South East Queensland Blog Meetup

Photo by Zoe

Photo by Zoe

On the weekend Luke and I trundled down to the land of Bris for a blog meetup organised by the lovely Melissa from Suger Coat It. It was so great to meet a bunch of people who’s blogs I had been reading for years now.

If you haven’t been to a blog meetup before, I totally recommend you go along. It was so much fun, and you get to meet all these awesome men and women you’ve been reading about! Plus, if Danielle is there, then you will probably get to chat to her (she is super rad- as relaxed in person as she is on her blog), and get Violet cuddles, which Luke and I got lots of!

We met at the Kangaroo Cafe in Padington (OMGosh, what a lovely place, what a lovely part of Brisbane!), and Nuffnang bought us pizzas and drinks! Woo Hoo!!

I really loved it when everyone went round and explained who they are and what they blog about. Though it was very apparent that most of us need some PR lessons in how to sell ourselves! Lots of  “I don’t really blog about anything, it’s just stuff…!” and things like that. I was terrible at this!

Danielle and Danielle are orgnaising a meetup in April, again in Brisbane (there are bunch more happening around the place too) and I can’t wait to meet another lovely Danielle, and the bloggers that make it to that one! Melissa also mentioned about maybe doing another meetup soon. Yay! Zoe from Boys Mumma took some awesome photos, and it was so refreshing to actually have photos of an event where I am IN the photos! lol. So thankyou Zoe!!

Without further ado, here are some photos from the day, you can see more here.

Photo by Zoe

Photo by Zoe

Photo by Zoe

List of bloggers who came:

Keeping Holiday Memories: Flag Frame Tutorial

I am a scrapbooker, so all our holidays are dilligently scrapped into massive books. All the photos, brochures, tickets etc. are stored, displayed and all the stories are told. Luke and I really love our scrapbooks, and we invest a reasonable amount of money into recording these memories for ourselves, our children, and all the generations after us. It’s like a personalised inheritence we can give to the people we love. Hopefully these will be the people who will care about us enough to take care of them, and treasure them.

Scrapbooking is great, but when it comes to displaying photos of travels it’s not always the most practical thing. Scrapbooks need to be opened, and can’t really be looked at briefly. They require time. So a few weeks ago Luke and I started brainstorming about how we could display our travel photos in a way that was easy for people coming over to our house to see. We ended up with the idea of a photo wall.

The idea of the photo wall is that you display a selection of your travel photos in a big collage on the wall. We’re framing our photos, and to make it clearer which country a photo was from, we’re painting them into flags!

Here’s a tutorial on doing a simple flag (France). The principles are the same for a more complicated flag (Australia, UK etc).

You Will Need:

Frames (We used frames from IKEA- they’re 3 for $3)

Paint in the appropriate colour for your flag

Paint brush

Clean water in a bowl

Small bowl for making a watery paint

Lead pencil and ruler

Process:

Step One: Take the plastic/glass and backing out of your frame. Prepare your area (perhaps cover it with newspaper etc)

The french flag is three even sections of colour, so we measured the frame and divided it into 3. With a lead pencil and a ruler, lightly mark each third.

Step Two: Prepare your paints. Put some blue paint in the small bowl, and add smidges of water until you end up with a watery paint. Test it on the back of the frame to check that you can see the wood grain under it. It’s important that your paint isn’t TOO watery, or else it will bleed on the frame.

Put some of the regular, thick, paint onto your paint brush and paint a thin line to the left of the first third (do both the top section, and the bottom). Make sure you paint down each side of the line, not just the top.

Quickly take some of your watered down paint, and paint the left section. Paint up to the line of regular paint.

Step Three: While both your paints are still wet, take your brush and brush over the line of regular paint, and down into the watery paint. Imagine you are ‘rubbing out’ the line, and blending it into the rest of the paint.

Step Four: Once you’ve done the blue section, repeat the process for the red section.

Step Five: In the middle section we use a technique which is applicable any time you are painting up to a section that has already used the ‘thick paint line’ technique.

In this white section you can just paint using your watered down paint, up the blue and red lines. Be as neat as possible, going TO the line, but not over it.

I waited until both my blue and red sections were completely dry before I started on the white, this meant that I could hold onto those sides, and not risk smudging anything, or getting colours mixed.

Step Six: Let your frame dry competely. In the mean time, have your photo printed. If it’s an IKEA frame, or something similar, then you’ll need to take the protective plastic off the ‘glass’ plastic.

Step Seven: Put your photo in with the glass and backing, and it’s ready to display!

I haven’t finshed my wall yet, so I can’t show you them all together, but I’ll let you know when it’s done!

My Place and Yours…

This week I’m plyaing My Place and Yours again! The theme is “one thing”.

What do you save and why?

The answer for me is scrapbooks.

We have heaps of them, so I’m just counting them all as one!! Of course, the other thing we would definitely grab are our external hard drives. They have all the original photos, as well as the scanned copies of all our important documents…

If you could only save one thing from a fire, what would it be?