Hey all,

It's been a while since you've heard from me. I'm sorry for that. I've been quite busy with several things, including a conference in Germany. I hope to have more time later on this week, 'cause I still have to let you catch up with everything from Scrap-a-Ganza, the conference and many more things!

And I'll post some new photos for the Photo Hunt again!

Talk to you later!

Babbled by Ilse at 9:26 AM
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Scrap-a-Ganza Wrap up Part 1

Hey all,

I thought I'd tell you about the rest of the weekend, so here goes. I'll continue from Friday afternoon. If you want to read about everything that happened before, please click on the link Part One above.

Afternoon & Evening
After collecting everything from the registration desk, we decided to put our goodie bag in our room and go and find a place to eat. We hadn't checked the goodiebag yet, because we had no time……..

Diner
Last year we had eaten in the Bistro bar from the hotel and around 5pm we decided to go there again for our diner. It's a lovely little place. We did warn the waitress it was possible that several people would come to eat there and they all needed to be finished before 7pm. Last year they really had no idea what happened! This year it went great! Mom, Bianca and I took the same dish (Chicken sate, for me without the sauce: allergy for peanuts). All in all we didn't have to pay much and it was a very good meal! AND, we were lucky, because when we left everyone else was told the kitchen was closed. Can you believe that? Oh well, for us it worked out okay!

Speed Scrapping
After we'd had our diner, mom and I need to be in the workshop Speed Scrapping at 7pm so we went upstairs to get our bags. Although it would take some time, we decided to wait a little for the elevator instead of hoisting everything downstairs.
Jodi Holbrook and the other Jodi (I'll tell you her name later on. Can't think of it right now....) hosted Speed Scrapping. And Jodi Holbrook did this in a very speedy way! Okay, she told us she'd first explain several things and then we could work on the four layouts, because we had the examples in our workshop description. But she went very fast! It was fun though! We learned to work with the Making Memories Punchers. The die cuts you get out of them, can be perfectly used in the rims you can use with the Making Memories Tag Maker. Because these tags literarily made the layout, this is indeed a very speedy way of scrapping. It's fun to do too! It wasn't at all what I had expected when I choose the workshop. I expected we would be working with precut borders, photo mats and more things like that. This was a very nice twist!
Although I found it very fun and indeed very speedy, I don't think I will be using these things a lot! It's just because of the fact I'm always using a lot of photos in my projects and a lot of interactive things. One (or two) of these tags is funny to include, but it's usually way to little to cover everything I need.
And guess what? Both Jodi's signed my album and my mom and I had our picture taken with them. How's that? I'm so happy they both wanted to sign my album! And they thought I had done a great job with the album too. What better compliment can you get? I was very happy with that compliment.

In Between
After we were done, we had some time left before we had to attend the workshop "About Me". We couldn't enter the workshop room yet, because there was still a workshop going on, so we decided to go and sit somewhere else. We had a nice chat with a few people.

About me
This workshop was being held in the biggest class room. As it turned out, the big class room was really necessary. There were a few hundred people participating in the workshop. I think it was a lovely workshop! All the kits were handed out and then Lisa told something about how the kit came together, what everything means and much more like that. I loved her story! It really gave me an insight in the kit, one which I wouldn't have had if I had only bought the kit and nothing else. I know there were people who thought this was more the "About Lisa" class, but I think they just didn't (want to) understand the whole story behind it. She was telling things about herself, because she wanted to explain things.
After she had told everything, she explained things about a few pages. The kit that comes with an album in a box and lots of extra goodies! I didn't mind the fact that I had to pay another 10 euros for this class as extra fee. It was well worth it.
At the end of the workshop Lisa wanted to take some time to meat all the participants and shake their hands. Because I also wanted my album to be signed by her, I just waited, together with Bianca and my mom. There were so many people who wanted to meat Lisa, have her autograph and a picture taken with her, that it took quite some time, but I didn't mind the waiting. In the meantime I met Lisa's sister, Angela, who's a very lovely lady! She had a great deal of patience with everyone and was really interested in people, just like Lisa. She even signed my album. By the way, she can start as a designer right away! I'll definitely remember her! I also met Kerry (I can't remember her last name right now, I'll give it later), one of the designers for Cricut. Kerry signed my album too! Angela and Kerry both signed on "the last page" because I didn't have a page for About Me. After all, I didn't know if I even could do this workshop. I'll make a special page for these two autographs.
Finally around 12PM we had our chance to have our picture taken with Lisa and to have her sign my album (on the page for "My simple Truth"). This was so great! Just like Angela and Kerry, she was impressed with my album. It's fun to see that something I'm not particular impressed by, others think is wonderful. I mean, my album is okay, but for my feeling that's it. For me it's not outstanding or something like that........ Maybe I just expect too much of myself. Anyway, I'm glad they all signed my album and I'm very glad I waited for it!

