Challenge #305 - week of 1st October 2018

Wow, it's October and the year is flying by. Of course, you know that I'm smiling every day because it's autumn and simply the best time of the year. I seem to be more organised, more energetic and get more done - (well, within reason ha ha!) - with the longer evenings and the full feeling of autumn in the air that seems to feed me.

But it's at this time of year that our social calendar fills up even more than in the summer as dinner arrangements are made and squeezed in before crazy season starts with birthdays and Christmas in November and December.

Which got me thinking about this week's prompt. I'd like you to be inspired by dinner parties.

Now, we call them dinner parties round here but you might have a more relaxed name for them - I'm talking about simply getting together with friends around the dinner table. You might cook together with friends and then sit around the kitchen island nibbling and chatting together. Or it might be a more formal occasion where the cooking is done behind closed doors and presented on your best wedding dinner service with fancy napkins and crystal glasses. The latter is more me because a) I'm chaotic and untidy in the kitchen which means I don't want anyone to see it! b) we are foodies and c) I'm more old-fashioned and still get a huge kick from getting out our porcelain and crystal and using it. :-)

You might want to talk about dinner with friends or with family. For special times on the calendar such as Easter, birthdays or Christmas. Or relaxed events where it just sort of happened unexpectedly. You might have silverware, dinner service or glasses with a story to capture this week. Or you might want to recall a particular dinner with a special meaning or story behind it.

For example, once we invited friends for an English Bonfire Night dinner for them complete with a menu and theme! We even had flower arrangements on the table created in English Wellington boots which were quite the eye catcher! It was a lot of fun, and explaining the whole story to them, with the history of Bonfire Night and what English elements we had included, was all part of the evening. I wonder if I've made a layout about this? Perhaps this week is the week!

I really feel that food, drink, eating together and spending time with friends and family are at the core of a happy life and recording these times in my albums is very important. I hope you agree and find a way to take this inspiration for yourself this week.

And if you are inspired, I hope that you'll share. You can do that in our Facebook group here. Tag your entry with #WMXX so we know exactly which inspiration you've taken. 

Challenge #250 week of 27th February 2017

Today is the main day for German Carnival (Rose Monday) and I wondered about finding a prompt around that before I realised that I'd kicked off the Carnival 5th season with prompt #237 so I'll save the big event itself for another year.

However, even though I don't personally celebrate Rose Monday or Carnival,  the day before Ash Wednesday is Shrove Tuesday in the UK which I most definitely do celebrate in its more colloquial form of "Pancake Day" .

This week, I'd like you to be inspired by pancakes or flipping!

I know I've made a page about pancakes before but I can't track it down anywhere!

You can read all about Pancake Day online including details of some of the more quirky aspects of this "all the pancakes you can eat" sort of day, such as Pancake races. These often have strict rules about flipping the pancake in the frying pan at the beginning and end of the race. When we were children, it was a highlight of the day to watch the varying success of our parents' flipping skills and when I make them for myself these days, there will be at least one attempt at a true flip!

Now, if you celebrate some sort of pancake day itself, this would be the ideal time to capture this snippet for your albums. Or maybe you have a thing for breakfast pancakes that needs to be recorded. How about some sort of food cooking technique which may or may not have been perfected in your house? You could take the "flip" into your design such as flipping a sketch around, mirroring some elements of your page, or scattering something. I'm sure you can find a way of being inspired by Pancake Day!

We'd love you to use this prompt and hope you will share your creations - there are now two ways to do this!

You can either upload your layout into the Whimsical Musings Flickr gallery with the tag WM#250 or you can post it in our Whimsical Musings Facebook group. We've decided that we'll save albums for special occasions so just load up your photo to the group with the tag WM#250 in the write up text so that we can find it.

Challenge #216 - week of 6th June 2016

This morning Timehop reminded me that this time last year, I had just come back from a weekend in Vienna, Austria visiting my brother who was studying there for a semester. It's a beautiful city, full of gorgeous, historical buildings and plenty of Viennese culture. He's heading back there in October for his PostGrad studies so you can bet I'll be going back for more as soon as I can.

But it got me thinking about the details we remember about these short trips away - so many prompts to come from this idea. And one of the over-riding memories of mine was one of cake! Yes, if you go to Vienna, it's a must to go to Hotel Sacher for a piece of Sacher-Torte.

I even made a layout about it.

Can you see where I'm heading? This week, I'd like you to be inspired by cake.

Be it an actual cake, a sweet culinary extravaganza, something that reminds you of cake, a treasured cake recipe, products featuring cake - it's all open for you this week!

I recently shared another cake layout over on my personal blog and I'm sure if I looked hard enough, I'd be sure to find others.

