Spice jars

My kitchen is tiny.  So tiny that most of our food is kept in an office storage cupboard by the dining table.  So things tend to get crammed wherever they'll fit, including the herbs and spices:

 

All mismatched, all spread out.  Until...

Yup, cosmetic jars.  Nice and dark, so sunlight won't get to the spices, and labelled on top as well as on the side.  As handy as it is having spices right next to the oven, having a whole collection of bottles getting steamed every night was not so appealing. So, with the top labels, I can store them somewhere else:

It took me over an hour to get them all decanted and into their new jars.  If you decide to do this yourself, definitely leave the ground pepper until last.  By fluke it was the last one I did, and it was the only one having me sniffle and cough.

Photo Challenge Week 29: Fire

Remember how I said I wasn't sure if I'd actually come right out and commit to doing a photo challenge?  Well, waiting three months between the first post and the second is a typical start, haha.

Week 29 for PhotoChallenge.org is Fire:

Feijoa Curry

It's autumn here, finally, and everything is turning golden.  This morning I went and climbed through the back fence to the feijoa trees, which have been dropping their crop for a couple of weeks, picked up a bucketful, and then came inside and found a yummy way of using them:

It's the first addition to my cookbook in what seems forever, using bits and pieces from Scrap Girls to pull it together.  The recipe itself came from here, and I'll hopefully be able to try it out next week.  The page is set up as A5 size - if anyone wants a print-quality copy, let me know :)

Journal spreads

I've given up trying to maintain any one system for journalling.  I flick from one to the other - art, typed, notebook, smash, scrapbook - at least once a month, so I've decided to just chuck it all into one book.  I'm loving it, although I still need to find a decent glue.  Double-sided tape and cheap gluesticks just aren't doing it for me.

These are a couple of digital pages that I've done and printed.  In between are pages from notebooks, index cards, and anything else I feel like pasting in, but I like these pages the best...

The photos in the first spread I took myself at a recent air show; everything else is from my stash of digital scrapping supplies.

Photo Challenge.org: Black and White

I found Photochallenge.org in the communities over at Google+.  While I'm generally pretty awful at maintaining challenges, their challenge this week was something that I actually felt able to do, and not something too intimidating.

I don't know if I'll do it every week, but it was fun to play with the camera.  I've never shot in monochrome before, and love how it turns simple things, like this grass, into something much simpler and more beautiful.

New journal project

This is my compromise to myself.  A digital art journal!  As much as I love the idea of art journals, and as much as I waste hours looking at other people's amazing creations, I just haven't created one of my own.  Too little faith in my own abilities, too little emotional connection to write anything meaningful and beautiful - and inclined to blame the lack of a thousand-and-one art supplies - has meant that I have stubbornly stuck with words.

And even that has been bouncing between mediums.  Now, I've decided to give my digital scrapbooking skills a practical use, and this is the first page of the result.  It's still going to be more words than anything else, but I'm really loving this technique.  I think I've finally clicked on the relaxing aspect that other journalers talk about, but I don't have the grinding OCD obsession with sticky fingers or spills.

For this page I've mixed all sorts of pieces from different designers:

• The alphabet used to create the letters - Tina Chambers from Digital Scrapbook Place
• Flower embellishment - Correen Silke 
• Cardboard embellishment - Meryl Bartho from Digital Scrapbook Place
• Green embellishment - Scrap Girls
• Circle embellishment - Bintys Designs
• Notepaper embellishment - Just Jaimee
• Background - Scrap Girls