CKU Album Class - Continued

January - Winter

This page was made using Making Memories product. It's a cute page. The ribbon on the upper left hand page is super duper thick, and not my style, because it covers so much of the picture - oh well. I'll live.

February - 10 Things I love

As you can tell it is not completely finished. It is page that is not my style, but I absolutely LOVE the way that it turned out. It is using the Daisy D's product. My ten things are: Todd, Matt, Ty, Steven, Katie, Nala, Pepper (my 2 cats), Jack (my dog), Flowers, and Diet Pepsi. I am planning on putting the titles of these 10 things on the left and right side of the pages and I need to make a photo college of these things.

March - My Journey to be like you

This page is about who you admire most. It too is created using Daisy D's product. it is so very cute. Totally my style, and I love it. I chose my dad as the person I want to most be like. He's kind and sweet and a perfect guy. The picture pics up for the journaling.

April - Spring Memories

This is a page that I created for CKU Minneapolis in which I attended last April. It is made with Making Memories products. It also is really cute and right up my alley. We dyed the twill, flowers and tags, but it is something that I wouldn't necessarily do again. I'm more into buying pink twill and pink and green flowers. Dying is a messing process and not sure I would do it again

CKU and the album class

Disclaimer: I didn't have a chance to journal while I was at CKU, so I am making up for it now. I'll try to do a journal entry for each day of the trip. :-)

May 17th
So after a big day of shopping, I felt like CKU was finally here. Jen and I had signed up to take the additional album class. You are instructed to bring specific photo's for each month - so that was a big part of prepping for the class.

Here is a basic description of the class:
We will be completing 24-page album and you will need to gather photos from the previous year. The information I have provided below will hopefully help you in selecting your photos. What I have listed are the photo sizes I used on my sample layouts. You can use these sizes or any combination that equals these sizes. There are no hard and fast rules, please feel free to customize the month or photos so the album will be the most meaningful for you. Of course you can always choose to add your photos later, once you get home.

The class was taught by Anita Olham, which I hadn't even heard of before. I'm not quite sure what company, etc. that she works for - but she was only an okay instructor. I'll explain more later.

Here's the key though, the album is really only 12 pages long, because on the right side of the page is the same for each month. It is a calendar page that can be used to keep track of special dates/times. This wasn't so much a bummer because I didn't keep up with the class anyway - but I still don't think that it is fair to say 24 pages, when in fact it is only 12, or 13 if you consider the photocopied calendar a page :-) Now I am not complaining and have zero regrets, but just wanted to point out what it really was.

So off we went. Before we could do any real scrapbooking we worked on all the prepwork for the alums. Prep work = painting, dying, pasting, the pieces of the album that needed some extra time to dry before we put them on the pages.

The pages were pretty cute - learned a couple of techniques, although most of them weren't my style, so I probably won't use the pages again. Did learn how to use Heidi Swapp's Masks. Kind of a pain the @ss, but I did purchase a small mask at one of the scrapbook stores, so I am planning on using it on something :-)

See next entry for album pictures.

CKU was awesome!

I didn't have a chance to journal while I was at CKU, so I am making up for it now. I'll try to do a journal entry for each day of the trip. :-)

May 16th
The airplane ride was uneventful. I made it through security with no problems, Jenny on the other hand was stuck having her purse searched, because she had too many coins. I guess I would rather have them look, than not to look but whatever. We got into Salt Lake City (SLC) around noon. We picked up our car was and off to the first scrapbook store.

The first store that we went to was Scrapbook Stories
It was a small store, with some fun product. Didn't buy to much, except for the new Quickutz flowers and rubons. I didn't feel an ounce of guilt - I was here to shop!! Plus we made a cute little notebook for a make n take.

Our second store that we wanted to go to was the Rusty Pickle warehouse. Not only was this a b*tch to find, but we called for directions and they told us they were not going to be open until Wednesday.

While we were trying to get to Rusty Pickle, we were stopped by the lovely beehive police. I say this with the most respect - but the whole encounter was a bit weird. We were travelling down a side street and was waved over by what looked like a police officer. Of course we stopped - he informed me that I was speeding and I said that I was lost.




Okay it wasn't so much that I was pulled over, but it was the way that I was pulled over. A guy standing on the sidewalk with a radar gun was clocking people on a sidestreet. The whole thing seemed like something out of the twilight zone. Lucky for me the beehive police let me go with a warning! It made the experience much more interesting than actually getting a ticket.

The third store was the HUGE BILL store. We went to a store called Paper Creations.
This was a great store. Jen and I spent the most time here (and the most money). Found a lot of stuff here that we do not have back in MN - so I bought a ton!! We got a free layout to do (AWESOME PAPERS) not to mention a HUGE goodie bag! Alot of it was junk, but we sifted through and found some cute stuff.

We also happen to visit Roberts Crafts while we were in the area (the store was in the same strip mall as Paper Creations). This is equivalent to our Michaels or Joann's. Great store - managed to spend 80 bucks there.

After visiting that store I was starting to feel a little guilty. 70 at the first store 160 at the second store and 80 at the third. I had only been in Utah for about 4 hours and I had already dropped 300 or so bucks.