Our weekend in Vienna had plenty of the sweet stuff, so you never know, I might feature another. But seeing as though cake features large in my life, there's plenty of choice!


We'd love you to be inspired by this prompt and hope you will share your creations - there are now two ways to do this!

You can either upload your layout into the Whimsical Musings Flickr gallery with the tag WM#216 or you can post it in our Whimsical Musings Facebook group. We've decided that we'll save albums for special occasions so just load up your photo to the group with the tag WM#216 in the write up text so that we can find it.

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#88 - inspired by seasonal foods

sometimes these stories come easy and sometimes they don't. This week they didn't. I thought long and hard about foods and seasons, but I was disappointed to discover that the majority of the foods I associate with certain seasons I eat all year round...

with the exception perhaps of grilling.

The grilled is only pulled out and put to good use when the weather is nice.

And so this layout was born.


I have a system for selecting the photos I scrap - which is to star them in my photo editing software (picasa) and this particular set had been sitting in that pile for quite some time. But I never tell food stories, so I didn't find a time to scrap them. Until now.

since this was a spring BBQ, I used subtler colors than I usually would and tried to keep it light and aerie.  

I love how vibrant the colors in the photos were. They carry the story in my eyes.

and of course, a cute photo with my siblings to round off the page and give the scrumptious food some context.

What delicacies did you feel inspired to scrap about?

xo,
Pamage

#88 inspired by seasonal food

We live in a global economy and can buy and eat anything we want at any time of the year. And that's a wonderful thing. Who can deny the thrill of something exotic in the middle of winter which reminds you of tropical beaches and warmer times.

But there's something particularly thrilling about seasonal food. Real seasonal food. That you can see in the fields along the roads you travel to work on. That you can buy from the farm shop. That seems to be more intense in flavour than anything you can buy in the supermarket. That you know is just a few hours old.

We have a lot of this seasonal food, especially where we live which is on the edge of the industrial heartland of Germany right where the farms begin. And Germany is very proud of its local food seasons. It takes me back to when I was a child and we really did only eat strawberries in June and July.

So I decided to bring together a few appropriate photos as a reminder of yet another cultural difference of living in my adopted homeland. Another series in the making maybe.

I turned to my Counterfeit Kit Challenge May kit, Excursion which is proving really successful and that I have turned to every day of LOAD so far. 5 days, 5 layouts, one kit. It's a smaller than usual kit and I think I might have another layout or two in there before I call it a day. This layout came together really easily and have you noticed a bit more paper than in recent times? It's the Glitter Girl influence. I've recently rediscovered how much I love her layouts and have been playing with more paper. Insert happy smile here.

Love how I managed to find some suitable themed colours in my kit - totally by chance and not at all planned.

I'm determined to catch up on some of the layouts I've missed here at Whimsical Musings during LOAD this month (although I'm also sure that I will not manage a whole month of layouts - too much going on for that) so keep me accountable for that and ask me regularly how I'm doing!! I am going to use the list of prompts that you can find on the prompt at the top of the page and start at the most recent missed prompt and work back. So first on my list is Big City Life. Watch this space.

How did you get on with seasonal food this week? I hope you'll share over at our Flickr gallery (here) with the tag WM#88. See you there.

Challenge #88 week of 29th April 2013

I seem to be the eternal white rabbit at the moment. But better late than never so they say!

I had a busy, food-filled weekend with my mum in town and we were out and about more in three days than I am usually all month. But that got me thinking about our prompt this week.

Where I live, there is huge excitement at this time of year as the asparagus season kicks off. It's little more than 6 weeks during a normal year and ends just as abruptly as it starts - one of the few truly real food seasons around in our global economy where here in the cold temperate north, we can get our hands on strawberries and the like all year round.

But asparagus season is something very special. We wait around for it. We talk about it. We compare prices and taste across farms. We recommend the best restaurants to go. We buy kilos and kilos of it and then eat it with passion.

And on Saturday, I had my first of the season. Followed by another plate full on Sunday. And that will no doubt be filled with many more plate-fulls before it's all over for another year on 24th June. I'm in heaven!

So, in the spirit of welcoming the white asparagus back to our tables for a few fleeting weeks, I'd like you to be inspired by seasonal food. Or food of the season maybe.

There are many different ways to take this prompt and in the past I've done a few food pages so I will have to put on my thinking cap myself.

Asparagus is ticked off my list with this layout from a few years ago:

As are strawberries (although, who's to say I've said all there is to say about these wonderful delicacies?)

I hope you can find some inspiration in seasonal food this week. Don't forget to share over at Flickr with the tag WM#88. Go on, make me hungry!