Thank u loved ones...

Though I technically was not supposed to celebrate my birthday this year, some people still made the effort to make sure I was remembered. Birthday greetings came from near and far and I got lots of hugs :)

The girls started by insisting that I should at least have dinner with them and they bought a totally yummy chocolate cake with very apt words in their view with the upcoming performance in April. We went a bit quiet at dinner cos America's Next Top Model came on and we were very distracted. The boys had their own discussion in the corner. The group is still pondering on the "best possible gift" apparently despite my wishlist sitting at Shabby Chic :)

Next to bring a huge smile to my face was H with a lovely meal at Senja Lounge the Saturday before. I didnt get my present till Monday after I was very tired out from the heat of visiting dad's grave n the morning of prayers but I was VERY HAPPY with the result! I had no idea what he was going to get me other than the flowers bit. An achievement for me cos the guy doesnt believe in giving flowers and I think the effort was as beautiful as the gifts. The girls in my office now think he is a romantic *grinz*

And finally...he gave me my new toy...

Oh and I finally managed to finish an LO yesterday. Was totally inspired as soon as I saw the pics. Will post soon!!

D Music Motion's 2nd Aniversary Show

The date of the show has been changed to 23rd April 2007 due to certain government restrictions. The response has been very popular so far so hope to see some familiar faces in the crowd. Almost all the students will be performing and you've got the whole range of tango, waltx, fox trot, quick step, chacha, rumba, paso doble, samba, jive, ballet, boogie, salsa, hip hop and ballet. Stunning performances n costumes await you on this "One Night Only". The dress code is "Dress To Impress". See u there! ;)

More mags!

I havent even finished reading the last few mags I bought and here I am *smacks hand* with another 2 new ones. I went to Shabby Chic to make my wish list (please stop n take note here...hehe) Got to check out their new goodies which had just arrived and I of course added to my list *wink*. Doodling genies, stamps, chipboard and brads brads n more brads are on my list...hehe.

On the way back to my car, I decided to stop by Best Eastern (conveniently) to browse and found Scrapbook Inspirations, March 2007. The free pattern paper n velvet stickers weakened my resolve n I ended up purchasing it n heading over to Bookers where I ended up with Memory Makers, April 2007 which had a free mini file folder album project. Call me a woman but I cant resist freebies!

Dance Amo

These are my bling dance shoes that I got after quite a trek looking for John & Josephine in Singapore. My original intention was to get Supadance shoes but I couldnt resist the bling on this pair. I loved the colour as well. This is my first proper pair of dance shoes after buying mediocre shoes when I first started dancing as I knew I wasnt that good as a beginner n would probably wear out my shoes more. These babies will be showcased on my feet at D Music Motion's 2nd Aniversary show which has now been moved to 21st/22nd April due to various reasons. What makes this pair even more memorable for me was H accompanying me n both of us half getting lost looking for the shop in Singapore then offering to pay for it for me. Sweet but I wanted to pay for my first pair myself. Silly I know but I felt guilty about him forking out for the rest of the expenses of the trip already anyway :)

Work in progress

So this is my latest partially completed LO. Have not managed to squeeze in time to finish it or work on another LO for some time. I was itching to use the flourishes chipboard I bought from Shabby Chic last week . I managed to squeeze in some scrapbooking time after watching 300 last Friday. I found this pic of me relaxing after my graduation ceremony n thought it was time for a "Me" LO. The photo is in colour but my clothes and the surroundings were very black n white other than a little corner of the photo which I managed to cover with a big Heidi Swapp flower with a smaller one in the middle before sticking a gold painted piece of chipboard in the middle.

As the photo was already 'black n white' I needed more colour for the rest of the LO and decided on the purple flower pattern paper from the Wedding Stack I got from Shabby Chic. I wanted to use more than one pattern paper so I chose another from the same stack. A touch of journaling was always going to be put in so I let the photo mat be longer at the bottom to allow for this and used my cutterpede scallop cutter to create some definition at the bottom.

Flowers and flourishes go so well together, I knew I would be adding it on here. I first painted my chipboard gold then black hoping to sandpaper it to get a distressed effect but that didnt work so I painted over the black with gold again and it turned out quite well. It will look goldish in light (like the title) and blackish with a gold tinge when there is less light. I did the same thing with the chipboard title, "Me".

