Fall Quarterly

I had a great ... and busy weekend.  Marianne came over Friday after work and we loaded our things into her car and headed to Newton for Quarterly.  We worked on 25 Shoebox Cards and actually got them all finished before midnight!!  Since Newton is only about a 30 minute drive for me, we went home and slept in our own beds (well, technically Marianne slept in my guest bed!) and got up the next morning to head back to Quarterly for more fun.  We did a Card Swap and a Gift Card Swap and got some great cards.

This is the Gift Card that I made using the MDS version of the coffee cup from Perfect Blend (I shared the card swap in a previous post HERE).

We also had a contest that was optional.  I decided to participate in all four challenges.  We were to make a 3D Ornament, a Christmas card, an "Any Occasion" card and an "oldie but goodie" using a favorite retired stamp.  I was happy when my Ornament below won 1st Prize!!  I used the stamp set and framelits from Bright and Beautiful.  There are two pieces of chipboard in between the front and back of the ornament.

Back of Ornament

Front of Ornament 

Christmas Card using Bright and Beautiful bundle

For the Christmas card above, I embossed the tags and the stars with Gold, Cherry Cobbler and White Embossing Powder.  I used a piece of DSP from the Newsprint and layered a piece of Vellum over the top to soften it.  All the stars are popped up with dimensionals.

Marianne's Christmas Card won 1st place!!

Marianne's card - Get Your Santa On from Holiday Catalog

My All Occasion card

 The card above was fun to make and a new technique that I stumbled across on Friday morning.  I adhered the Dots Decorative Mask (page 205 in catalog - a deal for $2.95!) with Repositional Tape on top of a piece of Crumb Cake card stock.  Next using a dauber, I sponged White Craft Ink over all the dots.  I removed the Dots Mask and cleaned it.  Next I replaced the Dots Mask on top again - just moving it to the side and up a little bit and (with a dauber) sponged Wisteria Wonder, Coastal Cabana, and Melon Mambo ink on top of the White Ink.  It makes a cool background!  The cupcake is from Cupcake Party stamp set and I used the Cupcake Punch.  I stamped the sentiment from Remembering Your Birthday on Vellum with White Ink and embossed it in white before adhering it to the card.

Blast from the Past - Oldie but Goodie

This set is one of my first Stampin' Up sets almost 10 years ago - Garden Collage.  I still love it!

Sunday night Sonny and I went to the Panther - Steeler game and had a great time!  I will share a few pictures of that tomorrow.

Packed and Ready to Go!

I have been busy packing my supplies for Quarterly.  Marianne is coming over when she gets off work and we will be heading to Newton for the NC Demos Quarterly.  We always have so much fun!!  We will be super busy tonight doing our Shoebox Cards.  We have about 30 to do!  Wonder how long we will be working on those!  Since Newton is close, we will come back to my house tonight and travel back to Newton in the morning (bright and early).

Sammie thinks if she gets in my bag, she can go too (and get some peace and quiet away from Bogart!)

Instead of doing a card for my Shoebox, I decided to do one of the Tag A Bags.  I was going to buy a notepad to go in each one but with doing 30, even if they were $1 each, that would be $30 so they can furnish their own notepad!!

I used the Bigzz Flower Die, the clothespins on page 208, doilies, ribbon and two stamp sets - For All Things and Four Feathers.

Tomorrow we will be doing several projects, swaps and have a few card contests.  Here is my swap card:

I used the For All Things stamp again and stamped the leaves in Coastal Cabana, Pistachio and Cantalope.  I used the Wooden Leaves that are in the Holiday Catalog.

