Stamp New England

I finally have had a chance to organize myself and get some pictures up from our Stamp New England event I attended with my friends Lynn and Molly. What a blast we had! I've not laughed so hard in such a long time! We all met and got on the road and talked all the way to Portsmouth, NH. We were early enough to make a couple of shopping stops and had some lunch at Ruby Tuesday's (yum!). Then we went off trying to find a scrapbook store called Wholly Scrap. Well, we got lost and spent about an hour and a half driving and even went back into Maine to find the store that we were just two minutes away from it when we started out! The lady working the store was great and friendly and helpful on our way there and laughed so hard at us as we stumbled in and said "Wholly Scrap! We finally found you!"



Here's Lynn and Molly, my good stamping buddies in our conference room at the Sise Inn, a beautiful Inn that Stamp New England was held at! Hey guys!



Stamp New England was the first organized stamping event where we got to meet other stampers and learn from some of the best in the business! So many people contributed products for door prizes and I was so proud to design for Susana at Susana's Custom Art and Card Design and Summer at Roses on Paper who were very generous with their donations! Thanks you two! Now on to our projects! This is the cutest sketch book that we made. We were late for the beginning of the class but we caught up! Karen Moltz helped everyone with the Bind-It-All (I need to get me one of these!) and conducted the Make and Take. Most of us brought sketches and voila, you have your own book dedicated to sketches for cards! Too cute and I loved it! And yep, that's a Bella there! Then we were off for the evening. Molly was trying to get over pneumonia so the three of us kind of laid low and go ready for the next day and boy, did we need our energy!



This is my name tag I made (It was done out of my favorite paper (Euphoria by Basic Grey. I'd stamp with it every day if I could!), had Euphoria buttons and my Scrapper's Floss and Metallic Dew Drops (two of my favorite embellishments!), and I stamped my name with an alphabet stamp that my son-in-law Chris picked out for me himself at Christmas. Some of my favorite things! And then we got to make a box out of one of Lauren Meader's templates! What a sweet person she was! Love the box because not only was it cute, but we all received the "Life" set by PaperTrey Inc that had been sold out! And our box got filled with chocolate so what's better than that?



This is Lauren teaching the class. Great templates she has!



Then came Cindy Lawrence and water coloring. Aren't these cards just beautiful? I love water coloring (so much like using my distressed inks that I love so much) and the colors were so beautiful and springy! I was so excited to have a class with Cindy because when I started stamping again, I was drawn to looking at flowers and watercolors, which I used to be pretty good at, and Cindy is one of the best with this technique! We were in the back of the class and she kept checking to see that we had copics, brads, ribbon, reinkers, made sure that everything made it back to the corner to us. Thanks, Cindy! What a talented stamper she is!



Then we had a break for lunch and took a quick break and checked out of the Inn. Here's Molly with her pillow. It always feels best to have your own pillow when you're not feeling well!



The one class I didn't know how I was going to take to was distressing and working with wood. Talk about being out of your comfort zone and my gosh, I LOVED it! Julie Masse did such a great class on working with wood and distressing paper and painting and sewing a bit. What great fun this was! And I got to do three step stamping and love it so much, I bought this Easter chicken set from Kitchen Sink Stamps and have to try it again!



Here's Lynn working on her chick!



And then came Joanne Basil from MFT, one of the companies I love and adore! She taught us the fine art of paper piecing and what a great time we had with that! I never thought about the logic with paper piecing. I've cut out a skirt or dress but that's about it. I'm going to be doing a lot more of this now that I've done it properly!

This was such a great event and all the great projects we got to work on was so worth everything. All three of us are looking forward to the next stamping event and we're bringing more people with us! Hope you enjoyed my rendition of Stamp New England. It was so much fun, and time spent with good friends is time very well spent.