More than just the packaging

Have you ever looked at the packaging our scrapbooking products come in and thought "I can't throw that away, I might use it!?" I'm sure I can't be the only one, and Prima seem to be one of my most favourite companies when it comes to product packaging. At the ATDML retreat at the start of the month one of the classes used several Prima Journaling notecards, which when purchased as a complete pack, come in a very neat notecard box. When packing up the kits with Mel & Jill, I remarked at the boxes and how neat they were, saying to Mel "I could do something with that" and there the challenge was laid down. "Go on then, and we can share it on the blog" they said!

So, here I am a few weeks later sharing my altered notecard box. First up, BBA image (Box Before Ann!)

And now BABA image (Box Altered by Ann!)

I have made the box into the housing for my Shimelle Christmas journalling class and the inside which once held Prima Journalling cards, now holds blank 6.5"x4" pieces of Kraft cardstock ready for the first class prompt tomorrow. The box actualy comes apart reasonably easy making it simple to cover in your choice of papers, and then reassemble as it was before. Add some distress stickles and a few beads, a stamped tag and a thickers JYC title and I'm all set.
The Prima notecards can be found here and are less than a fiver! Nice inexpensive Christmas gift to yourself!

Special Offer In The Run Up To Christmas

We all love the countdown to Christmas, there is something especially nice about getting a little treat each day in the advent calendar and getting more and more festive as the big day approaches. But how would you like to get something a little more than a chocolate as a pre Christmas treat?!

From now until Christmas Eve (or until stocks run out!) we are offering a free mini book kit with all orders of £20 (excluding postage) or more. The kit will include a shaped book with chipboard covers and 10 cardstock pages, 2 book rings, co-ordinating ribbon and 10 chipboard embellishments. It will be added automatically to your order, there is no code to remember.

So why not give yourself a little pre Christmas present from us!

PS October Afternoon Modern Homemaker arrived today and is on the website... it's very pretty and the die cut paper is great if you love your retro papers! Think Ladybird Reading Books!

Remember Remember The Sketch of November

In THIS POST Ann posted our retreat sketch challenge and opened it up to blog readers. You have got to be in it to win it so get creating with the sketch and link to it in the comments on that post!

Happy Scrapping!

Creating for Christmas

Been busy here, not a lot of time for crafting but I have a few projects that I am working on.

Several of them are for the Chicken Soup 12 Days of Christmas project so I can't share them here until they have gone on the soup blog.

One of them is my card class for the Eclectic Keepsakes Christmas crop so again I will share here after the crop!

What I have been doing which I can share is making some little Christmas gift bags and boxes using dies for the Big Shot. I love these for putting little gifts and goodies in - I will be making a matching set to be table favours for when my in laws join us a couple of days after Christmas for a rerun of Christmas dinner!

Snowy Layouts

No snow here (yet) but I know lots of you are experiencing the big chill - of course once the novelty of the snow wears off (usually after around 5 mins I find) you have a great excuse to be confined to the crafting area!

I thought I would upload a couple of snow layouts from years gone by - I am ashamed to admit that I have still not scrapped my photos from the snowy winter last year but here are 3 from my back catalogue!

If you have any snow layouts (new or old) then upload them to your blog and leave us a link, we would love to take a look.

Keep warm everyone!

Teachers gifts for the holiday season?

Fancy grabbing a cuppa and popping by to peruse the latest creations from the Design Team this month who worked with Websters Pages. Items created included this great minibook by Jane which would make a neat gift for the teachers this forthcoming holiday season, and such a great idea with the pencil too!


Think I might be scraplifting this idea!
Anyone else care to share their top-tips for creating that handmade something for our teachers and classroom assistants? I could use the inspiration with December just around the corner!!

Belated Challenge Winner!

Oh Wow, time really did get away from us the last couple of months with things being so CRAZY hectic at home and work!

Remember the spotty dotty challenge?? Go on, think hard and you may remember it!!!

Well I realised today that we hadn't chosen a winner. I sidted through the entry emails again and I just adore this layout!

Thanks to all who took the time to enter the challenge. Karen Williams please email me and I will get your prize sorted :) Apologies for the delay

A Couple Of Websters Pages Cards...

