Saturday, May 12, 2007

The retreat and Hello I'm back :)

Yes I have been absent for a few weeks. I have had some emails from wonderful friends wondering where my blog posts have disappeared to and I just want to say thank you for writing! I am back...at least until the summer heat drives me out of my none-air conditioned office LOL. So let's catch up from the past few weeks...............

April 27th-29th I spent at a wonderful scrapbooking retreat at Singing Hills Christian Conference Center in New Hampshire. I made the 3 hour trek alone and actually knew only the keynote speaker, Lucinda Seacrest McDowell. She is an incredible author of many books and is a newbie to scrapbooking. She even made her first album pages and it was very inspiring to listen to her speak. I met her through my MOPS group last year and I love listening to her words of encouragement. You can visit her website here: Encouraging Words
I made some great new friends, including Ronny, who had me laughing and crying all in the same hour we met. It was so refreshing meeting someone so confident and genuine. She and I joked about not knowing anything about directions and maps. She said she must live close to me since I was only 2-1/2 - 3 hours away from the conference site. And when we finally looked at a map we came to the conclusion that she lives in Canada (just about) and we live at least 5 hours away from one another. I think I was laughing so hard at us having no idea where we were that water came out of my nose at one point. I met another woman, Cynthia, who lives nearby (here in CT and not Canada lol) and we had a playdate with my daughter and one of the children she babysits this past week. She is a nanny and we have alot in common. She is a wonderful photographer and is a consultant for Creative Memories. We are all planning to attend the next retreat in November :)

I managed to get an entire 8x8 album complete and about 12 pages in one of my daughter's albums. I also bought supplies (they had store onsite) and managed to take some Tim Holtz classes on distressing and inking - I learned some fabulous techniques!!!! I even did photograph retouching and coloring with some of the Ranger inks. That was my favorite class! They offered many classes and I had originally signed up for 6 classes but ended up only taking half of them because I kept getting sidetracked doing my pages at my own cropping table (and failed to check the time). We each had our own cropping space. Mine ended up being an entire 8' table and I had plenty of space to set up all my goodies. There were 130 women at the retreat and it was so much fun! If any of you are interested in going, leave me a comment and I'll send you the info for the fall retreat - 3 whole days of scrapbooking, pampering and friends! I'd love to meet some of you fellow New Englanders.

Over the last few weeks I ended up suffering from/through allergies and have been recovering from those (Flonase is my best friend this month). And I started working out at the gym 3-4 times a week...which has boosted my energy and has been focused on getting household projects done. So I am back and will be posting some of my layouts soon, so be on the lookout for those :)

♥, Lisa

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