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Today was Sam’s first day of preschool! He was so cute and I was so proud of him. I got some really good pictures of him before his class started and can hardly wait to buy some school themed supplies at the warehouse . We have some great school themed papers and stickers that will be perfect for this project.

Last night we hosted a small (basically private) crop for one of my friends from the Moms Club, . We had so much fun and got alot done even though we talked the whole night. I have been working on a black and white album of Sam’s first year and was able to complete a couple more pages. I only have about 4 more pages to go until the album is complete. I am so pleased with how this project is turning out.

I went to a crop in Ft. Collins last week and someone showed me how to turn my Quickutz dies into Quickutz Stampz. It was really easy and pretty cool. You get this sticky sided foam (from Quickutz) and you stamp your die into the foam. Then you punch out the foam peice and attach it to an acryllic or wood block and then you are ready to ink and stamp. It was so easy. When I first heard about this, I thought you had to convert your dies and then you couldn’t use them for making die cuts anymore, but that is not the case. You don’t make any change to your dies, it’s just a difference in the material that you are cutting on. Anyway, my next task is to see if I can find similar foam without having to get it from Quickutz.

There is a website called www.dennydavis.net that has quotes on any number of topics for scrapbookers or crafters alike. My friend turned me onto this site and we really like it because it is specifically for scrappers. The site is an A-Z index of essentially whatever you can think of for any given letter. Then you are given page titles, poems, quotes etc. that you can use to embellish and journal your projects into works of art.

I attended a St. Patty’s Day crop with several of my friends last Friday night. We had so much fun! I am definetly planning on doing it again in April. It was held at a hotel in Ft. Collins, CO from 5:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. We were given the task of creating a 2 page layout about ourselves/our favorite things. The kit contained papers and paper embellishments from basic grey. I didn’t really like the selected papers too much, but the project seemed like it would be fun. None of us worked on that project however. We each worked on a project to enter into the judging contest and when we finished with that we worked on our own miscellaneous projects. I won a prize for the best/most creative name tag. Wanda won the judging contest with a 12×12 layout titled cousins. It was beautiful and she totally deserved to win.

Well, after trying several different methods and cleaners for my stamps and I’ve found that baby wipes work the best. It doesn’t matter whose brand even the generic ones work fine. I am thrilled with this news as they are cheap and effective! Happy cleaning.

When you start out, stamping products can be confusing. Here are a few tips to help you learn the basics.

The number of stamping products on the market may seem overwhelming, but you can get off to an easy start with a few basics and then build your collection over time. Choose stamps that you will be able to use on multiple projects. For example, background stamps, shapes, and alphabets.

Rubber stamps come in two forms: mounted and unmounted. Mounted rubber stamps come glued on wood or acrylic blocks. They are ready to use but are often more expensive than unmounted stamps. Unmounted rubber stamps require you to cut out the images and mount them (permanently or temporarily) before use. Wood, acrylic, and even new magnetic styles of unmounted stamps are available.

Rubber stamps are easy to purchase. It’s the inks that can be confusing for a beginning stamper.

Dye Ink:General-purpose ink great for stamping on all types of paper. It has a very quick drying time, which makes it difficult to heat-emboss. It is normally permanent and waterproof. Dye ink soaks into paper and becomes more muted as it dries. It can also bleed or feather, causing the image to lose clarity.

Pigment Ink: This is a thick ink with a slow drying time and is a good choice for heat-embossing. This ink does not soak into the paper but instead dries on the surface, producing a crisp stamped image. A heat tool speeds up the drying process. Pigment ink does not dry on coated or glossy paper.

Permanent Ink: Also known as solvent ink, which dries by evaporation. The ink is designed for stamping on nonporous surfaces such as shrink plastic, glass, metal, and transparencies. Hybrid ink shares traits with both dye and pigment inks. Like a dye ink, it dries quickly, but like a pigment ink, it produces crisp images. The result is a soft, almost muted, chalklike finish, yet the colors are rich.

Tonight we held our first monthly “Croppin’ in the Country” warehouse crop. It was so much fun. There were seven of us, which I thought was a good turn out for our first crop. We put together three different Valentine cards, which were all fun and easy to make. We used pink cardstock from Bazzill and assorted heart embellishments. I took four different pictures of Sam, in each picture he is holding a letter. For example, one picture is Sam holding the letter “L” the next picture is Sam holding the letter “O” etc. So, as you unfold the accordian card you see Sam spelling the word LOVE. The cards were adorable and everybody loved them. I am definetly going to make these cards again because they were fun and easy to make.

I finished my first accordian card last night. I made it for my mom for Valentine’s Day. I am really pleased with how it turned out and it was super easy! I took a piece of cardstock and cut it to 4″ x 12″ and then folded it front to back four times like an accordian. Then I embellished the front cover with two different coordinating pieces of paper. I picked four pictures that were all taken on the same day and cut them to wallet size and put one picture on each of the folded “pages.” Then I used a few small embellishments (brads; photo flips and fibers) to finish up the card. Don’t forget to ink the edges of all the paper used! It just makes it look nicer. That is it-done!

I submitted a response last night to Memory Makers Magazine for the January story contest. Responses had to be submitted by midnight (pacific time) on January 31, 2006—I had about 2 hours to spare. The question was to describe the best scrapbooking party you’ve attended or hosted. I wrote about my trip to Grand Lake a couple of weeks ago. It was actually the first scrapbooking party I’ve ever attended. There were five of us girls and we had so much fun eating, drinking and scrapbooking! The weather was beautiful and the views overlooking Grand Lake were spectacular. Carla had arranged for us to stay at her moms log home that is on the backside of Grand Lake Lodge . Since it was just us girls (no kids) we were able to stay up late and sleep in until we felt like getting up. Awesome! Wanda went snowshoeing, but the rest of us decided that working out on our “weekend off” didn’t sound like any fun at all.