{scraps of jacki's life}

Advent Calendar

To scrap or not to scrap, what a silly question!

hi

last week linda hattingh, linda koen and liza all made advent calendars. so amazing how similar they are, and yet they are all completely different.

the layout on the left is liza's advent calendar. she used a green chipboard frame. each number was cut on 3 sides so they flap open. under the little flaps she put photos of her son, and little bible verses. when she is finished teaching her class, she will take it home and add some little gifts and clues for her son.

layout 2 is by linda koen. she used the same pattern paper as liza, but she cut the little blocks out and spread them over 2 sheets of green treasures paper. she made little bags from felt to put little gifts in.  behind the other numbers she will put clues for her son to follow to other gifts. as he opens each day's flap, she will take a photo of him, which she will stick behind the flap. so after christmas, she can place the double page in her album as a layout. she put a ribbon through each page so she could hang them on the wall while they act as an advent calendar.

layout 3 is done by linda hattingh. she used different paper, and put the calendar in a blue chipboard frame. behind the flaps that can open, she put little silver chocolate coins.

this is a good example of how each one worked with the same idea, and almost the same products, and came up with something completely different! all three these girls are awesome and inventive scrappers.

hope you are making time to scrap. remember to post a comment, and to join our group on facebook.

love, jacki

I am blessed again!

confucius says: birthdays are good for you. the more you have, the longer you live...

hi

thank you ineke, rene, linda, gerty and janine for your birthday wishes. thank you to glenda for your birthday email. my sister carla sent me fishes for my virtual fishtank on my facebook profile, all the way from australia. and thank you to everyone who phoned and smssed your wishes. i am truly blessed with many great friends!

love, jacki

Birthday

'my husband lets me buy as much scrapbooking stuff as i can hide..'

hi

actually, the man lets me do pretty much what i want, i really cannot complain. He is a star!

today is my birthday. i won't say how old i am, but it is adding up! taking stock of all those years, i can only say that good times and bad, GOD has been with me every minute. i didn't do much for the birthday. in previous years i had the koek-en-tee thing every time, it is only the second year that i am not doing anything. but that is just fine! i worked this morning, and my granny came for tea. my son spoiled me with an awesome gift. i did get lots of phone calls, many from old friends. that was a nice treat.

love, an older and wiser, jacki

SCRAPPIN TIMES

I am truly blessed.

O Lord, I will praise you with all my heart , and tell everyone about the marvellous things you do. I will be glad, yes, filled with joy because of you. I will sing your praises, O Lord God above all gods! Ps 9:1

Hi!

it is sunday afternoon, and i am home all alone! yaaay! the man is working, francois is visiting a friend, and sean went to his mother for the weekend. this leaves the house neat and tidy and quiet, and i am enjoying every moment. it won't last, as any moment now my sister paula, and her family are coming for coffee, for my birthday.

the photo is of the toilet in my shop. it is also the gallery. linda and i get to hang our layouts there. as you can see in the mirror, there is another layout on the other wall, and some behind the door.

i have to go. sean has just arrived, and paula should be here any moment. sean has discovered thousands of tadpoles in the dam on our plot, and he can't wait to show paula's kids!

love, jacki

blogging, and comments

'i may not have gone where i intended to go, but i think i have ended up where i intended to be'.  Douglas Adams

hi

below every post, is a place that says 'comment'. if you click on that, you can type in a comment. this comment is sent to me in an email, but it also appears on the blog, and others can read it. this makes the blog much more interactive. i really love reading the comments. when you tell me you visited my blog and did not comment, or i get hits, but no comments, i am so disappointed. it is as though you came to visit me, but i was not home. please comment. if you don't, it feels a little like talking to myself out loud. and if you ever do that, you will know that it feels a little silly. thank you to rene, and carla, and ineke who have posted comments often. i love you! Also to elsa, diana, liza, laetitia, wilna, donna, who pop in to say hi, thank you!

