Phew, it has been longer than I had expected to get back here. You know how it goes, right . Time just goes by so fast. We’re already halfway September !

My holiday, albeit it already was 2 months ago, was fantastic. Croatia really is a beautiful country!

My creative juices have been running dry or in another direction for a while now. During the summer I started a new hobby: Amigurumi
Amigurumi is Japanese and literally means knitted stuffed toy and is the art of knitting or crocheting plushies. Most amigurumi are crocheted, which is what I do.

Mind you, I first had to learn how to crochet, and as my godmother wasn’t patient enough to teach me and apparently found everything I did with a crochet hook hilarious, I abandoned the plan of her teaching me. So I resorted myself to YouTube and learned step-by-step how to crochet and how to crochet amigurumi.

When a friend of mine – who actually introduced me to amigurmi – asked me where I found my tutorials and crochet patterns, I decided to start a separate blog about my crochet adventures.
At first, I wrote the blog in my native language (Dutch), but I have now decided to also write in English, to make it more accessible.
I wanted to add the blog as a subdomain to gawariel.com, but as my host is currently on training and I do not want to bother her with trivial things, I decided to add the blog to another free personal site I was keeping with awardspace, this mainly to minimize the amount of websites to keep track of.

But seeing as the amigurumi portion of the site functions as a completely different website, I now want to seperate the blog from tehkey and even decided on a name CHARAMI.
CHAR after my first name Charlotte and AMI for amigurumi. But unfortunately awardspace doesn’t allow “awardspace.com” sub domains any more for free users. I can only choose between .biz, .us, .info or .co.uk.
The site is NOT a business, I do NOT live in the USA, it might be an informational site, but I don’t like the look of .info; and I’m not a UK citizen. So yeah, unless I pay awardspace, I cannot use the .com extension anymore.

I’m a little at a loss of what to do .
The blog is just a small personal thingy, and I’m not sure if there is a lot of interest or how long I will keep my interest, so I do not want to spend a lot of money paying for a domain I might not renew in a couple of months. *sigh* Whatever.
For the mean time, the blog will remain where it is: http://tehkey.awardspace.com/amigurumi/.
Unless you have a suggestion??

Anyway, I’m sure none of you are actually interested in my rambling . I’ll try to be back with some content soon!

Love,
Lotte

I call for a small hiatus on the grounds that I’m leaving on vacation in 7 hours !

Me and two girlfriends are going to Croatia, more specifically to Dubrovnik (hotel in Cavtat). Beautiful nature, sea and history *sigh*

Let’s hope the weather will be good.
I’ve heard that it has been raining over there these last weeks, and the weather prospects for the next couple of days look a bit gloomy as well. It would be quite ironic that now that Belgium is experiencing its summer, I would be vacationing in a much more southern country in the rain… 0_0

Keep your fingers crossed for me and you’ll see me when you see me !

Love,
Charlotte

My whole adventure with scrapbooking started when I stumbled upon Jessica Sprague’s website.
I have been enjoying looking at strangers family photo’s wrapped in pretty little packages and I have been feeling the need to join the whole scene. As I’m not a real picture taker it was natural for me to go more into the design direction, rather than the page creator direction. Hence the section scrapbooking resources.
This week, jessicasprague.com is celebrating it’s second birthday.
For this entire month, the moderators of the site have been setting challenges for scrapbook layouts; one for every day. And while I enjoy looking at what people make of the challenges, yesterday I suddenly felt the urge to participate.

Yesterday’s challenge, was a template challenge. The template was only downloadable yesterday, but this is how it looked like:

As I wanted to join in the fun, I needed a picture to use in this challenge. As mentioned above, I don’t really take all that much pictures, and if I do take a picture the subject in 9 cases out of 10 is my cat, Billy. So, here is the very first scrapbook page I have ever created (click to see full size):

To be quite honest, digital scrapbooking is very much like creating any other sort of graphic, only on a larger scale, meant for print.
I kind of like how my page turned out. And, even if I do say so myself, I love the look of the papers

Anyway, tonight I thought of joining in the challenge again. This time the challenge involved inspiration drawn from movie posters.

I had already created my base (inspired by the Duplicity poster) when the dilemma of what pictures to use reared up. I had no suitable pictures of my cat or anything else, but I didn’t want my base to go to waste. So, I had another one of my brilliant *cough* ideas: Why not offer up my .psd base for scrapbookers who do take photographs.
And here I am to present to you yet another section in the Scrapbooking resources section: Page Bases. And the very first downloadable base:

This base can be used like any other page template out there, but it has a little extra in the form of the decoration with a paper, brushes and matching colours.
I already started some bases based on the other posters, but I haven’t finished them yet. Something to look forward to perhaps?

Goodnight,
Charlotte