Whole lotta LOs!

This past weekend I left DH in charge of the kiddies and sloped off to sunny Birmingham (no, really - it was! :D) for the Green Buttons scrapbooking retreat. 2 and a bit days of crafting, chatting, giggling, drinking, some singing, and a fair bit of chocolate eating, with 14 lovely ladies from my UKS house.

 

 

We had lots of fun and did a lot of creating - and I made a grand total of 6 scrapbook pages! Which is pretty darn productive for me cos I am not generally a super-quick scrapper (unlike a certain person, who shall remain nameless (Tracey!!), who was churning them out at a rate that put the rest of us to shame! :lol:).

 

I made this page using some scrummy Stampin' Up! papers and some Marianne dies:

 

 

I made this page using goodies from the Mystery Kit swap (we each put together a kit from our stash containing cardstock and papers and coordinating embellies):

 

 

This one was a sketch challenge one:

 

 

This one was for a class about sewing on scrapbook pages (I hand-sewed around the fleur de lys on this page and also hand-sewed a border):

 

 

This page was for a class on using up paper scraps - I chose to punch hexagons from my scraps:

 

 

And for this last page I sponged Distress Ink through the negative of a Tattered Florals die and then doodled all over and around them:

I had such a great weekend, crafting and chatting with like-minded ladies and creating all these pages. I don't seem to have done much scrapbooking lately, have been doing more cardmaking and other projects. So it was lovely to get back into scrapbooking. :)

What a weekend! :)

I'm back home following an awesome weekend away at the Green Buttons Retreat. It was my first retreat and I had an absolute ball - great venue, the extremely lovely, funny, clever and creative ladies of the Green Buttons House on UKS, and a whole load of fabulous, incredibly inspiring classes and challenges. :)

I have to say thank you to all the Green Buttons gals for making me so welcome and for being such great company - and for setting such amazing classes. And an extra special big thanks to Tink for organising the whole thing!

Here are the gorgeous projects I have created over the weekend:

Marvellous Mask-erade class

This was actually my class! :D I showed everyone how to play around with masks and spray inks and a lot of (messy) fun was had by everyone - and a huge amount of absolutely gorgeous LOs were created! :)

These were the LOs I created as examples for the class:

And this is one of the two LOs I made during the class at the retreat (the other one isn't quite finished yet!).

Mini Book in a Box class

This was Fizzy Drink's incredible class. Such a very clever project and the results were amazing! Here's my creation:

The outside is complete but I still need to finish off the interior - I've pretty much chosen which photos will go where (they are currently tucked inbetween the pages ready to be attached) and I just need to stick them all in place and add journalling.

Would you believe this gorgeous box started life as a simple Graze box, like this:

As part of the class, Ruth also challenged us to create something with the removable interior section of the box:

There were some amazingly inventive ideas. Here's what I made with the interior section:

Good Times Class

Daisychain888's amazing class featured die-cutting, embossing and colouring (with alcohol inks) beer cans! :)

Here's what I created:

So many fabulous techniques and ideas in this class and the results were just stunning.

Teeny Tiny Envelope Album class

JimJam's fabulously clever class involved created an album/booklet using little brown envelopes. This was mine:

Mine is filled with photos and journalling about our family day out at Mirfield Show in August. :)

Sketch challenge

The sketch challenge was set by queen of digi, Mary Buttons. :) Here's my interpretation:

I used photos of Grenoble and went with a whole French theme for the LO. :)

Stamped Borders with Masked Space class

eClaire's gorgeous class showed us how to use stamps and masking to create fabulous borders. I couldn't choose between the two photos (and matching papers) I had taken with me and I loved the technique so much that I decided to go ahead and do both! :)

Speed Scrap class

The final class was Thrifty Crafter's speed scrap class - you are given a set of instructions one at a time, 10 or so minutes apart, and do your best to follow them! :lol: Here's my interpretation:

Am thrilled to bits with all the gorgeous work I've created over the weekend - and you should have seen how fabulous the crafting room at the retreat looked with everyone's incredible work on display!

P.S. Grrrr.. the formatting has gone all screwy on this post and I cannot fix it, it just keeps messing up all the spacing. Sorry if it's making this post rather hard to read. :/