What A Weekend!

Well the cars are unloaded and the great unpacking and reprganising task is underway! I thought I would post and share a few photos of the weekend.

On Thursday mid afternoon we were allowed to start dropping boxes off at the hotel which made a huge difference as usually we are doing this late evening in the dark. It meant that we were able to finish delivering shop stock to the hotel by mid evening and could start organising where things would go although we couldn't have our tables until later that night as there were meetings and weddings going on in all the other function suites.

Rather unusually we then had a leisurely Friday morning setting up the crop room and classroom and I snapped this photo of one of the cropping tables before its occupants arrived!


I didn't quite remember to take the shop photos before any shopping had taken place (the early arrivals swooped in and started shopping straight away!) so Jill has already commented that the paper stands aren't quite as neatly displayed as they were at the beginning of the weekend but you get the picture!

As always Thickers were a firm favourite amongst most of the delegates and they enjoyed using those that were in class kits as well as buying just a few of the packs we had on sale!

jane Hewitt who joined our Design Team at the start of the year taught a class for us this time. She created a stunning interactive mini book using a Piggy Tales Slide Book, keep an eye on the blog for photos, and although it was a project that took longer to finish than the class time it was very popular as Jane worked through the techniques involved in completing the inner pages with the class and then moved on to creating the front cover. This meant they could repeat the techniques learned for the remaining inner pages and I can tell you there were a lot of people brandishing some gorgeous interactive books when it was time to go home!

I couldn't resist taking a photo of part of the lunch buffet on Saturday as it all looked so pretty and it was very tasty too.

For the evening meals we went for hot buffet options on both nights which, having read the feedback forms, was a popular choice. It meant that it was a little quicker paced than we had encountered on our previous retreats with a table service meal on Saturday night,

As always it was lovely to see what the ladies were making all weekend. We set five challenges for the delegates to work on if they wanted to over the weekend and the winners are shown below. Pat won the sketch challenge (look out for that sketch appearing here on the blog as Aprils second sketch!) Heather won the ingredients challenge (the pink layout on the left of the photo) Denise made a stunning card and fancy envelope and won the card challenge, Jane N won the scraplift challenge with her version of one of Debbies layouts and Jane H won the Alter This challenge with her ridiculously creative wardrobe which started life as a small treasure chest shaped box (which forms the top of the wardrobe)

All the challenge winners had made some great items but theirs weren't the only lovely creations, it was very hard to judge the challenges as there were some beautiful cards, boxes and layouts.

We managed to ger chance to have a few photos taken of the teachers altogether which was lovely even if we did all have to look down and then look up on the count of 3 to avoid squinting in the sunlight which suddenly appeared for the weekend!

Thanks to all the girls who taught classes for us and to Ann who did a fabulous make and take. We had a really lovely weekend and of course it was lovely to see so many ladies who come back time after time.

Keep an eye on the blog for more from the weekend including some pictures of the classes and projects we worked on.

Details of our next retreat will appear on here and on our website very soon!