The rest of the evening
I was supposed to meet several members of the Scrap-a-Ganza Forum to exchange our friendship cards. However I was just to tired, as were Bianca and my mom. That's why we decided to make a quick round by several shops and then turn back to our hotelroom to go to sleep. There were several good shops and I saw a few things that I had on my wishlist. I didn't buy them at that moment, however. I decided to wait and think about it for a day before making the final decision to buy them. After all, the Crop-a-Dile and the Xyron Design Cutter are not cheap. All though the cutter was now relatively cheap for half the price. That was interesting!

This is it for the Friday. I'll let you know more about the rest later on!

BTW, photos will follow later on. I still have to upload them here :)

Thanks for reading and Have fun!

Babbled by Ilse at 9:21 AM in Category: Jodi Holbrook , Lisa Bearnson , mini album , Scrap-a-Ganza , scrapbooking
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Hey all,

I've been to Scrap-a-Ganza this weekend! It was great! I went with Bianca and with my mother. As I told you before I managed to finish my SAG album just in time Friday Morning. I had hoped to have it finished earlier, so that I would have had time to also finish all the forum friendship cards, but due to a migraine on Wednesday which made me really sick, I hadn't had time to work on anything that day. So I had to do the last things Thursday afternoon (I took the afternoon off) and Friday morning. It turned out this was the only way to get my album finished. However, I still hadn't finished the forum friendship cards. I did that this weekend. But let's recap the weekend, shall we? I'll do it in several posts, so that you can easily follow it. Let's start with Friday.

Early morning
After I had had breakfast with James and he had left for work (at 06:30 am), I started working on the SAG album again. I wanted to finish that before I went for grocery shopping. I was lucky and had the album finished around 09:00 am. Now that that was done I could concentrate on other things.

Last minute photos
I had taken two photos from myself one week earlier and had sent them, along with photos from my scrap studio, to Pixum. These two photos were especially for the forum friendship cards. Remind never to wait for the last minute to do this! Really...... It's not worth all the trouble. I can guarantee that! Why? Let me tell you? Although the package with my photos should have been sent on May 28th (according to their system), it wasn't sent until May 30, so it hadn't arrived Friday morning. Because of that I had to to take the two photos for the cards with me on a CD to have them printed. I had never worked with one of those printing machines in a shop and now I had to learn how to work with it while I had to do all the other things too! I went to our local supermarket, cause I knew they have such a printing machine. I thought it couldn't be hard, right. Just put the CD in, give the order and have everything printed. Right! Note to self: Read instructions properly before asking on of the employees for help!!!! Anyway, I started up everything and put the CD in the place where I thought it had to go. And surprise, surprise, it wasn't working! So I called one of the employees to see if she could help me. Well, no surprise there, she didn't quite know how it worked either. In the end she managed to have my CD getting stuck in the machine and she had to call someone else for help. So, someone else came. She explained me that the machine had been put there without a proper instruction for all employees, so she didn't knew much either, but she'd try to help me. First she got the CD out. Then we started the process all over again. Right then I happen to notice I hadn't read the instructions correctly and instead of putting the CD in the DVD-Rom drive I had tried to put the CD into the whole where the burned CD's would come out. Can you imagine? Anyway, continuing, everything seemed to okay, finally. I could order 12 prints of each photo, I paid and I waited. To my horror I discovered there were only 6 prints per photo printed. Can you imagine??? Not only had I had paid for 24 photos in total, I really needed those 24 photos too! So I called the employee who had helped me last time again and ask her to fix this. She started calling the service desk from the machine and in the meantime she checked the machine. It turned out, to my shame, there are two compartments where the photos are coming out. How the hell was I supposed to know?!?!?!
Anyway, in the end I had my 24 photos and I could finally started my shopping. Just to be sure I bought a roles of double-sided too, so that I'd surely had enough and then I went home at 10:15 am. I stored away all the groceries, took a shower, packed my tool-tote (read: suitcase) and backpack (with my clothing and other things) and lastly I prepared everything for lunch. After all, my mom and Bianca were coming over for lunch and then we would leave for SAG from here.

