More Fun with Friends

I just spent three days milling about the Great American Scrapbook Convention with Jennifer and Marion.  I don’t remember if I’ve mentioned them before, but they are sometimes volunteer “helpers” for various projects I’m working on, particularly my scrapbooking cruises.  This week they were helping me promote the cruises at the convention, which basically consists of a lot of shopping and a little bit of time passing out postcards and goodie bags.  I’m very grateful to have the help.  I could go pass out the cards on my own, but I hate to do things like that by myself.  It just seems to be easier when I have company.

I’m that way about a lot of things.  Just last night, we were discussing movies with friends and they were surprised when I mentioned that I won’t go to a movie by myself.  Apparently, a lot of people do, and they tell me they like it because they can really focus on the movie, but for me, a night at the movies is a social activity.  If I wanted to watch it by myself, I could just wait for it to come out on DVD.  I also don’t often drink alone or swim alone or eat in restaurants by myself.  I prefer to take a companion with me for business trips, to dinner seminars, and even to church.  I especially like to have friends with me when I crop.

Yes, I can sometimes get more done when I’m home alone working on an important project, but nine times out of ten, I forget to make the time to crop if I don’t have someone else here to make it a priority.  It’s just one of those indulgences that I find hard to justify when I have a lot of work to get done.   So yes, I prefer to have friends with me to crop, in many cases just so that I will be forced to sit down and craft.

What about you?  Do you do certain things with friends that you won’t do alone?  Do you prefer to crop with friends?  Let us know in the comments.

We Pause for a Brief Commercial Message

Today I am in Promotion Mode.  That’s what happens when I have a lot of events and they aren’t filling up as fast as I want them to, or I just haven’t had time to take care of promoting them like I should.  Usually, I try to spread it out.  I don’t want my customers or my readers to be bombarded by emails and ads for things I’m trying to sell.  Some companies do that.  They’ll send out one or two emails every single day to remind you that it’s their annual “stock up on bath soap” sale, or “get extra points when you buy breakfast”.  It’s annoying.  I don't want to do that. 

Instead, I prefer word of mouth.  I want my customers and event participants to have so much fun at my events that they are eager to share with others and ready to come back and play again.  Don’t get me wrong, I do have to occasionally drop subtle hints, or post an occasional reminder on Facebook, and I send out roughly one newsletter email a month to let everyone know what’s going on, but lately, I have been so busy that I haven’t done any of that (or at least not much).  So I thought today I would do something I almost never do, and that is put it all in a blog post.  After all, I really don’t share all this stuff on the blog very often because the blog is more about crafting and projects, so you might not even know what’s going on.

Of course, a blog post with nothing but me hawking my wares would not be any fun at all, so today I’m going to kill two birds with one stone; I’m going to share some projects with you, and tell you how they relate to some of my events!

First, lets start with 

Cards (and other things, too!):

These cards were some that we made recently at our 3^rd Wednesday Stamp Club meetings.  If you aren’t familiar with it, the stamp club is a gathering we have here at my house (aka Crafty Neighbor Studios) once per month.  We are led by Barbara King, a Stampin’ Up! demonstrator who prepares 2-3 projects for us to do each month.  It’s a lot of fun, and we’re definitely learning a lot of great techniques!  So if you’re in the DFW area on a 3^rd Wednesday, please feel free to join us!  The first visit is free, after that, there is a $30 minimum order.  You can find all the details on Meetup.com.

Classes:

An example of our Perpetual Calendar

Recently, I’ve had a lot of requests for classes, including repeats of several classes I taught in years past.  My trusty side-kick and helper extraordinaire, Marion, and I worked up a schedule we thought would work for anyone, but I guess we were scheduling things too close to the end of school or something because we are still getting emails asking for different dates and times.  So here’s the deal…if you are in the DFW area and you want to take any of our classes, go to our Facebook page and find the post I made today about classes.  Give us your input about dates, times, etc.  We’ll use that info to come up with some more class dates – I promise!

Crops and Retreats:

I don’t have any public crops or retreats coming up any time soon.  I usually like to have one or two fundraiser crops per year, but I am not walking in the Susan G. Komen 3-Day this year, so no crop for that.  If you have an organization that needs to raise money, and you would like to host a Scrapbooking Fundraiser Crop, give me a shout!  I will be more than happy to organize one for you!  This is especially true in the DFW/North Texas area, but I will also help with crops in other locations as well.  It’s a great way to raise funds for your organization, and it works particularly well for schools, churches, and non-profits like breast cancer charities or social services organizations.  If you are interested, please send me an email.

Cruises:

I haven’t promoted them much here, but one of my favorite projects every year is our annual scrapbooking cruise!  The exciting thing about this year’s cruise is that we have two!  The full scoop is on our website, but here’s the skinny:

Crafty Neighbor Scrapbook LITE

Departing from Galveston, Texas

Carnival Liberty

October 3-8, 2016

Porting in Progreso and Cozumel, Mexico sailing 5 nights with “LITE” amenities, flexible crop times, and a more relaxed/fun environment.  Make your own schedule and work on your own projects.  Optional classes are extra.  Crafters and non-crafters of all skill levels are equally welcome.

