Close To My Heart Calgary Regional Convention 2009

Today was such a full day! This morning we had a great opening from Jeanette Lynton, the founder of Close To My Heart. Her passion for this business just radiates from her. Plus she’s so approachable! She said she didn’t want anyone coming up and introducing themselves by wanting to shake their hand with her. She wants a big ol’ hug! Too cute!

Anyhoo, after Jeanette we got a lot of great business advice from various members of the staff and there were different sessions available based on what we signed up for. The afternoon arrived and that meant play time for us! WOO HOO!

We made a card and 2-two page layouts. Here I am working away with a few other BC consultants.

One of the really cool tricks I learned by doing this layout is called masking. It’s amazing. You’re going to love this. Masking is when you want to only use part of a stamp. What you do is stamp the full image on a post-it note then cut out the part you want. Got that? I’ll say it again, cut out the part you want.

In this example below I want “fishing” from the stamp “hooked on fishing” from the Campin’ Fever Stamp Set (D1353 for $28.50 CDN). Using my micro-scissors I cut out fishing. Next, I put the post-it note on my page, lining up the space for “fishing” where I want it to be. With my acrylix stamps from Close To My Heart, it’s so easy to then stamp again over the image because I can line up the “hooked on” part so that with the hole I cut out only the “fishing” shows up exactly where I want it. Isn’t that neat-o??

The second great find from this workshop was the Dimensional Elements In Color – Adventure (Z1158 for only $5.50 CDN). It is a steal of a deal! Seriously, don’t tell Close To My Heart what a deal it is, I’m sure the price is a misprint. You get 11 items of chipboard with outdoor related sayings. It’s great for camping or fishing or adventure embellishments on your layouts. The wheels say things all sorts of different things. One says the months of the year and you can spin the dial to show one month. Another says: treasure, search, explore, learn, discover, celebrate.

Here’s the layout we did with the Dimensional Elements In Color – Adventure. It’s a little hard to see in this picture. I took a close up of the piece we used and the rest of the pack is below.

Okay, now enough talking and on to more pictures. Here are some of the samples they showed us. I love some of these items!

Timberline Ranch

This past weekend I went to Timberline Ranch for a scrapbooking weekend put on by Get Creative Scrapbooking. Diane always does an amazing job. She is so organized and such a creative individual. She was working on her trip to Disneyland and needed to fit A LOT of photos from the parade but she didn’t know how to get them all in one layout until she remembered the Close To My Heart Folios.

The folio is a 12” by 12” file folder that fits in memory protectors. You can slip memorabilia inside or use it as a flip page for more scrapbooking space – like Diane did. She put the folded side of the folder along the top of her album and slipped one side of the folder in her page protector then when she flips it up, she has another 2 sides of 12" by 12" space to work with. This is definitely a great way to fit many more pictures is one layout. Good job Diane!

As for myself…what did I get done? I was pretty surprised actually. I didn’t have as much preparation time to organize my photos and supplies to pack for the retreat but I brought what I had and got so much done! I was able to finish some layouts I had created some time ago, and I started some pages from scratch and finished them. I tried to take some photos of what I did but it didn’t come out too well. The lighting at this hour isn’t great! I’ll try again and post some other time. Come back soon!

One of the projects I didn’t finish (or start) is my last trip to San Francisco. I’m not sure how I want to scrapbook that. It was the batch of photos I pulled out a few times over the weekend and would look at for a while, then put them away because I just wasn’t sure what to do. I’d work on something else, come back to it and put it away again. I’ll get around to it eventually! In the meantime, there are many other things I can work on!