Fantastic International Stamping Adventure!

Hello!! As promised, I'm here with the scoop of the day!

To paraphrase Wida in a recent post of hers, and as many of you have discovered in this wonderful card-making community of ours in Blogland, occasional comments and then personal emails over the passage of time create deep and lasting friendships. An innocent sharing, a teasing comment, a few "what ifs?" and before you know it, you're off on a Fantastic International Stamping Adventure (FISA)!! That's what happened to me last week! 

How did it happen? Well, it took over a year to plan and we traveled 20,350 miles (32,558 km) between us to make it happen! Six stamping card artists came together from October 18-25, 2014, at a rented lake house in Prior Lake, (near Minneapolis), Minnesota, USA! It was a marvelous opportunity to meet in real life to get to know each other better and have lots of crafty fun! 

After trying dozens of possible names for our little group, we decided to call ourselves "BABES," which stands for the Benevolent Association of Beloved and Esteemed Stampers! How's that for self-confidence?!

Some of you have seen the sneak peek photo in my last post:

Darnell, Kim, Ardyth, Anita, Bev, Geri

For those of you who wondered if that was my kitchen, ah, that would be a snorting "no!" My kitchen (seen here) is about as big as that island we are standing around in the rented house!

In Alpha Betty order, here are my fellow BABES:

Anita of My Papercraft World came all the way from France!

Ardyth of Maskerade came all the way from Toronto, Canada!

Bev of Happy Dance drove all the way from Racine, Wisconsin!

Geri of Manitoba Stamper drove all the way from guess where? 
Manitoba, Canada!

And Kim of Cupcakes, Cards, and Kim came all the way from 

San Lorenzo, California!

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How lucky was I to be in the company of these stamping super stars for a whole week?! I've been fortunate to know most of them for a couple of years now, some either since I started blogging or they did. The ease with which we settled into our beautiful week together was really no surprise to me. Any onlooker would have thought we'd been meeting like this for years!

I took 273 photos, not counting the ones on my phone, between my week with my sisters (which was fantastical!) and my week with the BABES. I've put some aside for blackmail porpoises, of course, and to save your bumbum from chaffing, I've put some others into collages for you. You're so very welcome!

I'll start you off with a few photos of the house.

You'll see the spectacular views we had from the dining room table in another collage. Bev and Geri both drove, so they brought a lot of the big schtuff, thank goodness. Between the six of us we brought enough craft supplies to open a store!! We all brought two suitcases; one for crafty schtuff, one for clothes. We all agreed we should have brought less clothes, but we sure weren't lacking in product and supplies to keep us happy all week! 

In fact, we had so much schtuff, here is a photo catching Anita under one of the tables to find what she needed!

Okay, continuing, here are a few group photos:

Here are a few individual photos:

Here are a few "day trip" photos.  A highlight was a side trip to a small craft store called Creek Water Designs in Jordan, MN. The owner Mary was absolutely thrilled to have us visit her. That's her store in the middle of the top row. We also stopped for a quick peek at the famous Mall of America. Now we can say we've been there!

Next are a few photos of the scenery around the lake house:

I really had to frain and refrain from posting dozens more. We were so fortunate with the gorgeous  warm weather and extraordinary sunsets!

I must have taken several dozen photos of the Canadian geese landing and swimming in perfect formation on the lake. Ardyth and Geri found this quite amusing as Canadians don't find them quite so charming and think of them as we Americans think of pigeons!

We all agreed that it was sensational seeing a bald eagle fly over the lake!

But the highlight of the fauna was seeing an albino squirrel from the moment we arrived and every day we were there. She became our mascot and we named her "Snowflake!"

(You know the joke where you yell "squirrel" when you have moments of attention deficit disorder? Well, we started yelling "Snowflake" every time one of us forgot what we were doing or otherwise was distracted!) Isn't she something?! You can see her on the tree inside the circle on the photo below. She would hang there and watch us work and play!

Here are a few photos of the cards we made, which will be posted to our blogs in time. We also made craft aprons as a take-away. This photo does not include over a hundred cards that Ardyth and Kim made for their various projects!

Also, Kim brought us supplies to each make one of those adorable PTI felt coin purses! Here I am goofing off and yelling Snowflake every ten minutes. It turns out I can't laugh hysterically and stitch at the same time so I flunked that project! Luckily for me, Miss Kim is very generous and gave me the pretty one she made. (There is no need to mention the fact that Kim's preschoolers make these coin purses without any difficulty! Cough.)

The food needs were handled so well. We decided if we went out to lunch one day, we would stay in for dinner that night and vice versa. We each ordered something that gave us extra to take home for the next meal and the waitresses all kindly gave us separate checks so there were no calculators needed when it came time to pay the bill!

Speaking of food, we were treated like princesses by Bev and Anita. Bev brought us three different and delicious Kringle, which is a traditional Wisconsin specialty.

And Anita brought HOME MADE/GROWN honey, heather, walnut cake, and walnuts all the way from her homestead in France!

Oh, what fun we had! We laughed until we cried. I'm eight years older than any of these young ladies, so sometimes I laughed so hard, the tears ran down my leg! We also had serious discussions, lovely meals together, and learned a lot from each other. This will give you an idea of how compatible we were:

Darnell, Geri, Anita

And finally, here is a favorite photo, kindly taken by a passing stranger, which caught us all giggling about something!

Ardyth, Kim, Darnell, Anita, Bev, Geri

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There have been a lot of meetings in real life of blogging stampers in 2014! If you ever get the opportunity to do something like this, GRAB IT!! I'm still pinching myself that we actually pulled it off and came together from different parts of the world!! 

Please make sure you visit the blogs of the other BABES for their comments and photos!

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I will leave you with another autumn card. I made this one as a thank you from all of us to Bev, who was instrumental in making this FISA happen! I want to say a special thanks, too, to Geri for letting us use her car and gas all week long!

For this one I took a black pen and hand-drew lines to give the leaves some definition. I saw this idea on other blogs recently to give definition to watercoloring, but I don't remember who to credit for the idea. If you know, please tell me so I can edit this post to give proper credit. I thought it added a lot to the image, which is by Rubbernecker.com (846).

~~~

Thank you for waiting with bated breath for this post and bearing with me all the way to the end!!

Enjoy your day! No, seriously, enjoy.  LITS!* 

Still not unpacked!

As always, thank you for coming by to visit the Playhouse and special thanks to you if you take the time to leave a comment and/or join as a follower! Please let me know you came by, so I can be sure and return the flavor!

 

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