That is a really good question… and for those that have been following me I can say that life went pear shaped when CTMH shut there doors.

Financially, it meant I had to go back to teaching full time for the benefit of my family. With this came a whole world of crazy. I’d not worked full time in 13 years – and for most of it that was only 3 days a week. But 5 days was full on. Yes my kids are growing up, so they can get themselves to and from school – one is in Secondary School (she’s year 8 this year – so I think that’s the older end of Middle School for my US friends), my middle is in Grade 6 (starting Secondary next year) and my not so little boy has turned 10 and in Grade 4. So they’ve hit that stage were they are starting to live their lives with sport, theatre, Scouting, friends etc. Hubby and I are often flying by the seat of our pants getting them to all the places they need be, often at the same time. But I’m loving being there for them.

But I haven’t stopped crafting. Post CTMH, Stampin’ Up! has been wonderful. I’ve kept my workshops going, my card classes and retreats. In fact I ran extra retreats this year. It took time but I’ve built my business back up to roughly where it was before the change over. And I’m still absolutely loving it. I’ve even managed to earn the Stampin’ Up! Incentive Trip – and Alaskan Cruise next June. (Required Disclaimer: Less than 1% of demonstrator reach this level). Thanks to everyone in the past 12 months who has been a part of my business in some way – I value each and every one of you.

The craziness of managing full time work and my kids lives has not intentionally turned me more into a card maker of late. But memory keeping is still my passion. And my middle daughter is glad that at the ripe age of 12 I thought I’d start scrapbooking her baby album. Better late than never.

So I thought I’d share some of those with you today to get me back into the swing of blogging and sharing mroe with you all again.

For my daughter’s album I decided to use the Virtual Album Retreat Event Kit – this was the first time that Stampin’ Up! have run an Album Retreat (CTMH fans would know how much we all love their album retreats), and the team, supported by Karen Pedersen (ex-CTMH, now working for Stampin’ Up!), was amazing. Like all things a few first time bugs to work out. But I can’t wait for the next one. And they also annouced a Cardmaking one coming up too.

The Album Retreat Kit at the time of typing this is still avaliable. It has a Month by Month theme. You get two full size stamp sets, along with all the pre-cut materials to make12 double page layouts. So I decided this would be perfect for my Olivia. She was born in the June. So I started her album with the June layout. I made all the pages along with the live videos in the order they were in the videos, and then rearranged the order and swaped a couple around so that they colours etc of the layout matched our southern hemishere seasons. But most didn’t really mater. I’ve finished her first year – adding in extra pages as needed in a month from my stash I still have of CTMH layouts that I hadn’t put photos on. For some reason right now I’m missing two of the double layouts in photo format. But you’ll get the idea from the other ten.

Hope you like them.

The September layout is an interactive one – it has an explosion type box that opens up.

Until next time,

Happy Crafting

Dannii