Here are a couple of Thank You cards I made this week using the Websters Pages Hollywood Vogue range. Both card backgrounds came from the same sheet of 12x12 paper and it was then just a case of embellishing the lovely papers further to create the cards. The card on the left has clear gems stuck on the chandelier which do not show up well in the photo and the card on the right uses two punched shapes using my favourite butterfly punch of the moment to create a 3D butterfly.

Hope you like them and also that the recipients like them too!

PS Just another shout out for Queenie - please send me an email - you won the giveaway and we have some goodies for you :)

And The Winner Of The November Giveaway Is...

Thanks to all who took part in the blog giveaway by leaving a comment - the winner is comment number 12 - Queenie! Drop me an email to Mel@atripdownmemorylane.co.uk with your details and we will get your box of goodies sent out to you.

New Layout - Old Paper!

As promised here is the other layout finished from the weekend - finally got chance to photograph it in the daylight (well it is so murky here that it barely counts as daylight!)

The papers are from the now ancient Lillipop Shop collection from Basic Grey which I liked at the time and which have stood the test of time because I still like them! It seems funny to think back to the time when every new release from that company caused such an enormous buzz of excitement that you could harly move on forums for posts asking when it would be here, who would get it first, which scrappers would be first to get a layout scrapped and uploaded using it etc.... Basic Grey is still popular but with a vastly different economic climate and seemingly endless products to choose from that fever pitch of excitement hasn't been replicated for a while!

Don't forget to leave your comment on the giveaway thread before 6pm on Sundayto be in with a chance of some free stash... you've got to be in it to win it as they say!

Come back over the weekend to see another new class with free downloadable PDF instructions coming your way!

It's Giveaway Time Again

Today we are sorting out some new goodies for the site and we wanted to offer a little box of goodies (to include some new Maya Road items) for one of our blog readers.

just post a comment on this thread before 6pm on Sunday night (21st November) and on Sunday evening we will consult with Random dot org to see who to send the goodies to.

Good luck!

Love My Bump

I hope you will forgive the poor photography. This layout is just about passable but the other one refused to be photographed in any remotely presentable way so I will have to wait until I have some daylight time to take a photo of that one!

This is one of the layouts I finished off at the crop I went to. It is at the extreme end of simple but I love it all the same. The journaling talks about how I loved having a baby bump. The photograph was taken by Kirsty Wiseman at our first retreat - that seems such a long time ago - it was almost exactly 3 years ago.

There were a load of different patterned papers in the baggie with the half finished layout but in the end I used the plain white Bazzill and two sheets of Basic Grey which were some of the plain but distressed pages from their collection packs. It is clean, simple and straight forward but I love it all the same, for the sentiment it represents and of course it is one less layout on my "half started will it ever be finished?" pile!

*Mel Waves Hello!*

First of all a big thanks to Ann for blogging for me last week, as you can imagine the post retreat work continues with unpacking and reorganising retreat stock and going through feedback forms before sending out info to the delegates about the events for 2011 so it was very welcome when the lovely Ann offered to do a few blog posts for us :)

I did have a wonderful day out on Saturday at somebody eleses craft event and it was simply heavenly to sit down and just scrap. We absolutely love doing the retreats but there is very little time to sit and just enjoy it because there is always a list of things that need doing - for the entire weekend our job is to do whatever we can to ensure that the delegates have the most relaxing and fun time, so to just enjoy a bit of time to sit and scrap was lovely this past Saturday. I worked on my class for the Eclectic Keepsakes December crop (which obviously I can;t show you!) and then accomplished something I have been promising myself I would do for ages and complete some of the half started layouts that sit in my "work in progress" drawer at home.

It is half past 11 and the light is dreadful but I will photograph and upload the two I finished tomorrow. Once again I needed to remind myself that it is ok to mix it up and have some layouts which have taken a lot of time and effort and others which are quick and simple. I find it is a constant battle with myself to balance out faffing around trying to make a masterpiece with the need to get on and get some photos scrapped and in an album!

I am pretty happy with the two layouts I finished - they won't win any prizes for exciting technique or design but they are now complete and it feels good to be able to file those away instead of keep looking at them half done in a drawer!

I also made two cards - one of which was an emergency, send it in a hurry card and I forgot to photograph it and one is for the Chicken Soup Blog - we have something quite fun coming up in December so keep an eye out over there :)

Apologies for no pictures - i will get those layouts up after work tomorrow :)

New Gallery Now Online

Take a look at this months DT Gallery featuring Websters Pages goodies. our guest this month was Tracy Lihanne Lane who, along with the regular DT produced some lovely items with the different ranges from Webster Pages most recent release.