I got some rick rack pretty cheap from Hokko and added that in the bottom right hand corner. My friend had purchased some flower eyelets from Creative Hands in S'pore for me which I used in the bottom left hand corner to fill up some space.

I might add more journaling and definitely stitching to either enhance the cardstock or make the pattern papers stand out more. The LO is still a bit plain for my liking at the moment hence 'work in progress'.

Now all i need to do is figure out what to do for my aniversary present to H......

Lee's card

As promised, here is a picture of the card I made Lee for her bday that I did on crop night. I used the Sizzix to cut out the Happpy Birthday words on cardstock and the white butterfly with flourishes were from my Wholy Cow! white rub-ons that are oh-so beautiful. Then I had this idea to use the Whale-of-a-punch and had to measure out the squares before punching them out. I initially stuck on the Prima flowers with brads then remembered my organza ribbon so I took off the flowers, stuck the ribbon across the 'boxes' and put the flowers back on. I covered the dark purple cardstock with lighter purple at the back for a contrast n also for the brads to stay on. The inside was just a simple pull out (of her spa voucher present) and some words from H and me :)

At the end of it, I didnt want to give the card away cos it was so lovely but I guess I can always try and incorporate this in an LO later on....so pwetty tho!

Steak *drool*

I could have kicked myself for not bringing my camera out last night...a rare moment for me and H to be having dinner at Sheraton alone (our friends are Starwood members so they regularly organise to meet up there) Just incase the $12 T-bone steak wasnt enough to fill our tummies (or finish our Asti with), we ordered starters...my smoked salmon dish was bee-o-tiful and plentiful while H's seafood chowder was quite creamy. George came out just as we were popping open the Asti so he was a bit too late to assist us but it was ok. The steaks were bigger than I expected and I couldnt finish it...maybe cos I had Ideal about an hour or two before (I was starving after swimming n dancing!!)...there was no space for dessert after that!! After the bloatedness toned down, I was sleepy but still managed to go visit my uncle in the hospital before heading home *yawn*

For those who havent, catch the 300g steak offer before it finishes on the 15th....speaking of 300, the movie is pretty good! Go watch!!

What I've been up to...

Dance: Moving on from the chacha routine to paso doble this weekend...quit the salsa/boogie group as I was too stressed. Finally memorised the whole belly dancing routine n finale. Belly dancing costume is almost ready and bought material for the latin costume.

Work: Stress stress stress...hence I quit the salsa/boogie group as doing 3 performances would have been too much for me eventually when practice steps up to more than twice a week

Scrapbooking: Did a card (will post soon) and an LO in the past week...

Have yet to: Clean my room (scheduled for the not so distant future), have the Sheraton steak special, have Excapade with the family (scheduled for Sunday), collect more hugs from H (scheduled for tonite), catch up with the girls, play rummy with the Sexy Mummy n future taitai's (next Tue. Wohoo!!), clean my car, scrap more (scheduled for tmr aftn) and meet Scrapperholic to get my Scrappinggals stuff (*drool!*)

Before & After

I wanted to show this before and after on the difference embelishments can make. I finished this 9"x9" in half an hour. I was in a rush for dinner but I so had to do something with my time :) (I didnt expect H to come back from basketball training so early :p)

All papers are from MM Fresh Anthology collection (Sydney). I used the same photo in black & white and colour. The jigsaw frame from the same collection framed the coloured pic nicely and inside of the frame had other chipboard which included the paisley like swirls u see at the top left hand corner. I used metal words for the title and glued them on with glue dots. It felt really plain to me but I did not have time to do more after I had finished.

Now, as much as I was happy with this layout, I knew something was still missing. It still looked too plain for me. I wanted rhinestone words or something to jazz up the bottom part. In the end, I decided to adding a flower affixed with a crystal brad. I am wondering how I should do some swirls coming from the flower at the moment but for now, the flower does make a difference :)

Gil & Me

Ok ppl, I need a little help on this. When I saw this picture and someone's LO using papers from the same collection (Basic Grey - Urban Couture), I thought I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it.

