I wanted to show you the pages I made this past weekend at a retreat my friend Hazel and I attend twice each year. I'm like many of you, and find myself constantly battling the time factor as far as finding time to scrapbook. At this retreat, I always try to make two layouts that are my "masterpieces" of the moment, in other words, I throw in every technique I've learned in the past six months!

The red, white, and blue layout won the Best Overall award in the contest at the retreat, which made me feel really great, since the ladies attending were the ones who voted on the winner! For it, I made chipboard "glitter glazed" embellishments using Fancy Pants chipboard shapes. This was the technique that we learned recently in our free "Show-Me" session on how to make glazed glitter letters! The page also uses one of my favorite new toys, clear acrylic stamps. The journaling block stamps by Autumn Leaves were something I used on every single page I made this weekend. They are the perfect size for a few sentences, and each package has several shapes. I literally love them!

The fall page will be an upcoming class at Scrapbook Generation in October, and at our retreats in Branson and Eureka Springs. It's called Falling Leaves, and features chipboard leaves embellished with chalk ink, paper, acrylic paint, glitter glaze, and twine. The pages also use acrylic stamps for flourishes and journaling blocks.

"Adorable Boy," the layout of me and my grandson Drew, is probably my favorite. It went together really fast, and my "ugly dress," as Stacey and Ali refer to it, was an exact match for some papers in the My Mind's Eye Confetti collection. And I finally got to use some of those big Prima flowers that come in the cute transparent cans.

The last of the four is actually from one of our page kits clubs -- the Generation Page Kit Club July kit. I had to do a few alterations because my photos were from the 80s and were the 3-1/2 x 5 size, but that size seemed to work just fine.

Anyway, it was fun to get away from my normal routine and actually make some pages this weekend. That's the same feeling Karin and I want everyone to take with them when they leave our upcoming retreats!