More Shoebox Swaps

Sometimes if you don't have bad luck, you don't have luck at all!  Ashley made a quick recruiting trip Sunday to Little Rock, Arkansas.  I believe she could have driven there quicker!  She flew from San Antonio to DFW for a connecting flight and ended up spending about 6 hours in the DFW airport!  Her noon time flight was canceled and she couldn't get on another flight until around 6 pm.  When she arrived at her hotel in Little Rock, her wallet was missing!  Yep, all her ID, credit cards, etc.!  She knew she had it right before she boarded the flight.  She was finally able to get checked in to her hotel with a little help, but the next day, she did not have any ID to fly back home.  And to make matters worse, she had flown to Little Rock on American Airlines but was traveling back to Texas on Southwest so there was not even a round trip on one airline to follow.  Plus getting through Security with no ID can be tricky!  She was in her uniform which helped a bit.  But the only thing she had with her name and address on it was a mailing label on her Real Simple magazine that she had brought along to read on the flight.  That worked!  Now the hard part - trying to replace all that you lost!  I have always been scared when I am on a trip as to what would happen if I lost my ID.  Guess I'll save my magazines from now on!!   Although sometimes a bus pass will work.  When we lived in Washington, our friends, Margaret and Graham came to visit and brought Margaret's parents from England.  They wanted to see the Army base where Ashley was stationed.  So, they all piled into Ashley's car and then realized that Marg (the mom) did not have her ID - all she had was a bus pass (or maybe it was a library card - can't remember).  Anyway, Ashley bundled everyone's ID up and gave them to the guard at the gate.  I guess he didn't look at them close because he saluted Ashley and sent them onto the base!  Same thing happened last year to Marianne.  She arrived at the airport for their family trip to Las Vegas without her ID.  She was able to get through Security with her BJ's Club card because it had her picture on it!!  Maybe we're not so secure????

You should be able to get a lot of ideas from these great shoebox cards from Quarterly!

Quarterly Shoebox Cards

We are almost at the end of our catalog year.  It's always exciting to guess what will and won't make it into the new catalog.  I have a few guesses on what will be retired and I'm sure I'll miss a few stamps plus a few of the outgoing In Colors (like Summer Starfruit). I will be going to Stampin' Up's Catalog Premier event at a theater in Raleigh in a couple of weeks.  This is the first time Stampin' Up has revealed the new catalog in such a flashy way.  It should be a fun event.

 Here's the schedule of some of the upcoming events:

• Monday, April 21 - Retired List to be published (products available while supplies last)
• Monday, June 2 - New 2014/2015 Annual Catalog goes live!  (ordering begins at 12 pm MT)
• Wednesday, June 4 - Last day to order from the "old" 2013/2014 Annual Catalog
• Thursday, August 28th - New 2014 Holiday Catalog goes live! (ordering begins at 12 pm MT)

These colors will be retiring so make sure you stock up and get your ink refills before they are all gone.

We have a lot of talent in our NC SU demonstrator group.  We did 31 shoebox cards last weekend.  That sounds like a lot - wait a minute!  It is a lot!  But everyone designed their cards so that they were pretty quick to put together and followed the instructions to package each card separately and do all the embossing and die cutting in advance.  So we started putting the cards together around 5 and Marianne and I were finished about midnight.  Here are some of the cards:

Show and Tell from Quarterly

Today has been a nightmare for me!  I got a text message from a friend in Texas this a.m. telling me my email had been hacked.  As I was reading that message, Marianne called me to tell me the same thing.  They got an email supposedly from me asking for a "favour".  The spelling of favor gave them the clue.  Others who answered that email got another one from me (supposedly) saying we were in the Ukraine, were robbed and needed money or something like that.  So, I logged into my Yahoo mail account and was going to send an email to every one of my contacts telling them to disregard previous emails from me.  Well, imagine my surprise when ALL my contacts were gone!!   I was able to go on Facebook and post a message there.  But my phone was ringing off the hook from friends and family calling to let me know I had been hacked.  I worked on trying to fix the matter and change my passwords all day!!  Finally about 3:30, I started getting a few emails but not many like I would guess I should be getting.  So I don't know what is going on.  Luckily, I have a Charter email account and was able to use it to alert contacts in it.  I am still trying to get to the bottom of this mess.  I may end up having to delete my current Yahoo account and set up another one.

Here are a few photos from Quarterly.

This is the nametags that Marianne made.  Aren't they darling?  She used the small tag punch.  We stapled different colors of ribbon on the bottom for our Prize Patrol!

