Bon giorno!

Just a quick hello from Cecina Mare, Italy. We’re having a great time in this beautiful country. The weather is perfect, around 28*C and sunshine everyday! After a few nights in Switzerland, one night in Milano and 4 nights in Cinque Terre we arrived in Tuscany last Friday. We’ll stay here until august 11th and plan on doing some sightseeing trips to Pisa, Lucca a.s.o. and spent a lot of time on the beach, at the swimming pool and in the lovely villages.
The first collage are pictures from our time in Switzerland, the second one is Italy. Picasa crops the pictures a little strange sometimes but it’s just to get an impression, I just couldn’t chose only two or three pictures…





And even from Italy I have some scrap news! I feel proud and excited to announce that I was asked to be Prima’s guest designer! How cool is that?! Go check out their wonderful blog and get inspired by all the fabulous creations you find there!!! Thanks Sharon for asking me!! It was a pleasure!

OK, I hope you’re all enjoying yourself as much as we do!

Ciao!!
Birgit

Nijmeegse 4-daagse

Today we went to see the walkers of the International Four Days Marches of Nijmegen on the "day of Wijchen".
On Tuesday 17 July 37.505 walkers have started the first walking day of the 91st Four Days Marches. Four days of walking 50km per day!
Here a little impression of a very impressive and exciting day!

Tomorrow morning very early we'll be leaving from Wijchen towards Italy. No idea when I will be able to update again. Maybe I'll have to wait until I'm back home. If possible I will update with some vacation pictures every now and then, if not I'll see you all again in about 4 weeks!
Take care and have a nice time!
Birgit

I did what I promissed myself yesterday, got out some nice goodies and made a summery LO. This one is for the One Little Word Challenge "Simplicity". If you don't know this blog yet, go check it out! Soooo much inspiration there!!

Journaling reads:

"It's the simple every day pleasures that make life worth living! The smell of a single lavender flower in my garden means more to me than the most expensive perfume ever will!!!"

Had a nice surprise in the mail today. Ingrid's RAK arrived and it's just wonderful! I love flowers, chipboard and buttons so this RAK is perfect! Thanks so much Ingrid. You gave me a little sunshine on a rainy day! :)

Last thing I want to share today is this little paperbag album, they are so much fun to do! I taught it as a workshop a few times and this one was in the summer edition of Scrap Art Zine. The story is about my DD Marlijn and our friends son Pim. We spend a vacation weekend together and those 2 were dragging around the doll the whole time, no matter where we went... They craked us up acting like they were a married couple with a kid :) They took very good care about their baby by the way!!!

It's awful quiet in blogging land don't you think? When I go to my bloglines feeds these days there are only a few udates a day. For the first time in ages I can keep up *LOL*. A lot of you must be away on vacation... it certainly isn't the weather in the Netherlands, Belgium or Germany that keeps you from blogging.... :(

Anyway, thanks for popping by and have a nice evening!

Birgit

Today I've finished the last projects for some magazines I had to get done before I leave to Italy. And with a few days left before we go I might even have a change to do some scrapping just for me :) feels like ages ago that I scrapped without any restriction so I might lock myself up in my room for an evening or 2 and do just what I like!!

Finally something to show today:

Made these LO's for the latest issue of SAZ. They where for an article written by the verry talented Sylvia about daily inspiration. You can find out what my inspiration was in the magazine:

Meanwhile it's still raining, raining, raining... not really good for my mood!

So I'd better go upstairs now, get out my most bright, colorful, happy, summery scrapgoodies and forget about everything outside of my scraproom :)

Have a nice evening too!

Birgit

PS: just a little reminder... there's a new challenge for july/august. Click here for more information!

Which colors suite you best??

With vacation and hot summer days coming up it's quite important to know what color bikini and toe nail polish we should wear don't you think?! There's a fun and easy way to find out which colors suite you best. Just to make sure you don't wear anything totaly wrong! Just do the test like I did! I have to wonder though... a yellow bikini...??? But my ideal man is deffinatly my hubby... very confident :)!!

You Should Wear a Yellow Bikini

Like the sun, you radiate warmth and brighten up everyone's day. And while a yellow bikini is a bit strange, you have the perky personality to wear one!

What Color Bikini Should You Wear?

Your Toes Should Be Pink

You love to dress girly and work your feminine charms, with a bit of an edge. Your ideal guy: Is confident enough to get any girl he wants Stay away from: Jerks who only see you as eye candy

What Color Should Your Toenails Be?

I'm curious what your colors are! oh.... and don't cheat :)

Have fun!

I won a RAK on Ingrid's blog (which you should check out because there's so much to see!)! How fun is that? I never win anything, not i n competitions, not in loteries. And now Ingrids husband has pulled my name! So thank you Ingrids husband :)!!! Can't wait to see what I've won!

Birgit

sneaks and a new challenge!

I've been working my butt of and still have nothing to show :( I hope to be able to show a few LO's next week just before I leave on vacation but for now it's just sneaks, sneaks and more sneaks... :)

This is just a little bit of the LO's I finished lately, the rest I've already sent out, but as you can see I really have been doing something and I haven't been lazy :)

Just wanted to share with you what my table looks like while I'm working on a project. And this is not even so bad, sometimes it looks like a bomb exploded. I always clean up between two projects. I'm not so organised and have a hard time already finding everything I'm looking for :) It would be dramatic if I didn't clean up in between...

The challenge for july/august will be a scraplift challenge.

What do you have to do?

Scraplift the following LO:

You can use whatever theme you like. You're free to use any color, embellishment, letters, stickers etc. you want but you're NOT allowed to use any patterned paper, just cardstock!

Because it's vacation time you have until August 30th to send in your LO.

You can send it as always to scrappen@birgitkoopsen.nl Please use your name for the title of the image you send in to make it easier for me to find them once they're saved on my computer.

Hope to find lots and lots of beautiful LO's in my inbox when I get home!

I bought a new lens for my Canon 300D. I was not very happy with the standard lens that comes with the kit and my friend Anita, who has the same camera, was raving about this lens for a long time. I´ve seen her pictures and they are beautiful, so I thought if I was gonna buy a new one anyway I´d better do it before the holidays.

It´s the Tamron AF SP 28-75/2,8 XR DI Canon and this is the first picture I took with it:

No photo editing done on this! Isn't it great? I think I'm gonna love this lens.

Today was the last schoolday in the north of the Netherlands so if you´re leaving on vacation any day now...have lots of fun, make sure you make some precious memories and don´t forget to take loads of pictures!! Enjoy!

Oh, and I almost forgot: Have a look at memorylanescrapbooking. Danielle already has the marvelous new Infuse paper by Basic Grey!! Don't miss it!

Birgit

...and the june sketch challenge winner is...

YVONNE DE BOER!
Even though there where only 8 participants for this challenge I had a very hard time choosing a winner! The LO's are all beautiful and very different, but I had to choose one and it had to be this "Tuinieren" (Gardening) LO by Yvonne!
I love the stitching, the colors, the hand cut felt flowers, the journaling on the note book paper... I just think this is a wonderful LO! So, congrats to you Yvonne, please e-mail me your addy and will send you your RAK!



Have a look at the other gorgeous LO's here. If you click on the image you get a closer look and the name of the designer. Thanks again ladies for playing along. Hope you enjoyed it!

Have a great day!!

Birgit