After Hours, After All.

Jen is painfully creative. The kind of person who makes me hang my head in shame with the shear munanity that is life before meeting her. I never miss a crop she hosts, and I'm never ever disappointed. If you're cool (and you know you are!) you'll be clickin' this here link to sign up for her Meetup group:

http://scrapbook.meetup.com/1451/

So, here's a pic of Jen and Alex, chilling after an After Hours crop last week. I got really sucked into the movie (French Kiss, admittedly one of

my girliest favorites.) so I only got a few cards made and a couple of pages finished on my in-progress honeymoon album. Unfortunately, I left a page at her house while the stickles dried so that one won't make it into this entry, but here are the cards (above). I was playing with tearing paper because it's not something I've done much. In a constructive manner, anyway.

As the name would imply, After Hours is an uber-hip kind of crop. There's typically a cocktail of the evening, candy strewn tables (very Warhol), and some type of yummy takeout or dinner by Jen. Dessert is generally provided as well, and since Scott and I discovered Henry's Gelato nearby, I sometimes pick up a sorbetto assortment to share. Mmmm.

On the big (TV) screen, there is usually a girlie film selection (get your head out of the gutter, you know I meant a romatic comedy. Yeesh.) to increase the XX chromasome energy. A good time is to be had by all.

In unrelated news, this weekend is the big ol' Fiskateer Roundup. Fiskateers http://www.fiskateers.com/ is something of a secret society of scrappers and paper crafters. Well, not entirely secret, but you do have to contact one of the lead Fiskateers and tell them you were sent by Joe (or me, Veronica, rather) to get in.

Once inside, they look deep into your soul and assign you a number in the order which you joined (apologies to Homer Simpson). From that point, you can visit the blog, edit your homepage, upload your projects, chat with other Fiskateers, and post on the message board. It's cooler than it sounds, trust me. My favorite thing they do are the challenges. Restricting what materials you can use, giving you layout maps to follow, etc. It makes you really think about the pages and stuff you're making, which helps keep things interesting. It also keeps your layouts from falling into a rut. Sometimes we need to be forced to navigate away from our regular habits.

So, this weekend is the Round Up. It's a four day (Thurs-Sun.) online crop with challenges and prizes and all kinds of stuff. While it's hard to forget that it's really a consolation prize for those of us who were passed over for the real live Fiskateer weekend in TX, it's still pretty cool. There's a ton of talk going on on the message board (much like the chatter at a real crop) and the challenges are a-flyin'. (See my entry for the Stitches challenge to the left.) They throw out various assignments with deadlines to have them posted on your profile, then give prizes to people they select among those who turned their projects in on time. If you're a challenge-junkie like me (no, I did not say "a challenged junkie", snickerpuss) it's worth devoting a weekend to. I just picked up a Fiskars paper cruncher thing that corregates paper into neat wavy ribbons, so I'm totally psyched for the tool challenge.

On that note, I'm off to booby prize central. (Oh come on. Like you wouldn't have wanted to be one of the 50 who got to go on the real trip?) Seriously, I love being a Fiskateer. If you like an active, supportive, friendly kind of scrapping place to retire to daily, you'll love it too. The more active you are, the more devoted you'll become. If you aren't one to check in often (daily or at least bi-weekly), you may not like this group as much though. It moves fast and keeps you on your toes! It's worth the time, though, so if you're on the fence about it, jump in. It's really my favorite crafting space on the web by far.

Fiskateer #1135. Signing off.

More Pajama Fun

Here are the other hosts! Terri, my recruiter :) is the one on the right. Love those silky jammies. Hubba hubba! We had the whole Masonic Lodge to ourselves which was pretty neat too, since I'd always wondered what was inside that huge building. Lots of halls, mostly. It kind of reminded me of a labrynthian elementary school. If that was the case, the room we were in would be the cafetorium. Tables had 2 or 3 card stations set up and I travelled around them with my peeps, helping demonstrate the techniques when needed.

Despite my best efforts at instruction, there were two Crop-a-dile injuries in our group. Since I was one of them (I'm the one with vaguely purple hair in the third pic here), it's possible that Laura (right there next to what I'm writing right now) was just copying my finger crushing technique. I don't think I'll try teaching it to anyone else. Eyelet setter pinches really hurt, even if our injuries didn't show up so well on our film documentation. Now we'll never win our lawsuit to obtain one of every item from the Stampin' Up catalog for each of us. I doubt they'll even try to settle out of court for half (Laura and I decided we could just crop together all the time and thus it would still be like we had everything in the catalog. Pretty clever, huh? In real life you can still see my Crop-a-dile scar, and I think that makes me pretty hardcore no matter how you look at it.

Okay, so I just uploaded this picture of me and it's really an awful one, but the truth must be known. The people must be warned! Beware the jaws of the Crop-a-dile! Their attacks are unpredictable and may prove deadly if you somehow manage to wedge your carotid artery in the eyelet setting part. Or if the cut on my finger gets packed with razor sharp glitter, then infected with anaerobic bacteria. Lockjaw kills, people.

Pajama Party for National Card-Making Day

Well, you can't call it a Hallmark holiday. Honestly, I'd never heard of National Card Making Day till this year, but I'm always happy to have an excuse to celebrate any holiday. If it involves making lots of paper crafts, all the better!

This was my first Stampin' Up event as a demonstrator, so I was nervous. The other demos did most of the work, having made tons of card kits, reserving the venue, etc. My job was to provide beverages, invite my friends, and help them make the card kits into actual cards.

Since I wanted to make my guests feel extra special, I made them little page-making kits to take home. The two pages pictured show the pages the kits made. It was fun, but I had no idea it would take so much time to get all the pieces together for each kit. I had to consider how to make it work with only the pieces included, make it look good, and use only Stampin' Up products. I think I mentioned previously that I'm really into working in the 6x6 format at the moment, enjoying the challenge of taking such a small space and making it interesting. The size is also good for little make and take, but sometimes I wonder if other scrappers find the size too weird for use in their own albums. If they're using an 8x8 album, it's easy to mat the page to fit, but 12x12 seems to be the most commonly chosen size. Should I just have done a single 12x12 kit instead of two 6x6's? Or would it inspire scrappers to try something new, maybe pick up a 6x6 album even?