The picture is of a sign that appeared on my son, sean's door recently. he thinks that is is hysterically funny! it says 'forget about the dog, beware of my stepmother!' . ahh, the humor of 11 year-olds..

i have been having some fun lately on facebook. it has been sweeping the world, and it is so popular that they say companies have experienced a drop in productivity as a result. it is like having a little corner of the internet for yourself. it is a lot of fun. of course, most users are younger than i am, in fact i have only found a handful of people over 40. if you want to try, go there, and look at my profile. you type in 'jackie janse van rensburg' where it says search. remember to say hi to me there too when you visit me. you can also search SCRAPPIN TIMES, you will find us there. join the group! when you are done, type in the names of some of your friends. or the name of your high school. you might find some old friends.

love, jacki

layouts

'en wat jy ook al doen, doen dit van harte soos vir die HERE, en nie vir mense nie'. kol 3:23

hi

today i want to show you something that we marvel at on a regular basis.

when we present a scrapbooking workshop, we never give our clients a kit. we prefer to help her choose paper that matches her photos and her scrapping style, and even her mood. mostly, we also help her adapt the layout to her photos. when she leaves, she has a layout that is unique, and her own.

it is amazing that every person in the workshop's layout looks so completely different to everyone else's, even if the layout is similar. the page on the left was done by ineke, using the photo of her nephew lee's matric farewell. the page on the right was done by laetitia, using a photo of herself. so similar, yet so different.

These 2 layouts were both created by liza. the layout is identical. but they look so different. the choice of paper and embellishments create a totally different mood.

to us, this is one of the most satisfying aspects of teaching scrapbooking to others.

love, jacki

Ramblings and philosophies

'there is a fine line between hobby and obsession'. unknown

after a week of internet and computer problems, i am back.

it seems i can either scrap, or sleep, or blog. so monday i scrapped till 1h30 in the morning. tuesday i slept. i suppose today i have to blog...

as i have mentioned a million times, there are 3 blogs i visit every day. Annette Scholtz, Donna Downey andWilna Furstenburg. and what i enjoy most about especially donna and wilna, is the personal touch. i love the stories about their days, their thoughts, their creative journeys, and wilna's scriptures. i know more about their lives than i know about my own sisters'. (if my sisters had blogs, i would read theirs every day too)(one of my sisters, carla, who lives faaaaar away in australia, and who i haven't seen in 2 years, reads this blog, and comments. thanx, baby zus. i love you and i miss you!)

although this blog is intended as a cheap imitation of a website for my shop ;), i have decided that as it is my blog, i will be making it a little more personal in future. up until now i have felt that i needed to make it of interest to shop clients, and separate from me, but this has intimidated me a little. and as i feel my clients are my friends, i hope they will forgive me for rambling a little. and if they don't, then they don't come back. easy! so decision no 1 is to blog about my life. in general. as my shop and scrapbooking is a huge part of my life, they will feature constantly.

i have felt that every time i blog, i need to add a picture, preferably of a page layout.. but these take ages to load, and some times i only have a few minutes. so decision no 2 is to sometimes have posts without pics.

i type with 2 fingers. this can be slow. so, to make it a little faster, decision no 3 is that i am going to use all lower case letters. my english teacher, my mother and liza will shudder at the incorrectness, but, once again, i refer to decision no 1. at least i am not using sms abbreviations, but hey, maybe that could be decision no 4 in a while.

i want to show you one of my favorite items in my tool bag. it may look like an ordinary pen, but to me it is a special pen! i got it 2 years ago at the scrapbook convention in donna's class.

please leave a comment by clicking on 'comment' below each post, and tell me what you think.

love, jacki

Wow!

I have just discovered a wonderfully artistic video blog. Wait, let me start at the very beginning. A very good place to start.. (enough of Mary Poppins). Donna Downey, on her blog, has been doing a painting a day. And she makes it look like sooo much fun! Now, I am not artistic. Creative, maybe, but not artistic. But I have always wished I was. And so I admire Donna's painting a day, and a seed is planted. Next, I follow a link from Donna's blog to this wierd and wonderful character, called Suziblu. Now this is cool. This girl is awesome! And what do you know, she actually inspired me into action. She tells you how to start an art journal. The nice thing about this is that it is much less expensive than painting on canvasses. And nobody EVER needs to see it! It is in a book, and only you can see it, if that is what you want. If you are a frustrated artist, go see this. And if you want to watch a wonderfully kooky girl, also go. I bought a book, and I am giving it a try.. I have always enjoyed playing with paint. Even when I scrap, I like to paint a little. So, I'm sure this will be fun, even if it isn't very good.

Great! My internet connection has been incredibly s..l..o....o....    ..o..w.. lately, and just disconnects in the middle of everything. And just sometimes, it is so fast, its brilliant. I had such a connection earlier, so fast that i could download videos faster that they could play. Uploading photos was a pleasure! And, of course, it could not last. It disconnected, and the new connection is back to the usual.