I downloaded (for free) this spring subway art and bought some colorful frames at M's; framed them and we gave them away to our three demonstrators who did projects for us.  They were really cute.  I was going to make them in My Digital Studio and actually started one but decided why reinvent the wheel??!!  Here is the link to the download - SPRING

I made a couple of banners and we tacked them up in the room.  The top one is from Sale-a-Bration and say's WELCOME.  The bottom one uses the canvas banners and says CREATE.

Here are a few of my favorite "SHOW and TELL" items that the gals brought.

And a Good Time was Had By All

What a fun weekend I had.  Marianne and I left Mooresville Friday morning and headed to Shallotte in her brand new card!  We stopped along the way and did a little shopping and ended up at Lake Waccamaw in time for an early dinner at Dale's Seafood.

After eating, we headed to Shallotte, checked into our motel and went to the high school to work on 23 shoeboxes.  We got all of them done but each other's by midnight.  There were some great cards and I got a lot of new ideas.  Saturday we headed back to the school for quarterly.  Several of us demonstrations teaching projects to the group.  Here is the first card we made that Nancy Carr had for us:

Isn't it great??  It's really a lot easier than it looks.

We had door prizes all during the day.  I won a beautiful fall plaque.  It was on the "show and tell" table earlier in the day and I had taken a picture so I could try and make it at home.  Now I don't have to.

When the Quarterly was over, Marianne and I went to Sunset Beach with one of the gals from Wilmington, Penny.  There was a festival going on with a great beach band playing.  We wandered around the festival looking at the different booths and then found a few seats in the shade to listen to the band until they pulled us up to dance in the conga line!!

We popped in to a Mexican restaurant and had a margarita and got to know each other better.  From there we drove to the beach to put our toes in the sand and see the awesome sunset.  After all, we were at Sunset Beach!!



Isn't it cool how the camera did the reflection of the sunset in the marsh?

Marianne, me and Penny

It was getting to be dinner time and Marianne and I still hadn't decided where we were going to stay for the night.  We drove to Calabash and had some great seafood.  We were going to find a hotel in North Myrtle but it turned out to be bikers weekend and the hotels were full.  So we drove back to Shallotte and stayed at the hotel we had stayed in the previous night.  This morning after breakfast, we hit the road for home.  We stopped at Goody's in Wadesboro so I could get some new shoes (2 pair actually!)  On the way to Shallotte we stopped there and Marianne bought 2 pairs - it was "buy one, get one free".  I used all my will power and did not even try them on.  But I weakened on the way home!  Driving along, we saw a "Peaches and Cream" ice cream shop.  Marianne made a U-turn to get back to that!!  It was delicious - home made peach ice cream!!  Plus, it was also a little roadside produce stand with apples from the mountains and muscadine grapes, my favorite! 

It was a great weekend!

Truly Grateful for NC Demo Quarterly

I am headed to my teenage "stomping grounds" tomorrow with Marianne.  We are going to a NC SU Demo Quarterly meeting in Shallotte.  But, on our way, we will be stopping by Lake Waccamaw which is less than an hour's drive from Shallotte.  Our family went to Lake Waccamaw for two weeks every summer with my grandparents, aunt, uncle and cousins .... and our maid who was like part of our family.  Oh the tales I could tell of my "coming of age" at Lake Waccamaw!  My oldest cousin, Landon, taught me all about smoking, boys, sneaking out of the house at midnight, boys, plucking my eyebrows, boys, etc. etc.!!  We had such good times.  I met a boy there when I was in high school and we were quite serious and had a relationship through my college years off and on.  Who knows what the future would have held if he had not moved to California!!  Not that I am not grateful and in love with my husband (even after 40 years!!) but don't you ever wonder - if some little detail had changed, how different your life could have been???

Our family had some sad news today.  My Aunt Carol passed away this afternoon.  She has been struggling with dementia for several years.  My cousin, Candy, who lives in Mooresville had her at her home for a long time until it just got too much for her.  So her sister, Jane, who lives in Raleigh has had her for almost a year.  She went to a Hospice facility on Monday and we knew the end was near.  Candy and her brother, Bobby, went to see her last weekend.  And today Candy took her daughter, Alex, to Raleigh one last time.   Alex posted the most touching tribute to her Facebook page this evening.  "Today at 3:30pm I stayed by my sweet Grandmommy's side and watched as she drifted off to heaven. I'm so glad God let me see her in time to say goodbye. I remember when I was a little girl, she would lay with me at night until I would fall asleep, and I'm so thankful I could do the same for her at her last moment of life. I will always love you Grandmommy ♡ RIP My beautiful angel."