Anyway we moved on. The 4th store we went to was Pebbles In My Pocket. This was a cute little store with tons of Pebble products. Apparently I felt the need to buy one of everything, so I pretty much bought one of everything at Pebbles. Most everything I purchased I had NEVER seen in this area so I went nuts. I had a great time! What can I say? I love shopping!

About this time Jenny and I started to lose steam and decided that it was time to hit Provo. Only one more shop between here and Provo. However before making that stop we needed to find the correct highway. We were looking for I15 to Draper. We got on a "belt loop" first thinking that it connected to I15 - well somehow we ended up going in a circle and ending up about the same place that we started, so a driving we went. It seemed like we drove, and drove and drove. We turned around a about a million times. We thought we had seen the sign before, but neither of us could remember where we saw the sign - I think it was this time that we figured we were POOPED.

We eventually did find I15 and off to Draper we went to the final store in our shopping escapade for the day. All My Memories was a great store - tons of stuff - lot's of stuff I had never seen before. Of course I buy paper, stickers, etc, by the line so it didn't take long to have a full basket. Either way it was fun, fun, fun. We also got a goodie bag here. Anyway after we were done we were off to the hotel.

About 16 miles outside of Provo we came to a screaking hault. We are not talking stop and go traffic here. We are talking coming to a complete hault. It took us 2.5 hours to get from Draper to Provo.



Finally a little after midnight we pulled into the hotel. We carried our loot up to our rooms, spread it out and took a quick look. So very much fun.



We ordered Pizza and off to sleepy land we went - a little after 1am.

We were both signed up for the album class the next day... I'll post about that next.

Wow

Can you believe that it has almost been a month since I've blogged? Life has been so busy that it suprised me how something as easy as blogging could get forgotten.

I've completed my first sb page all about Jack. Isn't he cute?


I also bought a new digital camera tonight. I so was in need of one. My beloved Olympus C720 hasn't been it's self lately. It started to act finicky almost a year ago and it has taken that long for me to realize that it is time for a new camera, so I took the plunge. I purchased the Olympus SP 500. The sole reason that I purchased it was because it was similar to my other camera. As you can tell I loved it.


I've been practicing taking pictures. Mostly Jack and cats.


I can't believe that I leave for CKU Provo in one week. Exactly one week from now I will have shopped the evening about and will probably be getting ready for bed and prepared for my album class the next day. I'm so psyched! It is going to be so much fun.

Still need a new things for the trip, but hopefully everything will go smoothly!

Create a beautiful...

This is a phrase that my life coach uses when she e-mails me. She always ends the e-mail/phone call with Create a beautiful... day, afternoon, evening, weekend. It is empowering to read/hear statements like this.

I'm may even make a mantra out of it. (Mantra's by the way are next weeks topic... I've always thought of them hokey, but we'll see.) I think my mantra is going to be Create a beautiful LIFE. I think that this covers a huge part of my life. I have the power to create whatever I want both in a artists way {scrapbooking} or in life.

I am a life artist, I can create the whatever kind of life that I want. When I'm feeling bad about something, I have the power to change it. I have the power to be the human that I want to be, and create a beautiful life!

So my challenge to you!! Create a beautiful day!

Surly Today.

I am so surly right now. I have no idea why. Everything is annoying me, and I’ve been feeling this way for a few days. My co-worker is the one who is annoying me now. She has been on vacation for the last week, and I’ve been doing one of her projects. Here’s the catch. She hasn’t taken the project back yet. I keep doing the boring, stupid tasks, like making sure her focus group materials get sent to the right people.

She sits in her cube all day and takes personal call after personal call. Heaven forbid she does any work. Seriously, I’ve had it. I am going to crank up my radio and completely tune her out.

That will make me happy!

Quote of the Day

Okay, so I saw this GREAT quote on the back of someone's truck this morning.

"Silly Boys... Trucks are for Girls"

Not sure why I liked this quote so much. I am in no way shape or form a truck kind of gal. In fact I think I am the poster child for a gal who shouldn't drive a truck. Anyway, I liked it so much that I laughed out loud and smiled. So if you are the gal in the big black truck -- Thanks, your window sticker made me laugh :-)

Onto other things. I've been shopping, shopping, shopping. Here's a run down of purchases I've made in the 2 weeks.

• Six new books from Amazon including the Post Secret book. One book that I've wanted for a really long time.
• All the new Heidi Swapp stuff from Joann.com
• All the new CBX paper, including the cardstock. *Note: I found some patterns at Michael's yesterday that I hadn't seen before.
• All the new Bookworm Stuff (from Artsy Tartsy), KI Memories.
• Put in a 217.00 order from Scrappin Deals -- and wishing that I could afford even more (although it's not all for me. I had two other ladies stuff on this order)
• A new spring skirt from Elisabeth
• A new purse/handbag from Delia's at the MOA.
• Clothes for the kiddies -- you should see this cute Beagle shirt! I can't wait to see Ty in it.

I can't seem to stop shopping. I think that I have an addiction and need help. Will someone please stop me? Plus I had so much fun shopping with my SIL, that I really want to go again, for a whole day.

Anyone else have this problem?