Workshop Fun

This past weekend was my January workshop weekend. I absolutely love doing workshops! On one hand, designing and creating two layouts every month definitely keeps me working on my own scrapping. I like to have pictures on my layouts when I get to the workshops so it keeps me scanning through my photo folders and looking for the perfect set to go with each layout. That keeps many of my photos fresh in my memory and inspires me to create further layouts for those favorite photos tumbling around in my brain.

I also really enjoy doing the actual workshops themselves. I love to share my layout ideas (or other ideas that I've scraplifted because I thought they were cool) and I love to share little technique pointers. Helping someone else enjoy their hobby just that little bit more is so much fun.

By special request, both layouts this month were Christmas themed. It's actually quite motivating to do Christmas layouts in January. I find that I'm either getting energized by getting super recent photos onto pages, or I'm catching up/finishing up the year before and feel like I have a fresh start in front of me for the new year.

Here's the first layout we did:

The technique I taught with this layout was creating your own background and texture paper with our acrylic stamps. I used our stamp set 'The Season Defined' and designed a random background to stamp on the bamboo paper. I warned the ladies that the one problem with stamping your own B & T paper is that you can get to attached to how pretty it is and not want to cover it up!! Sure enough, they found that to be true... Another popular feature of this layout was the use of our 'Simply Stitches' stamp set. This stamp set is all different types of stitches and when I use it on a page it looks almost like hand stitching! SO fun!!

Here's our second layout:

For this layout I used our extremely popular 'Jingle' paper that was released in the recent Autumn/Winter catalog. For accessories I added accents from the 'On Target' chipboard circles (an awesome product - 12x12 sheet of chipboard with all sizes of die-cut circles! Fantastic!) and lots of Twinkle brads. I used our chipboard monograms for the title and - my very favorite part - I used our brand new letter stickers 'Irresistables: Lots of dots' for the words 'is the best time'. These Irresistables are one of my favorite new products in the just released spring Idea Book. It's two sheets of white letter stickers that you can ink any color you like. When you do ink them, they have a polka dot pattern on them that resists the ink so they stay white and you get polka dot stickers in ANY color you want. WOW! Love it, love it, love it!! They work especially great with this polka dot Jingle paper too!

We had so much fun this weekend! I hope you can join us next time...