gave her a skull-light. She totally LOVED it tehee. (when she's visiting one of their fave things to do for the moment being is to turn off ALL the lights in the house and play with maglites and stuff...cough).

Todays title: "Come Closer" by Marit Larsen

Figured I'd share the rest of my Hambly layouts for january...taking pictures of transparencies ain't easy so I am sharing both images I shot of it..can't really decide which one displays it the better kinda...

Had a lovely time (ok, I might kind of have freaked out somewhat slightly when Sonjas bird decided to land on my head and stuff) yesterday with my cropping pals...got to see Maries Banglaalbum in real life (it's amazing!)!! And got great yummy food too, yay! ;p So glad to share this hobby with people I genuinely feel comfortable around aswell...almost finished a layout and started on a new one too!! :p




So.
Friday.
5 faves. (finally!)

1. Lyrics.
   Lyrics and music. Or I guess it should be the other way around. Great comfort nevertheless.
2. Kajania.
   Someone googled (for nailpolish natch) and found my old (first!) website....had it with a friend of mine. This has been a topic a few times before already - I do get the occassional mail about my past every now and then (Youths: take heed! what you do on the net like, stays on the net. Thank god I didn't do anything nasty ;p) I miss that girl. The carefree, silly, giggly girl (ok, gimme enough booze and I might turn into that girl for a few hours :p). Ah the good times..and speaking about the past..someone even googled and apparently found pictures of my secret(cough) Childrens Television-past...hmm....(mental note: remember to ask her where, cause I can't find them myself :p)
3. Friends. Love you.
4. The Legend of Drizzt Omnibus.
   Simen came home with it yesterday. I've almost forgotten everything I've read about Drizzt, but got flashbacks and looking forward to rekindle my love for fantasy - graphic-book-style :) I really ought to read more - both classics I've read and forgotten about (I once studied Literature after all..Virginia Woolf being one of my faves at that time...and reading plays were one of the things I loved aswell - even the absurd ones....like "Waiting for Godot"..not sure what or why but I really like this play, like absurdism as a genre), fantasy (I wanna familiarize myself with Terry Pratchett! And although Dragonlance was my first fantasy-love, I don't think I should reread them cause it's probably just silly and like, the pulp fiction of fantasy..hmm Kine?...but as a teenager they were amazing lol..I loved and felt like Lauralanthalasa while it's Kit I should be more like I guess) and sci-fi. And more Neil Gaiman. Can't get enough of Gaiman! :)
5. Um. Just saw the Fancy Pants CHA-W stuff and ooooh I am so itching to get to play with the stuff (still enroute here..sigh..the disadventages of living abroad)!!!!! Not sure if I should say anything or but....looking forward to make minibooks....! *cough* Peeks starts next monday just started on their blog, and I believe Hambly also will start the peeks around then too...and Luxe already posted some of theirs :)

Right.
Friday.
Time to clean up some.
And finish some layouts I guess.


Ps. Did you see? Bad Girls Kits is having a 2009-Design Team Call. Sweet :)

Todays title: Under the Surface by Marit Larsen