When I was a little girl, I have fond memories of always loving crafts of all kinds. From coloring books to sketch books and crocheting to macrame, I loved it all! So, naturally when my grandmother gave me my first scrapbook in 9th grade, I started saving things in the scrapbook. Pep rally ribbons, shards of a van side mirror leftover from a brush with an orange tree branch in my first driving lesson, an autographed napkin from a local Elvis impersonator– are all in the book, which is falling apart from melted tape that doesn’t stick anymore!

Little did I know that 30 plus years later, my first experiences with scrapbooking would come around to me starting a program that will teach others how to do it! It has become one of the most rewarding things in my life.

Case in point, is a surprise delivery I received at my house this week.

It was accompanied by a wonderful digital card with photographs of pages from a wedding book I helped a new customer create for her daughter. It  read:

Amanda:

You are the best. I can never thank you enough for all your inspiration and help in getting this scrapbook done. Ashley & John just loved it and have already shown it to many of their close friends. You are an amazing person and I feel lucky to have you in my life. Thank you again from the bottom of my heart for all your help and support.

Agnes

My friend Agnes came into my life at the begginning of this year as a referral from someone she worked with as a temp for the U.S. Census. To this day, we do not know who it was!  She’d gone to local craft stores, scrapbook stores, crops, etc for over a year., but no one would help teach her how to scrapbook so she could put this wedding book together for her daughter. After that fateful phone call, I invited her over and together we devised a plan to get it done before her daughter’s visit here in late May. So, about once a month for five months, we got together and worked on the album for a few hours and I’d send her off with "homework".  She was able to present the completed album to the married couple just as planned and they just loved it! It was just as wonderful to witness Agnes’ sense of accomplishment!

This is such a wonderful reminder of why I do what I do and just reinforced my determination to show others how scrapbooking can touch the lives of so many people! It is  probably one of the best gifts you could give someone. One that they would cherish forever! Even if you do not scrapbook yourself, everyone these days knows someone who scrapbooks and would love pre-made pages they could easily drop some photos on and call it a day! Every month, for the last four years I have been teaching a format that transitions a card into a beautiful scrapbook page. I call this design approach/theory, Cardvertibles™.

This different way to teach card makers how to scrapbook is my exciting, new adventure!

But, ahhh, how I’m going to do that will remain a mystery–for now! ha ha ha!

So who won the Blog Candy?

Want me to avoid the drum roll?

Just flat out tell you?

Okay—I will but you won’t be happy!

Why not?

Because no one won!

That’s right! No one guessed it!

Most of you got it partially right by guess scrapbooking, digital scrapbooking, scrapbooking newsletter, tutorials, etc. However, what I’m going to do is use two different delivery systems to teach this Cardvertibles™ design theory. But ahhhh…I can’t tell you everything at once now, can I?

Ahh…but don’t fret—I’ll share some more scrapbooking projects with you to keep you inspired until I do tell you. Okay?

Now to tell you about the card and scrapbooking samples. The first ones, posted at the top of this post, uses the retiring stamp set, "On A Pedestal". I have done so much with this set and highly recommend them if it is not part of your collection. It, along with the tropical leaves stamp set "Paradise" (shown here at the bottom), have been go to sets for a lot of occasions since they first became offered in the catalog and I will dearly miss them. If you can see their potential as much as I did, then you may want to give me a call to get your own before they are gone FOREVER….sniff…sniff!

Well, I’m gonna leave you with this now. I promise tomorrow to unveil more about Cardvertibles™. Until tomorrow!!

 PS. Sorry for the delay in posting. Guess I didn’t have my blog post "scheduling" skills down as well as I thought I did. I was surprised that no postings were going through this morning! I had sceduled two of them, too. One for yesterday and one for this morning. Now, we’re really off schedule. Sorry about that! I’m getting there!