Saturday I went to Mesa, AZ with some of my scrapbook “chicks” to attend the Creating Keepsakes Convention. It was a scrapbooker’s playground…

There were a plethora of vendors, but here were some of the ones I visited:

Best Craft Organizer (sweet paper storage solutions)
Dollar Scrapbooking
Embellish It!
Eyelet Outlet
Itscheaperthantherapy.com
Lickety Split Scrapbooks
Melissa Frances
The Paper Loft
Picture That Sound
Pioneer Photo Albums (my favorite albums in the whole wide world)
Queen & Company (cute felt borders)
Red Bee, The
Rusty Pickle
Scrapbuck.com (the best deals around)
Scrap-Mart.com
Scrapperz Outlet(Sizzix)
SEI
Strictly Scrapbooking
Tami Potter/Wish in the Wind (a cool photo mosaic tool)
Tattered Angels
Technique Tuesday

Take a look at my loot…

Yummy.

I didn’t take any classes this year (because frankly, they are too expensive and I haven’t had the greatest experiences in the past with CKC classes) so this year it was all about the vendor faire.

After a couple of hours of that, we got some lunch, and visited two scrapbook stores in Mesa… Mystic Paper (A. Mazing.) and Scrapbooks Etc. (a lovely overload).

I was gone from morning to night and it was simply a spectacular day. Wonderful company, good food, sweet deals and new ideas.

Maybe one of these days CKC will come to Tucson so we won’t have to drive to Mesa (show some love CKC!) But until then, its worth the 2 hour drive.

Your turn…have you attended a CK convention?

So I subscribe to Creating Keepsakes magazine. Love it. Its chocked full of great ideas, product information, how-tos and the latest industry news. One thing I find super helpful is the collection of layout sketches by Becky Higgins (and I’m so sad to hear that she’s departing from CK). I rip them out every month and put them in a 3-ring binder under “Sketch Layouts”.

Anywho, another thing I love to do is, like so many others, use the layouts scattered throughout the magazine for inspiration (a.k.a. “scraplift”). I go through and rip them out as well and put them in the “Layouts” section of my above mentioned 3-ring binder. Over time, I’ve collected a slough of them. Here’s one I did this week from the November issue…

Inspiration layout (credit: Paula Gilarde)

Paula did a lot of this layout digitally, using Adobe Photoshop and Heidi Swapp for Advantus Digital Brushes. I followed the same design concept and came up with this:

The photos were taken at our last NSD (National Scrapbook Day) event where we were simply “Scrap Happy”. I used a patterned paper and coordinating gemstone scraps, Colorbok brads, acryclic stamps and the DoodleType Critcut font for the title.

Thanks Creating Keepsakes and Paula Gilarde, for inspiring me. What about you? Do you ever take inspiration from magazine layouts? If so, which ones are your favorite?