Montreal Regional Conference

I really wanted to have this post up on Sunday but, I had a really crazy weekend! I bussed back and forth between Ottawa and Montreal twice and one time I was alone with a cranky toddler and a ridiculous amount of luggage!! As you can imagine I'm a tad exhausted! It was a great weekend despite the insanity, I got to spend time with some of my cousins (who are awesome cooks, in passing) and attend the Stampin' Up! Montreal regional conference! Although I have tons of fun stories about Montreal and visiting my family I think I'll focus on the conference in this post...it is a stampin' blog after all ;^>

This was my first official Stampin' Up! event and I had a blast. I brought my friend from Ottawa with me to conference so that she could get an introduction to Stampin' Up! She's really interested in becoming a demonstrator but needs her infant twins to be a little older before she's ready to take it on. We left Ottawa at 5 am to get to the conference on time so we were nearly zombies when we sat down to cut out our free stamp sets. (Yay, free rubber!!). We enjoyed getting to know a bunch of stampers from Abitibi (I think...) and I found out I was the only stamper there from Western Canada! I learn soooo much at this reagional and definately came out inspired. In this post I just chose a few fun things I saw to share with you, I will have stuff to share with you for quite a while!!
I thought this first card was just great, although I'm a little biased because I'm a frog nut! The frog and lily pad here were simply made using a few of our punches. The lily pad is the large oval punched out of certainly celery DSP. The frog (and I think this is absolutely brilliant!) was made by using one of the flowers from the Three for You Punch set (yet another reason I 'need' this punch). The blossom was tucked behind the leaf to look like a frogs face and then eyes were added. I think they used punched paper to make the eyes but you could easily use our Signo
white gel pen and a black Stamp'n write marker. If you have discovered any fun uses for your punches send me a photo , I always love to learn new ideas!! This next card was made using a stamp set we all have... our fingers!! I thought it was a really fin way to make characters and to get kids stamping. Doesn't it remind you of the little creatures you made in kindergarden using poster paint? The stamper who presented this (and I know bad me, next time I will write down names) used all of her fingers and different colours to make her critters. As well as cards and tags she used the thumb print art to make adorable childrens scrapbook pages, I am defiantely going to have to give this one a go!This last project was brought to us directly from the home office. I thought it was a great home decor idea and even better, in my mind, a wonderful way to recycle something that we all have so many of now days. The circles are simply old CDs covered in DSP, decorated and then hung through jumbo eyelets set in the CD using a Crop-A-Dile (I love that tool!!). And yes the CAD punches through the CD like 'buttah' with no cracking and splitting. The really cool thing about this item, is that it can be multi purpose. You can have a generic welcome message on one side and then flip it over to have a holiday theme on the other side.

Well that's it for now I hope you enjoy!