What a weekend…

Apr 7, 2008

I had such a blast teach­ing this past week­end at Last­ing Mem­o­ries retreat in Dan­bury, CT. Julie and Barb are the best hosts. They go above and beyond for their cus­tomers… loads of laughs and cre­at­ing were had by all.

I have a few kits left over. If you are inter­ested in pur­chas­ing one let me know. They are the Time Flies and Sto­ries Told mini album kits and Hap­pi­ness is you/Two Sis­ters (you will cre­ate 2 — (1–12 x 12 lay­outs) Lay­out Kit, and the Our House 1–12 x 12 lay­out kit. You will have lots of left­overs from each kit to use on future projects or layouts.

Their good friend Nancy cel­e­brated her 50th birth­day yes­ter­day and all week­end some­one was sur­pris­ing her with some kind of birth­day wish. Nancy took it all in stride even though I think she wanted to go and hide a few times. They sur­prised her with a birth­day cake which is the best cake I have ever had in my life. It was insanely incred­i­ble and I am so glad there are 1000’s of miles between me and that bak­ery. Nancy also has me on a mis­sion to get a cri­cut expres­sion. She was show­ing me all the great things this machine can do and now I have GOT to have one. Sue tried to con­vince me I need the Paz­zle but I am just too com­puter chal­lenged. What she did show me was great. It is super cool too and has loads of neat fea­tures but I just can­not grasp all of it and fear frus­tra­tion would be my main state of mind. That is unless Sue moves down here and does it for me all the time.

Dur­ing one of my classes Ruth gave me the tip of the day… I tell ya I should be so embar­rassed to tell you all this but I just have to let you know as I am sure there are oth­ers out there like me. Did you know the plas­tic part of the emery board file in the Basic­Grey Pre­ci­sion File Set comes off? I NEVER knew this and I am so glad I didn’t throw mine away. I tell ya that was such a DUH moment for me. So THANK YOU RUTH for shar­ing this lit­tle tad bit of info with me.

I also want to thank all of you that came to my classes and left telling me you were so glad you came and you learned a lot. I was happy to hear you say you were going to apply some of the tech­niques you tried in each class in future lay­outs and projects. I know I put you all through the ringer with the craft knife but in the end I do believe you were all happy and will agree it is the quick­est method for cov­er­ing chip­board pages.

I must say there is one per­son in par­tic­u­lar who I got to speak with for a bit before leav­ing to catch my flight who truly touched my heart. Livia pulled me aside to thank me for help­ing her in class as they were the first classes she had ever taken. She showed me the lay­outs she had been work­ing on dur­ing the retreat and each one she added some of the tec­niques she learned in class and told me where she planned on adding other tech­niques to other pages. Then the kicker was when she said, “You made me feel like I really can do this.” Yep, I can hardly type or think of this with­out hav­ing tears. I love teach­ing and that one com­ment is why.

Every­one really can do this!