Queen of the Crop! My Crop Time Retreat
I had such a fun time at my Crop Time retreat this weekend. I went into my weekend scrapbook retreat feeling so disorganized, I am just so behind in printing photos I had to burn them to CD and take them to the local camera shop rather than uploading to snapfish (my preferred printer). Usually I have some page layouts planned, pictures and paper put together this time literally threw my cropper hopper and photo box into my car and off I went!
My favorite items this time were the Basic Grey papers. I love the look of them, combine them with some paint and distressing ink and I was in love. I found them last year and the store was pretty picked over so I got on ebay and bought several packs of the complete set which included tags and letter stickers. I just love the color schemes they use in their lines. I did a bunch of kids pages in the Lollipop Shoppe and Oh Baby Boy! and pictures from Hawaii in the Romani line. I also had a blast with a new product called Simply Paint. I’ve used paint before but this stuff puts paint for scrapbooking in a whole new hemisphere. It has the lowest water content of any acrylic paint on the market, which or course makes it ideal for scrapbooking and stamping. I love being able to get a nice opaque look to my stamps without using embossing. And finally the most amazing item of the whole crop the Cricut die cut machine. Pat gave me a Sizzix die cut machine five years ago when it was the newest thing on the market and I’ve been very happy with it, but the Cricut blows the Sizzix away. It’s all computerized, no loading and unloading different letter dies. You can size your fonts to different sizes. This has to be one of the most awesome products I’ve seen. I will be selling off my Sizzix on ebay and investing in the Cricut, it just can’t even compare.
So all told I had a fantastic scrapbook weekend, I can’t wait to go again. Crazy enough I won queen of the crop again! I will admit I did work very hard on this layout and also I had a lot of friends in tow to vote for me 
I used both the Cricut machine (on the cut out letters) and the Simply Paint on this layout. I really loved how it turned out.
Evan’s gorgeous little heirloom Jon Jon was lovingly handcrafted by Jessica from Little Lamb’s Lane.