The Afternoon

The trip
After our lunch we packed everything in the car and we went to Egmond aan Zee where SAG would be held. At such a time you check everything three times and you still have the feeling you're forgetting things, but we decided to ignore that feeling. According to our checklist we had everything, so the whole event should go well for us.
The trip took us two hours. We expected to have traffic jams, but we were lucky. We hardly had any and we could easily continue to Egmond aan Zee. The only thing we regretted, was the fact we had forgotten something to drink for in the car. But we got over it :)

Checking in in the hotel
We arrived around 15:30h. Last year and the year before that we could easily park on the parking lot from the hotel. After driving around the upper parking lot we saw no place there. We hoped there would be a place on the lower parking lot, but someone else came from there and told us there was no spot either. So, what do you do then? We had quite some luggage and we wanted to park the car for the weekend. That's why I went to the hotel reception to see if they knew where we could park. The girl at the reception told us there's a temporary parking lot ("laden en lossen" in Dutch, it means something like packing and getting things out) where we could park the car, but she advised us to regularly check if there was a spot on the parking decks left. I told her there was no way we could do that, after all we would be in workshops all weekend and we simply wouldn't have time to check for a new parking place. She told us to take our chances and that's what we did. We parked the car on the temporary parking lot and got our things inside.
Unlike last years the registration desk for SAG was downstairs instead of in a desk we passed on our way to the hotel reception. So we decided to check in in the hotel first, so that we could leave our luggage in our room and then go to the registration desk from SAG. We got a nice three-persons room (it looked the same like the one we had last year) and we put all our luggage inside. And just to be sure, I immediately checked the window to see if we could properly open it. Well, we could, but it wasn't ideal. We decided to keep it shut for the moment and see what we'd do in the evening.

Checking in for Scrap-a-Ganza
Last week I had been thinking about following one extra workshop. I had seen the About me Book kit from Lisa Bearnson and Lisa was at SAG to give exactly that workshop on Friday evening. It's a two-hours workshop. In the end I finally decided that, if there would be places left for this workshop, I would follow it. I had mailed Scrap-a-Ganza to ask if I could reserve one extra ticket, but they told to take my chances at registration, because I couldn't register online anymore and they couldn't register me for that workshop through e-mail either. So while we were walking towards the SAG registration desk I was keeping my fingers crossed for the possibility to follow this workshop. Downstairs there was quite the line for the registration desk. It turned out most people in line needed to check in before they had Karen Burniston's workshop that afternoon. Thankfully it didn't take really long, so it was our turn to check in. I got lucky cause although I was told I had to pay another 10 euro's for paying through Paypal, apparently their administration wasn't in order and I didn't need to pay it. (TELL NO ONE!!!) No complaints here :) Of course we got our goodiebag and an envelope with all the tickets for the workshops, the make & takes, breakfasts, lunches and diner. After that we checked for extra workshops. Bianca wanted and extra workshop for Saturday afternoon and mom decided to take the "About Me" workshop too. Bianca already had booked this workshop, so the three of us hoped we would all be able to follow the workshop. And guess what? We got lucky! Mom and I got the last two tickets for About Me and Bianca was able to do one workshop extra with me!!! We were really happy with this! Of course we had to make sure we had all the necessary tickets, so we sat down besides the registration desk to check our tickets. They all turned out to correct, so no problem there :)

Okay, I think this is enough for now. I'll get on in another post! Talk to you later!

Babbled by Ilse at 12:15 PM in Category: Lisa Bearnson , mini album , Scrap-a-Ganza , scrapbooking
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Hey all,

I'm back from Scrap-a-Ganza. I've had a wonderful time, did about 11 workshops (I included one extra Friday evening) and had lots of fun. I'll tell you all about it later, cause it's going to be a very long story!

Last Friday morning I did manage to finally finish my SAG album, so I took it with me too. Didn't journal in it yet, but all the teachers signed it! Yeah for me! Once I've included all my photos I'll show it to you!

Talk to you later!

Babbled by Ilse at 10:43 AM in Category: mini album , Scrap-a-Ganza , scrapbooking
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