Firstly I messed up cutting the frame of the patterned paper. I was not sure whether to put the card stock on the pattern paper or the other way round. In the end, I decided to put the pattern paper on the cardstock. I used some of the leftover pattern paper to mat the photo. As the theme of that night (the picture was taken) was Glitter, I knew I was going to use Glitter letters as for the heading. Another thing I knew I was going to use was crystal brads and flowers. Initially I considered doodling to link the flowers together but my friend had bought me the white chalk pen from Laines which Scrapperholic has said isnt very good. Then I remembered I had bought new stamps and paint so I tried that instead. Bad idea!

First, I used copper which turned out to be too light and did not show up well on the (what was) brown cardstock) then I tried pearl...another mistake...had to cover it up by painting the cardstock pearl. After that I thought, ok, since the paper is lighter now, maybe gold will show...again No....so out of desperation, I tried black...which is that I should have done in the first place. After I finished this LO, I really wished the black swirls were chipboard but they arent. I am considering stamping and cutting out the design on black cardstock and sticking it on using 3D glue dots now. I tried to neaten up the stamps using my silver Zig writer as well which turned out ok. Oh and then I painted over the black using the clear glitter paint.

So this was my end product last night...maybe I was too tired and it didnt go the way I wanted it to. Its a move away from what I usually do so that could be why. I would have started over but I only have one of that pattern paper so it was a no go. Any suggestions?

Ok so maybe its not that bad but the messing up of the paint really frustrated me. H thinks its kinda cool and I do love the swirlys and flowers combo...think I might have to fight my restraints and check out Shabby Chic's new chipboard arrivals now for my future LO's...

Scrapping Mags!!

While driving out at lunch today, I suddenly got the urge to drop by Bookers and Best Eastern to see if they had any scrapbooking magazines. I bought 4 out of 6 that I saw including one that incorporated cross stitching into scrapping which I really wanna start. It will prob take ages though cos of dotting the cloth then stitching etc but effect looks fab!! Looks like I'll have to get the DMC thread off Jazz!! Anyway here are the mags if anyone wants to have a peek :)

i. Scrapbooking & Beyond, February 2007
ii. Stitch & Craft, February 2007 (came with a freebie card kit for me to try out!)
iii. Creating Keepsakes, March 2007
iv. Scrapbooks etc, February/March 2007

Steven & Steph

Here is an LO some of you might not have seen. I did it for my friend Steven for his birthday not knowing that he was going to propose to his woman that night...hehe. I am not a green person but when I ran the photos against my patterned paper, this one from the Old World stack I got from Shabby Chic made the photos stand out best. I chose complimenting green cardstock from the my cardstock stack I bought from Shabby Chic as well to matt the photos. I also sandpapered the matting to add to the vintage look and a bit of white matting to make the main photo stand out more.

As the cardstock had a white core, painful as it was, some tearing was in order to add on to the effect of the LO. I had just bought my vellum pen and really wanted to try it out so I tore out some more of the card stock to put behind the vellum paper then wrote on the vellum covering the paper, the names of the lovely couple. Now I had to fill the blank space caused by the green cardstock so firstly, I used eyelets (which I dont seem to normally use in my LO's) to line the divide between the 2 papers then used glue dots to stick on some autumn leaf embelishments that I got from Hokko. Finally as I only had 2 pictures for this 12" x 12", there still seemed to b e some space to fill. I found my pack of MM metal tags and rubbed on a letter "S" which just so happened to have matching colours to the patterned paper and Voila! Ze LO was complete...well, I couldnt really think of what else to add and I didnt want to overdo it.

P.S. By the way, I held down the vallum paper with metal brads I got from SC (the ones in that nail polish look-a-like bottle. Sorry still in training for brand names)

Well, its simple but I quite like it. Hopefully the couple did too :)

D Music Motion's 2nd Aniversary Show

The much anticipated event is finally almost ready. The performing guests have been unveiled as a Standard (i.e. Ballroom) Dancing couple who are Blackpool competitors. European totty! The lady is from Germany and the guy is Australian I think but they entered in Blackpool representing Germany. While the rest of us are slaving away perfecting our performances which obviously cannot compare to these professionals, you're ensured of an entertaining night no matter what! Details are:-

Date: 14th April, 2007 @ 7pm

Venue: Songket Ballroom, Ridzqun Hotel, Gadong, Brunei Darussalam

Ticket Prices: $120, $90, $60

The price of your ticket includes dinner, entertainment which has lots of flashy dance moves and skimpy costumes (not for the kids laa!) and open dance floor after the show.