Click HERE for the gallery

A little more retreat sharing

The last of the Sunday classes to share today, and we had Debbie teaching us a double layout class using October Afternoon papers, including the tag die-cut sheets. Add a little stitching and voila!

Closing for the teachers last weekend was Suzanne with her gorgeous Prima layout full of texture and colour.

In addition to the sketch challenge, the card challenge and the altered heart challenge delegates were able to particpate in a mystery kit challenge, a music challenge and play scrapping bingo over the weekend.

The mystery kit contained 2 double sided sheets of paper, a sheet of card, a HOME die-cut and a bag of flowers and buttons. There was a wonderful array of layouts created using the kit, with only a few items permitted to be used with it such as white card, black/white stitching, die-cutting machines/punches/stamps, adhesive, photos and black or white pen/ink.

There were some fabulous layouts entered for this challenge but the winning one was from Melissa and featured some beautiful handcut layered flowers.

Six delegates chose to enter the music callenge and the winning layout was the yellow melon-muching page!
The final challenge was Bingo scrapbooking which we have featured here on the blog before. Our crafters had to choose a line of scrapbooking components and then build a page around them, plenty chose to do so and picking a winner from these was a real chore!


The winner chosen in the end was this lovely page.

I hope you have enjoyed our week of retreat reviewing. If we have tempted you to want to join us at a 2011 retreat keep your eye on the website where details will be revealed about the March retreat in the next couple of weeks. If you like any of the class layouts shown and aren't sure what products have been used or would like to know more, leave us a comment and one of the team will come back to you.

The retreat news continues & the November sketch

As promised I'm back bringing you more news from the 7th ATDML retreat last weekend. Sunday morning saw the crop room in rays of glorious autumn sunshine and after a hearty full english breakfast it was crafting time again, the classroom filling up this time for a festive minibook taught by yours truly. Known amongst those who took the class as "the class the just keeps on giving!" the lovely Echo Park Merry Christmas papers, a few sheets of cardstock and some serious cutting out lead to this 12 tales of Christmas minibook being made - all ready for photos from the forthcoming holiday season.

Clare taught next in the classroom with her ATC/Mini Album class using 7Gypsies products. Again lots of lovely variations of this created by class attendees, all very happy with their projects.

Sunday lunch up next, always a very popular roast and this year did not disappoint. The dessert did cause quite a bit of a stir with waiters almost being bowled over in the rush to secure one of the very pretty cheesecake desserts that were initally in short supply!

The raffle was drawn just after lunch and over £400!! was raised for Cancer Research which included proceeds from the sale of raffle tickets, from the silent auction bids and from the sale of Christmas cards some delegates had made in advance. Many thanks to everyone for their generosity in both donating raffle prizes and cards, and indeed in purchasing tickets.

Tomorrow we will share the last of the classes for the weekend and some more challenge layouts, but to close for today, the sketch challenge entries and of course the sketch.
Congrats to Jackie who won this challenge with her Princess layout - especially nice as she had to leave the retreat early due to feeling unwell.

We haven't forgotten that we need to post the winner for the September sketch challenge, that will follow next week when normal blog business resumes after all this delicious retreat news! Until then let this be your November sketch, post your layout or card inspired by this sketch here to be in with a chance to win a £10 ATDML Store voucher. You have until November 30th to play along! Back tomorrow with the penultimate day of retreat news

Mid-week retreat review

Welcome back again as we continue sharing with you news of the retreat last weekend. More classes to share with you today, but before that a quick glimpse at the make-and-take table where some serious sparkling occured in the making of miniture Christmas trees using gems and glitter to decorate chipboard cones.

Over the weekend the make-and-take table also saw delegates making giftbags using Sizzix dies, alcohol inked metal ornaments and notebook covers.

The classes on Saturday were kicked off to a flying start with Suzannes Crate Restoration paper photo cube project. Featuring multiple photographs, this cube would make a wonderful gift which anyone would love to receive, although I'm not sure many of them were going to be given away as they seemed too cherished by those who made them!

