CKU-A

Right now, I’m sitting up in bed in my hotel room with my mom sleeping next to me and my two aunts in the next bed. We had such an awesome time. Tonight is the first night that we are in bed early. We were going to get our stuff and go back down to crop, but that turned into trying to pack and make sense of everything that we have to get out of here in the morning. From there, Debbie and my mom called it a night. I figured I’d go ahead and write a quick entry for my blog into Word and I would copy and paste it when I got home and was able to get on the internet. Crappy enough, I can only access the internet if I go downstairs to the lounge. That’s not going to happen. I have to admit that I am very curious to see if any of my grades for the summer semester have been entered yet, but not enough to go down to the lobby with the laptop, braless and in my pjs.

Now my good news though. There were 3 “honorable mentions” and a “first place” for the Chatterbox contest and I took one of the honorable mentions. I am so excited. I rarely share my layouts because I don’t want to be scrutinized, so it’s nice to have one of the few looked upon favorably. From what I was told by our “professor”, everyone was raving about it. I know that I walked up on some other students who were saying, “that’s a really good one” when they were reading it. So, Cathy Z. and Ali Edwards liked my layout and especially my journaling. They gave an intro to each layout before they announced the person’s name and everyone seemed touched by my layout. I heard a lot of nice congratulatory things as I went up to receive my prize, a Chatterbox messenger bag filled with Chatterbox products and a “Make it Meaningful” t-shirt. Thanks Elissa, for encouraging me to submit for the contest, even though I felt like my layout was crap. We are truly our own worst critics.

On to a review of the whole CKU-A experience: First of all, I have to say that CKU-A was a favorite over just CKU. The difference? The “A” stands for albums. During the make and take demonstrations on Thursday, we created an 8” x 8” layout at each station with a theme of a “favorite” (ie: favorite vacation, favorite candy, etc). There weren’t as many make and takes as there are at CKU, but that was okay. We had more layouts than would fit in the 8x8 album that was provided for that purpose. It wasn’t overwhelming. I also didn’t have a bunch of unrelated embellishments, tags, etc. that we made that I will never use. That is thing with CKU, I still have stuff from 2003 that I made….

Okay, in addition, Anita Oldham ROCKS. I mean, the class wasn’t all hype. It was just solid, technique based, calendar/album that I will use. The pace was awesome. I got to sit with my mom and my aunts. We enjoyed working on the albums together, being in each others’ company, and Anita’s instruction.

Lastly, the 4 elective classes I had were just terrific. I loved the Perfect Match with Gin-X, the Girl Thing purse album, and both of the inking classes with Tim Holtz. I just can’t say enough GOOD things about them. I will have to take pictures of the finished projects when I get home.

I didn’t take a single photo this entire weekend. Crazy huh? My mom and Aunt Nancy took most of the pictures and will be sharing them on CD. So, no photos now.

Didn’t get a ton of free stuff, but that’s not why I’m here. What we did receive, I have no clue how we will get it all home. I can get myself home, but I am taking everyone to the airport in the morning, so EVERYONE’S stuff has to fit into my car. Hmmmm… we’ll see how that goes.