Please let me know if you're interested to watch me embarass myself showing my fats in my belly dancing costume, boogie dancing in my can-can skirt and keeping up with my learned senior dancers in our latin combo. Yikes! Wish me luck!

This was hard...

When I went on to Scrapperholic’s blog and started reading her posts (as usual), I started freezing up when I noted that she had been tagged with this post. This was cos I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that I could possibly be one of the people she would choose to tag. Sure enough I did and it was a challenge n these things may not necessarily be weird to some but its my list anyway.

The rules are:-

“Those who get tagged must post 6 weird things about themselves in their blog and state the rules clearly. At the end of the post, you must choose 6 other people to tag”

So here goes…

i. I eat really slowly. Some people find this weird as I take up to 2 or 3 times as long to finish my food compared to them. I dunno, wolfing down food is just not my style

ii. I keep 50 cent coins (to pay for parking) on a non slip mat on my car dashboard. The coins are hidden under my dog and monkey beanies. My friend Sha finds this strange. I only do it cos I don’t want the coins sliding everywhere and to make sure the coins don’t get heated up by the sun, they are hidden under the beanines J

iii. I like to eat things that some people don’t necessarily like and I can eat a lot of it. Examples are crabs, fish head, snails cooked Japanese or French stylie and even sea snails, chicken feet, fish intestine, fish roe, durian, etc

iv. I would rather spend my money on a holiday abroad or recently on scrapbooking than on branded handbags, shoes, etc.

v. I would buy a really expensive present for my bf but can never find it worthy to spend that much on myself (cos I can get more than 1 thing for the price of that one wallet, Armani shirt, etc). In the past, I have bought bf’s branded wallets, belts n clothes but not for myself.

vi. My car is also like my makeshift caravan. I usually work late and have something on during the night. Most of the time, I don’t go home til late and usually after work I’ll either head to H’s or the dance studio etc. Cos of this, I have to keep my shoes, change of clothes, dance shoes, sport shoes, jacket (for court), belly dancing scarves, make up, etc. in my car so I don’t go “Opps! I forgot” and have to rush home and be totally late.

The only people I can think of tagging that haven’t already been tagged are Duckrice, Bartender and Jances. Good luck to you guys though Ducky is usually quite critical so I suppose it shouldn’t be too difficult for him…hehe.

28th Feb 2007

I just realised I've been talking abt scrapping so much recently, I havent really gone into updating my overseas peeps about what I've been up to.

This is who I celebrated being alive with after rushing to Senja when belly dancing rehersals finally finished at 9pm...Lin was finally back....

If course I got to see my darling too sometime in between....here's a pic of us....

Just kidding....hehe....there are enough pics of us in the blog already me thinks so wont gross u guys out with more cuddly pics for now :) Seriously though after dinner, I joined him at our mates house winding down in proper CNY style....rummy, poker and 3 kings with sips or wine/ beer in between. The lovely hosts did not let us depart empty handed at the end of the night and gave us a lovely Bel Air burner with Fleur de Lotus scent. Hope I can squeeze in more rummy tonite after Margaret's open house...hehe....

Wish I could have my UK mates with me as well but oh well, guess u cant have it all...

Tuesday night saw me at the BBA Hall for the Brunei Basketball Association's Annual dinner. I reckon most people turned up just to see this guy...

He's grown too thin for my liking to be honest. For those not in the loop, this is the famous Wu Chun. Bruneian guy who's been whisked off to Taiwan to be part of the band Farenheit and also acted in Tokyo Juliet and Hanakimi. Also one of the owners of Fitnesszone in Brunei. That ball he is holding was auctioned off at $900 on the night. H bought that ball earlier in the day...hehe. Its the signature that made the price difference :)

Lin will be leaving on Saturday after 2 weeks here and I've only seen her like 3 times!! *sob!*