Thank you Lorraine

Lorraine gave me this gorgeous frosted glass wall hanging. I love the saying and that it has green dragonflies, I love dragonflies.

Thanks Lorraine, it means so much to me and it made me cry knowing how much you care.

Flowers from Fran P

Fran gave me these lovely flowers on her last day at the Swarm, they are gorgeous (sadly now all withered and dead) They looked lovely in my craftroom, thank you for them Fran.

Close ups

(oops a little blurry)

Swarm tutorials

I did two tutorials during the Swarm, one was on how to make a wordbook using the Cricut Design studio software. The design we came up with is Mackay 2009 Swarm. I finally finished my book this afternoon and am very happy with the end result. As with all the wordbook I design I used the George and Basic shapes cartridge for the base of the book and for the lettering I used the Hello Kitty font cartridge.

Here is what I came up with. Hope you like it.

The second tutorial I did was using the Cricut Gelly Pens. Let me tell you these pens are fantastic, a lot finer than the Cricut markers. I used the Home Decor cartridge and the Design Studio Software, which is essential when doing this project. You need to have the drawing shape and the cutout shadow aligned just right or it will not work out at all.

Here is the step by step in pictures.

The Gelly pens

This shows the design that will be drawn with the Gelly pens

This shows the design that will be cut out after it has first been drawn.

The Gelly pen and the pen housing, the pen has a strong magnet in the top that attaches to the inside of the housing.

The Gelly pen housing in the Cricut Expression ( also works in the Cricut and the Create machines)

The first pass is the drawing of the design

The second pass, after changing the pen housing to the blade housing, is to cut out the shadow around the drawing.

The finished drawn and cut out design.

Here are the girls checking out the design (we had a pajama tutorial session)

Chris

Lorraine

The card made using the design

Me showing off the card, yes in my pajamas.

I would like to thank Mandy from http://www.scrappy-go-lucky.com.au/  for the Cricut Gelly pens I used in this tutorial and for the set that she kindly donated as a prize for the Swarm.

"Swarmers gone WILD" .......................

Saturday night was BBQ and Spa (hot tub) night. My hubby Rob was the chef for the night. He made all the salads and cooked the BBQ. He even made a "HOT DOG" (not really, that's our dog Muttlee LOL)

Spa time, I will just let the pics tell the story, it was lots of fun in the spa.

yes we did do lots of crafting while we were at the Swarm :)

Here is what we have been up to, some did a lot (like almost doing a WHOLE album) and other did a little (like me LOL)

Fi, this was her first ever scrap page.


Nel's 21st scrapbook, she a lot pages.


Chris's wedding gift card





Chris's card


Chris's mosaic pic page


Lorraine's birthday party page


Michele's wedding albums for her DD





Chris's card


Nel's bucket for friend's 40th





Jackie's card


Jackie's coffee mug this is the first time I tried etching. I really like etching :)


Mel's layouts