Scrapbooking Retreat

This past weekend I headed out to Columbia Valley up above Cultus Lake for our bi-annual Scrapbooking retreat. My good friend Jan has been organizing these weekends for more than 10 years and we all look forward to them. We rent the Dogwood Lodge at Stillwood Camp and Conference Centre where we have a large room with lots of tables and light. Upstairs there are dorm rooms for sleeping and we are royally fed by the camp staff in their lovely dining room overlooking Cultus Lake. We can't carpool up to the camp because we all take so much with us that we each need our own vehicle to accomodate all the equipment necessary (?!) for scrapbooking.

Once we've unpacked all our gear, we get right down to work.

When a page is completed, it is held up for all to enjoy. Some gals are making albums featuring their grandkids.

Others are building memory books for their grown up children.

Me - I'm still making travel albums. I haven't gotten organized enough yet to start on the albums I'd like to do - there are years of negatives to go through. So I go back to chronicling our road trip to Newfoundland several years ago. It is almost finished now after this weekend ( I completed 28 pages!). Hopefully when the next retreat rolls around in October, I'll have the pictures sorted and ready to start on my kid's albums.

So here's a sampling of the pages I did.

Saturday afternoon, I had visitors! Harv came up bringing our kids and grandkids from Seattle with him. We made fun cards for them using my new "Cricut" machine,

and then headed up the trail for a hike. We found treehouses with ladders to climb and rope bridges

and the children had lots of fun in the playground before heading back home. It was fun to have them come a visit.

It is a real gift to have friends with similar passions, and to be able to get to know new friends as well. We compared notes, asked for and gave advice, checked out each other's tools and paper, caught up on each others' lives, laughed, ate chocolate, and even cried once or twice.

Thanks Jan for all the planning and organizing that made our weekend so fun and productive. We can hardly wait for the next one.