What a fabulous weekend.

I have had such a good time this weekend, at a Craft Retreat organised by two of my best crafting buddies, Janet and Michelle from the Tuesday Taggers DT.

The venue was the Beamsley Project, a converted Chapel on the A59 at Beamsley, between Harrogate and Skipton, which provides small scale residential conference/activity facilities for up to 24 people and is fully equiped to provide for people with physical disabilities. Janet and Michelle had hired the centre on a self catering basis to run their first ever Craft Retreat. Participants had travelld from as far away as Lowestoft and Edinburgh to take part in this weekend.

As well as getting together with a number of old friends, Janet, Michelle, Emma, Andy, Kate, Georgina, Averil, Cazro and Yvonne, I made new friends and acquaintances, including Margaret and Vicky, Jean and Marie, Sandra, Glynis, Lyn and Avril, these last two also being members of the Tuesday Taggers DT but this was the first time we had met in "real life". So many talented crafters and all round fabulous people, we were all soon relaxing and chatting away as if we had known each other for years.

On Friday evening after a substantial dinner, prepared by Andy, our chef for the weekend, it was back to the craft room to complete an altered notebook project that Janet had designed as an ice breaker to start the weekend, crafting and chatting carried on into the night with "the late shift" (including me) finally downing tools and heading for bed at about 01:45am.
The next morning after breakfast we all headed off to Harrogate to The Great Northern Papercraft Extravaganza at the County Show Ground, for some serious craft shopping and the opportunity to catch up with our favourite retailers, demontrators and crafting gurus ++++before returning to Beamsley with our newest buys to get on with some crafting. After Dinner on Saturday, Emma and I each held a brief techniques based workshop for those who were interested, mine was on getting more out of your cuttlebug, Emma's was on two step stamping using a stamp positioner. Both workshops were well received.

Whilst I headed to bed at a reasonable hour on Saturday "The late shift" were still crafting at 03:00am !!!

On Sunday morning we continued with our own crafting projects but also had the opportunity to explore using alcohol inks with Janet, making and packaging bath crystals as gifts with Michelle and making an easel card with Emma, as well as these prepared workshops and demos, eveyone shared their own skills and talents, including making paper roses, and painting with Twinkling H2O's, amongst other crafty techniques.

All too soon it was time to pack our crafty bags and get ready to return to the real world, but not until we had all enjoyed A traditional Sunday Dinner provided by Andy. Would we do it again? You just try and stop us.

So a huge thanks to Janet and Michelle for all the hard work the put into making the weekend such a success, and here's to next time.

Photos to be added later...

Bee xx