The colourful pictures dotting this blog, are photos that I took of all the pretty new ribbons I bought for the shop. I LOVE ribbons, and these are particularly beautiful!

Let me know if you also feel inspired to start an art journal. Leave a comment, and tell me if you are also going to try it.

Love, Jacki

Christmas stuff!

I went shopping for stock yesterday. Lately I have been getting mostly usual stock, and a little Christmassy stuff every time. But the the Christmas feeling hit me! The stuff is sooo beautiful! To celebrate I bought some fairy lights, and filled a whole stand with Christmas cheer. I suppose I need to start playing the Bony M CD now..

This is me..

It is never easy to scrap myself, even looking at pics of myself is difficult. A psychologist will probably tell me that the image that I have of myself in my mind is better than the real one, so looking at a mirror or photo forces me to face reality (pun not intended), or some psychobabble like that. Maybe there is some truth in that..

Anyway, not only did I scrap myself, I used all those AWFUL photos of myself that have been lying around all these years, the ones that survived being torn up, that is! This page was not easy to scrap, in fact it took months of packing it away, and dragging it back out again. Donna Downey is busy working on a book about scrapping those crappy photos, and reading about it on her blog made me determined to finish this page at last.

As you can see, there is some journaling on there. It is my intention to do much more journaling on my pages. When I page through scrapbooking magazines, I LOVE to read stranger's journaling, so I suppose that I should do more of that myself.

That shiny thing in the right corner of the left page, is my student card from my only year at university, in 1985!

Love,

Jacki

tutorial - download fonts for your computer

My husband lets me buy as much scrapbooking stuff as I can hide...

If you were inspired to journal more by one of my previous posts, and cannot bear to use your own handwriting, then journal on your computer and print it on a piece of cardstock, vellum, or transparancy. I will tell you step by step how to download new fonts from the internet, to use in your documents.

First, you create a new folder on your desktop, and you 'rename' it to 'downloads', or 'fonts'. This makes it easier to find them later.

You can Google the words "free Fonts". You will get lots of websites. Also, you could go to a local website called Scrapkits. There you click on 'Free Stuff". Once you have found the fonts you want to download, you click on the 'download' option. It will then give the option to 'open', 'save' or 'cancel'. Choose 'save'. It will then ask you where, and you will select the folder you created for it. Click on 'save' again. You can then close it all, and download the next. Continue downloading and saving in your folder until you are finished. You can now disconnect from the internet if you want to.

Now you go to 'My Computer', to 'Control Panel', and you open a folder called 'Fonts". You 'drag and drop' or 'copy and paste' the fonts icons out of your new folder, into this folder. This step is very important, as your computer only looks for fonts here.

When you are finished, you can open a new document, and select any of your new fonts. Have fun!

And if you want to comment on this, or any blog entry, click on the word 'comment' below. A little form will appear where you can say hi.

Love,

Jacki

New Stock, 7Gypsies

We have new stock and paper, especially 7Gypsies stuff. Above are all the new colours and styles of Gaffertape.

We also have new 7Gypsies stickers, rubons, paper and brads. You can visit Seven Gypsies to get lots of inspiration.

Also, if you know Chantal Slabbert, or if you attended one of the 7Gypsies classes in July, you can check out the photos at their blog.

Frames

This simple, blank, cardboard frame, can be transformed into something special with some imagination. The sides flap open, so you can cover it with paper. Inside it is the size of one page, 30cm x 30cm. We suggest you see it as a whole, and scrap it as such, rather that finish the page, and try to make the frame match.

We used modge Podge on ours, to protect it from dust, as it has no glass.

You can use anything on your frame, as long as it is not too heavy. Lots of ribbon, lace and flowers add dimension to it. You can use several photos, but we found that using one special photo that was enlarged, was the most effective.

You can visit the Scrap 'n Frame website for more ideas in their Gallery.

The frame on the right was done by Linda Hattingh.

Paper

We have just got in the new range of paper from Queen Of Hearts, called "The Romance Collection". This paper is for wedding photos, but will work well with any romantic page layout.

Wild Thing

This is a page created by Diana Engelbrecht, one of our clients. She attends Antoinette's workshops, and then makes the page her own. This is one of my favourites from her. She is a passionate 7 Gypsies fan, and you will almost always find at least one of their products featured on her layout.