Anyway, I have been furiously getting prepared for the Quarterly.  I am doing a presentation on Saturday and teaching them to make a tag booklet with shipping tags and the envelope punch board.  I'll be sharing my book soon.  I also organized the card swap and will share my Perfect Blend hybrid card with you later.  Marianne is in charge of the Christmas tag swap and I made a snowman tag (later share also).  Friday night we will be doing a shoebox swap with 23 people participating.  That's a lot of cards to make in one evening!  But it will be fun!  Here is my shoebox card using Truly Grateful.  I really like how it turned out.  I used Summer Starfruit for the base and Cajun Craze for the layer.  I stamped the background stamp onto the Cajun with Cajun Craze ink.  I die cut the Chocolate Chip label and a label from Naturals cardstock.  On the Naturals cardstock, I sponged Summer Starfruit, Cajun Craze and Crumb Cake ink.  On top of that I stamped the wheat.  I punched 2 small holes and threaded some strings from the burlap ribbon in them.  On top I stamped the acorn and adhered it with dimensionals. 

I''ve been working on my new computer today - love how fast it is!  But I think I may have to download all the elements I have bought over the years for MDS which will take me a little bit of time!  I'm hoping there is an easy solution to that but I will tackle that problem when I return.

OK - gotta go pack for my trip.  Have a great weekend!!  I probably won't be able to post again until Sunday.

Shoebox Swaps

I haven't shared the Shoebox Swaps from Quarterly with you .... mainly because I haven't finished them.  But, I decided to go ahead and share the pictures that I took of the ones I need to finish.  I hope to work on them real soon!! 

The stocking punch makes this one so easy!

Again - another punch to make it easy - this time, the owl punch.

No punch - have to cut the snowman out.  This is the cute snowman in Snow Much Fun



A great autum card using French Foilage

Angela took Mom to Dr Hines today - the spine and pain management specialist.  He diagnosed her with severe stenosis, disc bulging and severe osteoarthritis.  He is going to give her an injection next Tuesday - a nerve root block to try to decrease the inflammation which should reduce her pain.  He says it will not change the stenosis and does not know how long the relief will last.  The other option is surgery and he wants us to talk to a surgeo.  I am very leary of her having back surgery. 



Lollies

SU I am starting to get back to normal here.  I played bridge today .... almost got high but came in 2nd and won $4!!!  Getting the big bucks, huh?  I got my club orders sorted out and am ready to deliver them this week.  I'm working on some table decorations and menu for the Southern Living Dinner that our group auctioned off.  It is tomorrow night so I will be finishing up the project tomorrow.  And I even cooked us a dinner tonight - chicken tacos which is an adaptation of my daughter-in-law's recipe and is very good.

As I mentioned in my previous post, Marianne and I made a few stops along the way to Greensboro on Friday.  At one of the stamp stores, they had a really cool wreath hanging in their bathroom.  I took a picture and I think Marianne is going to try to make one for her bathroom in shades of purple.

It is simply 12x12 DSP rolled.  I think this would look great with our Spice Cake DSP and a big button in the center!!

At the Quarterly, there were random Prize Patrols.  Marianne and I both won prizes - red and green buttons in one of the little plastic sleeves that is in the mini.  (I'll take a picture tomorrow - it is really cute.)  But another group won "lollie" wreaths that Janie made.  They were great!  This is going to be a project of mine soon too.



This one uses Spice Cake DSP



This is a Christmas one.

 And finally, here is a picture of a Thanksgiving wreath that I saw in one of the scrapbook stores.  I thought it was pretty cool.  Wouldn't it look nice on a front door?

Well, it is almost the bewitching hour of midnight so I am going to say good night and go to bed!!