Crafty Neighbor Scrapbooking Cruise

Departing from Galveston, Texas
Royal Caribbean Liberty of the Seas

January 8-15. 2017

Porting in Roatan (Honduras), Belize City (Belize) and Cozumel (Mexico) sailing 7-nights with FULL amenities, 24-hour open crop room, and lots of crafts, projects and demonstrations.  Participate in scheduled classes or work on your own projects.  All classes are included in the cost.  Crafters and non-crafters of all skill levels are equally welcome.

Here is one of the projects from our last cruise:

This simple layout was a make-n-take on our 2015 Scrap Cruise.
In all we had 4 make-n-takes, 1 interactive demo, 10+ hours of dedicated
class time plus games, contests, prizes, goodies and giveaways.

Garage Sales:

Last but not least, I’m sad to say I am still waiting for open dates at our Girl Scout facility for the semi-annual scrapbook garage sale.  They assure me that they will know the open dates by the end of May.  Keep your fingers crossed for a fall date.  If not, we may have to look at another facility, which would mean an increase in vendor rates, which I don’t want to do.

That’s it for now, thanks for your patience, and I hope you enjoyed the projects I shared as part of this giant advertisement! 

Happy Birthday, Christen!

Most of you probably don’t know, but today is the birthday of my very sweet and sassy daughter.  Thirty-two years ago, she came into this world like a boss, and she’s been ruling my world ever since!  Seriously though, my Christen is the craftiest and most artistic person I know, and so I can think of no one better to be the inspiration for today’s post.

Why should you care?  Well, for one thing, we’re giving away a PRIZE and YOU could WIN it!

Yep! That’s right…we’re having a little birthday contest here on the blog.  In honor of Christen’s 32^nd birthday, I am giving away your choice of a grab bag of supplies valued at over $50, or a certificate for $25 off your registration for one of our events!  It is not going to be announced anywhere else, and only blog subscribers are eligible!  All the details can be found here on the blog.  So read the blog every day throughout the contest, and on Saturday, fill out the contest entry form.  On Sunday, I will draw the winner!

WIN! WIN! WIN!
PRIZES! PRIZES! PRIZES!

One of the things I love to do with Christen is cruise.  In fact, she was with me on my very first cruise (along with my best friend and Crafty Neighbor co-founder, Stephanie), and we had so much fun that I just had to get involved in cruising myself. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to go on one of our scrapbooking cruises, now is your chance to see what it’s all about!  Over the next blog posts, I’ll be sharing photos from our cruise, samples of our projects and workshops, and more.

If you’ve ever been to a Crafty Neighbor event, you know that I’m all about perceived value.  That’s why we give away lots of prizes, gifts, and goodie bags at our events.  It’s always been my goal to give participants MORE than what they paid for or expect.  I don’t ever want a cropper to go home saying, “I paid for this event and this is all I got”; I want them to go home saying, “I went to this event and look at all the stuff I got!”  I want them to feel like they got MORE than they paid for -- way more!

On this year’s cruise, we gave away goodie bags valued at over $150 each including products from top names like Lawn Fawn, Maya Road, and Quick Quotes.  Included in this was a full box of Tombow Mono tape runners (6 packages) for each participant!  We also had special treats for our guests each night.  We call them “Pillow Gifts” because on some cruises we have the ability to put them on their beds while the stewards are performing their turn-down service.  Since it was a scrapbooking cruise, I thought it only fitting that the very first pillow gift be a scrapbook kit, so I prepared this very special kit for everyone who met with us in Galveston the night before the cruise – a Cruise Friends autograph page. That way they can take down the names of all the new friends they met!  And yes, I do still have a few of these kits and they are for sale on my Etsy shop if you’d like to purchase one for yourself.

Here's the whole layout once it's assembled.

Here are a few closeups of some of the details:

 

Well that’s it for today!  I have to get ready for 3^rd Wednesday Stamp Club tonight and on Friday, Sixta and I are driving to Spring, Texas to crop with some of our new cruise friends and work on a few projects we haven’t finished.  I can’t wait!

Valerie's Layout 1

As I mentioned on Monday, I’ve spent the last few months really working to finish up some UFO projects that have been lying around for a while.  If you’re wondering what UFO stands for, it’s an old term I borrowed from a crochet group I once belonged to, and it stands for “UnFinished Objects” meaning any project you’ve started but never finished.  I’ve had so many of those UFOs over the years that I could fill a house with them.  Oh wait…I did….ooops!

Yes, my house is full of unfinished projects, and I am doing my best to try and finish them!

Today’s project came from my UFO box (I have several boxes, but let’s not quibble over semantics).  Valerie Jackson of Creative Sanctuary designed this layout as a class for our 2013 cruise.  We made enough class kits for the instructors to keep a set, and I am just now getting around to working on mine.  Here is Valerie’s original design:

Since I am just now getting around to this layout kit, I didn’t have access to the matching floral stamps Valerie used in the class, so I had to change it up a bit.  This gave me an opportunity to pull out this motif stamp from Paper Parachute.  I’ve been dying to use it on something, and I think this was a great place for it.

As you can see, my layout is just a little bit different from Valerie’s, but I think it maintained the same overall look and feel.  I just love the color combos in this Close to My Heart paper series, don’t you?

Question of the day:  What’s your favorite color combo?