Stamping Around in Manchester, VT !

So here I am in beautiful Manchester, VT (even though it was overcast it was still lovely!) for the Stamping Around weekend. It was held at The Inn at Willow Pond. This is the main building where we had our breakfast and got our coffee all day long.


The room for our workshop was in this bulding directly across the drive.



Our first class on Friday night was led by Erika Martin. She had us do a really intersting project involving an 8x8 canvas board, acrylic paints, small pieces of designer papers and Modpodge. Here's Erika showing us her sample (which was larger than the one we made today).


We started by painting a canvas board with blue acrylic paint. Then we added white with swirling strokes. While that was drying we cut out a sun, a hillside, and rectangles and triangles to make little houses to run along our hillside. (We had been instructed to bring a bag of coordinating color designer paper scraps with us to the workshop). So here is the beginning of my project.


And here it is after I got it all together. After we got all the pieces on it - we went over the whole thing with ModPodge - let it dry overnight and in the morning we outlined all the pieces with a fine point Sharpe marker to give all the pieces definition.


Here's a shot from the back of the room we were working in.


Here's me sitting with new found friend Dee who came over from Conway, NH for the weekend. (Hi Dee!)


We were all asked to make nametags before coming to the weekend - here's mine.

Julie & Kim give away prizes all weekend long (I won a pack of new 6x6 Basic Grey papers, an Amuse Halloween Stamp and a Castle Clear Stamp !) - below center is Julie picking out a winning number. Erika is on the left here, then Julie Masse, Kim Schofield in the green sweater (the organizers of these workshops), and you can see Cindy Lawrence another instructor in the red sweater.

On Saturday we had 4 classes and just look at the wonderful projects we made! Joanne Basile had us make this fun tote box and 2 beautiful cards! The stamps are by Stamping Bella.

We hardly took a breath and we were onto class #2 led by Cindy Lawrence where we made this wonderful box that she designed as well as these two beautiful cards using a stamp set by Our Craft Lounge.

Then we broke for lunch where the choices were smoked chicken, pulled pork, ribs, brisket, baked beans, cole slaw, ceasar salad, corn bread and Texas toast - Phew!!! talk about yummy!

Next up was Jenn Shurkus - who I'm sure many of you know as one of the Amuse Instructors

She had us make 5 (count 'em - five!) great Halloween cards using some of Amuse's new stamps. Each one was cuter than the last!

Ok, so by now we are getting pretty exhausted from our marathon stamping - but we had one more project to go. Julie Masse taught the last class and she had us make this terrific acetate box decorated with a wonderful pumpkin multistep stamping set from Kitchen Sink Stamps. Can you see how 3 dimensional these pumpkins look?! And we got 2 cute aroma wax pumpkins and a votive candle to tuck inside.

So there you have it! Don't you wish you had come!?!?! Check out the next Stamping Around to be held in PA in Nov - they still have spots open I think.

Thanks for much for dropping by today! Can a person have too much stamping in one day?!!?