paper: 10 Things :: May 2012 | pretty paper. true stories. {and scrapbooking classes with cupcakes.}

Oh hi there. The rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated… Okay, perhaps not that, but no, I certainly didn’t mean to leave you hanging for so long with nary an update to read. I could bore you with why, but I have this minor aim in life to not bore you, so I’ll skip that.

Instead, I’ll proclaim that I’m back and I’m going to stay on top of this, starting right now. Starting with getting this 10 Things on the Tenth post live right in the nick of time for this time zone (my apologies to all of those to my East who have already declared it tomorrow, but hey – bonus to those of you in Hawaii who haven’t even had lunch yet!) With this big gap in reading material in mind, why don’t I share the most obvious list of ten things: ten things I should have blogged here in the last two weeks.

1. How ridiculously quick and easy it is to make a happy and cute birthday card with the Sketchbook collection designed by the lovely Amy Tangerine.

2. Probably most importantly, the PRIZE WINNERS from the online scrapbooking weekend!! These will go live right here just shortly (Friday morning) and the gift certificates are being sent by email this Friday, the 11th of May. Thank you so much for your fabulous participation in all that fun. Next time I’m going to make it a goal to not fall over and stop blogging as soon as it’s over. Cool?

3. For the third year running, I popped over to Germany to scrapbook with the lovely ladies who gather for the Crop on the Rhine. I think this year was my favourite yet! I taught one scrapbooking workshop with three layouts and one more craft-based workshop with an old book that hides a secret inside its pages. And because it is Germany, I ate a ridiculous amount of chocolate wafer biscuits (seriously, even the bargain bags are like tiny bites of Kit-Kat taken to an artisan level) and refuse to make any apologies for eating multiple potato dishes at the same meal because frankly there is little in the world that could stop me from trying something as simply wonderful as potatoes cooked in a new or different way. Hmmm… have you ever noticed that pretty much every 10 Things list comes back to food? I know by now you’ve realised that I take in way more food tourism when I travel than national monuments. Priorities, I tell you. Anyway: Crop on the Rhine is amazing and sincere thanks to Barbara, Heike, Andrea, Conny and everyone who attends and makes this happen. Even special thanks to Ingo, the hotel manager who has come to embrace the special kind of fabulous that a hotel entirely booked by scrapbookers really can be.

4. I went to Germany on the train, as it is more sensible with class kits and also because I just like it more than flying. (Anyone else?) And I got to take The Boy along with me this year as a bit of a treat, so then we headed to Amsterdam for a few days before we came back to the UK. This was actually our first little holiday since we came back from our big trip just over a year ago now. We’ve each done a few journeys here and there for work or family things, but we hadn’t had a good opportunity to actually go somewhere new. This was new! Neither of us had been there, which is always fun. And what was extra super-duper fun was that essentially, this trip was on the house. A few months back I won an amazing prize from Hotwire by telling the story of how I once saved money on travel by sleeping on a pool raft in someone’s broom cupboard. A much easier way to save money while travelling is to use Hotwire – they offer cut-rate hotel rooms by not telling you the name of the hotel until after you’ve made the booking (you get to know its neighbourhood and amenities, just not the exact hotel). So anyway, I should both thank them and write a full post about this adventure since they were kind enough to send us to the mystery hotel of our choice for free! (It turned out to be a very recently built Crowne Plaza, for the hotel curious. Definite win.)

5. We rolled into Amsterdam on the eve of a national holiday. More like THE national holiday. We had no idea. The entire city was on the streets and clad in orange and holding an annual city-wide secondhand sale. Seriously fabulous timing.

6. I came home from Amsterdam, went to work on a super-secret Olympic project and immediately got crazy-sick, despite having gone the entire winter without a sniffle. But between ‘super-secret’ and ‘ugh I’m sick’, I don’t really think there is anything there to blog, so really this number six is a total cheat.

6. Glitter Girl has been out and about you know. There are three adventures I need to blog! In Adventure 17, she tries a variety ideas with the new DIY Thickers range from American Crafts, in Adventure 18, she talks about travel papers and makes a layout in under ten minutes, and in Adventure 19, she talks about what she puts in page kits, both big and small. All of those links have the project photos, videos and full shopping lists so you can catch up with her crazy pink-nailed scrapping antics. Whomever she might be.

7. It was National (or International) Scrapbooking Day. Such a day exists. We had an almighty fun weekend at Two Peas and I haven’t seen so many people on the message board there in years! I absolutely loved it. They even let mild-mannered little me share an extra special video for the weekend, which you can find here. When I say ‘they let me’, I basically mean that because it is ridiculously long. It is forty entire minutes of me scrapbooking. I kid you not. So you might want to schedule it in… but at least I’ve warned you up front.

8. Before Amsterdam and crazysick and supersecret and Scrapbooking Day, I took a giant stack of pictures and notes for the Week in the Life project with Ali Edwards. I’ve done this project almost every year since 2006, but I usually do a week in July. Spring was different and it was a good change! I’ve ordered my prints for that this week and have a few projects to finish first before I can work on that in scrapbook form, but I’m looking forward to it!

9. I should have shared some starting points or something, huh? Here’s one for today then. Made with the current kit from JBS Mercantile.

10. My new class Cover to Cover started this week. It is making my heart very happy. I’ve had some of my favourite discussions about scrapbooking ever, and I love that with this class lots of people are emailing me to talk about different solutions, already! (The forum is buzzy too.) Anyway, if you were thinking about it or you forgot, it’s not too late to join! Sign up and pull up a chair so we can scrap away!

And there are a few more things after that, but I promise I am officially behind but quickly catching up so thanks for not giving up on my little corner of the internet! (Extra thanks for those of you who blogged your 10 Things today even though I was absent until the last minute. I do plan to continue this series and you have ever right to twack me over the head with a teaspoon next month if the post isn’t up first thing in the morning! Thanks for your patience.)

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10 May 2012

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