What a great weekend! Thanks to all that joined me at the Weekend Retreat. It was very relaxing (except for the fact that I could not get my ipod & new speakers to work!) One of the features I hear a lot is that my croppers love the space they get to use. Everyone gets a 6' foot table to themselves! I also heard a lot of "I'm so glad I came this weekend...I've learned soo much!" There was lots of demoing & teaching happening! I showed how to use pattern papers (some where quite colorful) & how to keep them from overshadowing the photos. We discussed having a focal point on your page & how to create it. Balance also played a big part of how to build pages & keep them pleasing to the eye.

It was a very enjoyable weekend. I even completed a few pages myself! Woo Hoo! Here's a few of them. Jarred's green coat and CTMH's Mistletoe paper pack inspired these layouts.

I Love my new snowflake punch. It sure made a beautiful boarder on these pages. The large snowflakes are one of the chipboard Dimensional Elements shapes in our catalog. I love our Chipboard. It is sooo easy to use. They come white & in lots of shapes & alpha's, they are ink ready. In comparing our chipboard to other companies the biggest feature that makes them easier to use is that the texture is like our white daisy card stock & is very easy to stamp on or add ink to. Most other companies are grey or kraft colored & you have to cover them with paper or if you try to ink them it is difficult to get the color you want. Many are a glossy texture which can be inked but again the color will not be the same. I love that with our chipboard I can easily add the coordinating ink that matches my pattern paper & it always looks great! I used my cricut to cut the other snowflakes. I love to use different dimensions & layers on my pages. The cart. is "Winter Wonderland." When applying the DE (Dimensional Elements/Chipboard) to my page I always use glue dots. Make sure you know where you want the piece to go because once you put it down it is not going to come back up with out ripping your paper. HINT... Use craft tweezers & pick up your piece once you have the glue dots on it, then you came hold it just above the paper & move it around (without your bulky fingers in the way!)to see where you want to put your embellishment & place it accordingly.The picture of Jarred & Alyssa just makes me say "Aaauhhhh! They do love each other!" One would not know that if they were at our house when school got out! These pictures also remind of older photos I have of Jimmy, Nick & Alyssa when they were young standing in front of the snow tunnels they made.

I stamped the snowflakes in New England Ivy onto Colonial White & used a generation stamping technique to make it look like it was snowing with bold snowflakes in the forefront & lighter flakes fading into the background. The "Generation" stamping technique is a simple one... Ink up your stamp & continue to use it without re-inking. The darker the color the more "generations' you with get. Another simple technique that can add to your page is to put your corner piece in an embossing folder & run it through your cuttlebug. Our "white core" cardstock is perfect for this technique. Once you have the texture on your piece sand it & watch the magic appear! The top color will sand off & the white core will show the texture. In this example I used a snowflake template.