Roast Chicken and Herbs Lunch

A recipe from Martha Steward's EVERYDAY FOOD. Every Sunday, we try to make something special, apart from the norm, nasi and lauk. Today, I decided to roast chicken! Thank Gawd, it turned out great. Love this recipe and very simple too. Takes only 15 minutes to prepare but 1 hr 30 mins to cook! Chicken is marinated with butter, salt and pepper! the rest such as lemon, crushed garlic, rosemary and thymes are stuffed into the chicken. Cook in 245 C. Everybody loved it! Yay! Another fun Sunday lunch!

Making a 6X6 Accordion Album

To make an accordion album is very simple. Usually I use glue stick, it works just fine. But if you are making a bigger album, I would suggest to use liquid glue, any liquid glue that is, it holds much stronger.

Make sure glue is all over the mounting board, especially the edges too!

When cutting off corners, just make sure that the width between the mounting board and the paper is the same length as the height of the mounting board. Just so that corners will look much neater when there are ample space for folding in corners

After applying glue to flap just bring the mounting board forward like so, to minimise the air bubbles from getting in between paper and board

Use scorer to fold in the sides.

This is how my covers will look like when finish.

Now when adding ribbons to albums, adhere end of ribbon with double sided tape,

Bring back and over then glued down again with another piece of double sided tape, the more times you go over the tape, the stronger the ribbon will hold onto the board..

Its very simple. As I intend to decorate this album with light embellishments only, I have only gone over twice with the ribbon, that should be sufficient enough to hold album together.

I like to line pages up this way so i know where i need to have the double tape. This technique will really help when we are doing the star album next time.

Lining up the pages can be tricky. I used to line them up in standing position like this before i stick them together.

But.. I found that if you lay pages flat on the table and align the edges together, there is a better chance of a perfect stick. Practice makes perfect though..

Lastly, pages are then stuck to covers to finish.

Project done! with the most simpliest technique ever for an accordion album!

Hope you find some handy tips here. Please check back for more albums coming soon!

Altered Bubble Gum Mini Tin

My very first altered tin and this is for you, Ning! Remember how Mel used to use the same tin for her ciggies, yeah well, you can use it for something else then..now that you..(ahem). This altered art was very easy to do, took me longer than i thought to finish only because i was taking my time to decide on the paper and colour i wanted to use. I had to pick a theme that was not to flowery (as you know my taste.. sometimes.. it can be too flowery.. so i try to not be this time). Hope you like this one!

Parcels, Parcels, Parcels Today

This is what arrived for me today. Books from Amazon.com and scrapbook supplies from Creativexpress.com. My absolute 2 fav websites at the moment. Creative Express is very efficient with their parcels. Only takes 1 week for parcel to arrive after ordering. Very efficient indeed! Works very well when there is something you need a.s.a.p! hehehe..

Rumah Tanjung

So anyway Mimin and I managed to get away from everything else this morning to spend time at the Spa, Rumah Tanjung, in Damansara Heights (ahem.. its close to home too!) Boy, did I need it! (So did she.. hehehe) Place was so serene and quiet, just the place i wanted to be on a Monday morning! We arrived around 10ish when we served ginger tea followed with a soaking of the feet in serai and lime warm water.. aahhh.. changed into towels for body scrub for an hour, then after soaked in aromatherapy bath with flower petals, last but not least another hour of body massage!! Came out feeling so refreshed and rested! A little time away from the screaming kids is always good for the soul! Time to myself. All in all 3 beautiful well rested hours!! (except for time when hubby called asking where his shirt was..argh!) But it was all good!!

a project by salt

Found these hand crafted notebooks in Bangsar Village today. Couldn't help but bought some just to inspect. Little notebooks like these were just RM15! Offer was 4 for RM50. Not bad, quite competitively priced must say. Often, we use too pricey materials to make our albums, unlike this one, materials used are fairly priced (cheaper). The slightly thicker notebook was only going for RM28! Made from different sizes of ribbons and sweet colours. I am still figuring out if they binded the thicker book themselves, or did they just do the cover. They also had scrapbook albums made from hand, i think, going for RM128! With these kinda pricing, hmm..gotta really look into using cheaper materials or maybe even looking for way cheaper resources altogether. Also they have a website, www.saltbqe.com although think they are still constructing it. Sigh*

Mini Yummy Cupcakes

Mimin and Nadia made this today.. They are determined to make more beautiful cupcakes such as these. They are just too pretty to be eaten! Recipe was for a chocolate cake but Mimin improvised and made it into kinda like a cupcake. It's yummy, i tell you! Icing is not too sweet just right! Think they did a great job with trying. Not bad at all for a first attempt! Keep making more!!!

The American Bazaar Day

Started the day so earlier than usual. Managed to get Nadia out of the house by 7am for school, had to be at Crown Princess Hotel before 8.20am way before the door closes for vendors. When i got there, there were heaps of tables being set up and ofcourse Michelle, the early bird, was standing at ours, preparing for our christmas sale. This time we didn't get to prepare too much, we wanted mainly to market for the new shop in December!! Must say, we did pretty well with that! Managed to make known what the shop will be selling and teaching classes too! People were thrilled to hear that it'll be in Bangsar Shopping Centre by December. We were giving out flyers and name cards, believe it or not we ran out!! We both had fun, most importantly.

Boxes

Gayn attended a making boxes class last month, enjoyed the class so much that she ended up buying additional 2 more box making kits from Laines. So when she came over for Raya, we actually had time to make them. We decided to make boxes in christmas themes to keep little tringkets from the holiday season for memories. Boxes are really cute, brads are used to make boxes look like little suitcases and ribbons as bag straps. The blue box is the one Gayn did in class, the other is done by me. Real easy to do, willl definitely do more. Now am scouting out for empty brown boxes to paint over, until then will i definitely make more. Fun Fun Fun ...

Baby

Scraplifted this layout idea from Ali Edward's blog. Love it! Took the photos of Ariff's crib the day before we were admitted into the hospital. The stickers are Jolees Boutique from Laine's Paperterie, Singapore, day trip in August.

Friends

I absolutely love this photos of us, if frances was in it, it'll be perfect! Another simple layout but here i try to incorporate more my own handwriting. Also what i did was i distressed the pink patterned paper with tim holt's brown distressing inkpad. Find that distressing parts of the layout gives the page a more complete look.