My Other New Hobby

When I ended my last blog entry alluding to the fact that I had a new hobby, the intention wasn't to keep everyone in suspense for so long. Work's been super busy, Ray's been travelling a lot since he moved to a new position within the same company (which means more babysitting for me!) and now that I can't even blog from work (bloody increased firewall security) AND I'm been spending a lot of time on my new hobby, it's taken a while to get this new entry in. Sigh....

Anyway, enough with the excuses, I've been bitten (badly) by the scrapbooking bug!! One of my friends suggested doing a class at Laine's Papeterie at Wheelock Place and I had heard about it but didn't think much of it (or rather didn't think I was creative enough to do it).

In an effort to be social, I went, armed with 3-4 photos with the same theme as instructed and I ended up with this!!

It does take a number of hours to get each layout (LO) done but since I had all these photos of Alicia just lying around in a shoe box somewhere, remnants of good intentions to complete her baby photo album, I thought this was a much cooler way to display her photos!

After reading up and learning more about the craft, i realized I didn't like the first one I did so much. So here are a few others that followed:

The papers available are just so pretty that you can't go wrong!

Best part of all, they make great gifts! It was my mum's birthday yesterday and I decided to make her a tribute to Grandma LO. These pages can't be fitted into regular frames because of all the 3-D embellishments so they have "shadow boxes" - frames with depth.

I used to think that scrapbooking was something you made from scraps but this trend has been commercialised! These days, they make really expensive "scraps" which means I've had to cut back on shopping for me.

I'm hoping I won't lose interest too quickly. It'd help if my friends reading this show some interest too for mutual inspiration. Just like how Pui, Meips and I "inspire" each other to attend our weekly photography lessons religiously. God knows if they weren't there, I would be so much more tempted to skip the classes.

Uncles

Instead of our annual Oz Christmas visit, this year, we decided to ship Ray's two youngest brothers over to Singapore for a visit instead. Since Ray is usually pretty tied up with work during the course of the year, this visit was a great opportunity for some brotherly bonding and for Alicia to get to know her uncles better.

When I first met them, Glen and Dean (aka "the boys" or "the kids") were only 11 and 9 respectively. Now they're 21 and 19, both taller and bigger than Ray, who at 6 ft 2, is no midget himself.

Well, boys will be boys, and given that the McGregor folks are super duper competitive (in all things) and sport jocks, the boys (including my dear hubby) decided to challenge each other in a 100m dash. Obviously, the appeal of that was totally lost on me but I thought it would be a great opportunity to test out my new Nikon D80 and provide a photo finish in case of sibling disputes! (I did say they were competitive :)

The results were not surprising - Glen, who weighs 10 muscly kg more than the other two, won easily but old(er) man Ray still managed to keep up with a not too shabby finish.

The funniest part of this was when Alicia saw all of them running - she decided it was a cool thing to try out as well. This, coming from a "gu niang" girl that loathes walking too much and is always saying "bao bao", was a pleasant surprise.

She even looked like she was giving it 100% as well with sheer concentration on her face and arms pumping vigorously to keep up with her little legs that were working as fast as they could. It was hilarious to watch.

On another note, I loved how my photos are coming out on my new DSLR camera. I've always wanted to be able to take these pro looking shots with a clear subject and a blurry background. As I've learnt in the photography classes I'm taking with Meips and Puiming, this is known as a shallow depth of field. Cool. Here's Alicia taken with a shallow DoF.

The other thing I've realized about photography is that it can get expensive if you want to be a serious amateur (is that an oxymoron?). If that's not bad enough, I've recently picked up another hobby that's proving to burn some more holes in my pocket. Will blog about that in my next entry.