Next up teaching was Debbie who worked a little magic with die cuts to achieve a beautiful layout using Girls Paperie papers. There was plenty of options within the kit to change this layout around by mixing up the die-cuts which led to several unique pages being created for some very happy scrappers.
The next class by Clare Brown saw delegates creating a stunning A4 shadow frame wall décor item with a time theme in a “steampunk” style featuring some beautiful 7Gypsies embellishments.
After a refreshing cup of tea and delicious pastries that were virtually on tap all weekend the Saturday afternoon classes continued with a gorgeous layout from Mel using My Minds Eye and October Afternoon. Quite possibly one of my favourites from the weekend this blues and browns layout featuring a floral cluster of embellishments was very popular among those who took the class.
The final class for Saturday was again with Suzanne who created a luxurious layout using the exquisite and unique range of papers by Pink Paislee (Parisian Anthology) and distress inks.

Saturday dinner was as always divine, and the every popular crumble for dessert made the evening! Plenty of free time then was enjoyed into the early hours as class projects were finished off and more challenges were undertaken. Here is my workspace just before I abandonned it for sleep at 3.45am Sunday morning!

More retreat news tomorrow including the sketch challenge which is always popular at the retreat and images from the Sunday classes.

Retreat review - Day two

Day two of the retreat review and I thought I would share with you the teachers, their Friday classes and as promised images from the card challenge. As you can see the teachers for the weekend were Debbie Jewell, myself, Mel from ATDML, Suzanne Torr and Clare Brown. There were four classes on the Friday with the retreat kicking off with a beautiful layout class taught by Clare using Fancy Pants Happy Together range.


Clare's class teaching incorporated the hand-drawing of the tree and the making the swirly paper flowers too which proved very popular.

The next class was a vibrant multi-photo layout taught by Mel using Prima Paisley Road products. The kit included 6 Paisley notecards which Mel used very creatively.

The cards come in packs of 30, all presented in a neat box which can be altered very easily (watch out for a blog post featuring one very soon!). Third class was a messy one with inking bubblewrap and Cosmic Shimmer sprays to create a unique background for two layouts. Taught by yours truly the class kit included a rub-on alphabet which was applied to text covered patterned paper, cut out and used as a title to coordinate with the page which several delegates enjoyed.

The final class for Friday was taught by Debbie Jewell using Sassafrass Indie Girl papers to create backgrounds full of patterned rays! The combination of several heavily patterned papers in strips across the page made for a very effective and yet simple to create background for a special photo and the layouts created in the class were all rather wonderful!

Throughout the afternoon and evening on Friday delegates settled into their crop spaces, perused the shop, caught up with friends and started on some of the optional challenges set for weekend. Yesterday we featured the altered chipboard heart challenge and today we are sharing the lovely cards made as part of the card challnge.

All very beautiful cards and it was the dimensional festive baubles card that won this challenge.

Tomorrow we will share with you some more classes from the weekend and the sketch challenge entries also. See you again then

I HEART the ATDML retreat!

Phew what a creative weekend of fun that was! The 7th retreat has been and gone and as I am sure you can imagine Mel & Jill (and their supportive family) have a tonne of unpacking and retreat reviewing to undertake these coming days and as such I shall be your blog host for the week! Join us each day as we reveal the gorgeous work the retreat delegates and teachers produced. We thought it would be nice to share these with everyone as even those who attend the retreat don't always get a chance to see what everyone has created and share ideas and inspiration.

So first up I thought we'd share the altered challenge - which involved those who wanted to participate to be creative with an ornate chipboard heart as follows.

The challenge was to decorate the heart and either enter it as a stand-alone item, or use it on a layout, card or project of any description. I am sure you will join me in being amazed at the creative uses of this little object!!

Entries included home decor items, a layout, minibooks built around the heart and incorporating the heart, one heart was given wings, another made into an ornament and we even had a pair of hearts joined to make a Christmas tree!

DT member Jane used her heart and an empty Maya Road tin to create a lovely altered project as well which I'm not sure many people got to see as it was sat drying on her table. The inside had been sectioned off and housed four tiny jam jars filled with sweets, a truly stunning gift.

It was however the flocked paper box made with a bind-it-all which incorporated the heart in the lid that had more than a few crafters impressed that won the challenge.

I hope you will join me again tomorrow when I will share a few of the classes taught on Friday along with the card challenge entries.