Crop in Athens February 5th

Hello everyone,

Last Saturday I had a GREAT time! I went to my first crop ever, organised by Irini - Get Creative.

Although I've been making cards since September, I had never tried scrapbooking before, mainly because of lack of pictures (you know, that horrible day you want to forget about, when your hard disk crashed and hundreds of photos were lost forever because you thought that this would never happen to you and you couldn't find the time to make a backup? Yes, PAINFUL story!).

Anyway, I've been flirting with the scrapbooking idea for a while now, and when I saw that Irini from Get Creative was organising a crop... well, suffice to say I was sooo glad with my last minute cancelation of my plans so that I could attend the crop.

Let me tell you, we had a great time! More than 20 ladies, scrapbooking along, giving advices, ideas... What more can I say, if you have been in a crop before, you can imagine what I'm trying to describe here. You can find some photos here.

So, of course, I had to give it a go and try to prepare a layout for the first time. I selected a couple of my cats' photos. Unfortunately the quality of the photos is not so good as I am really horrible with taking photos... and most of the photos are taken with my iphone... but anyway ("to do": get some advise from Petros, my cousin/friend photographer whose work I admire!). I thought I'd better work with what I had instead of not doing anything!

I prepared my very first layout for the pre crop challenge, which was a layout with only one colour. Somehow, I ended up preparing something in green - mainly driven by the 12x12 papers I had, which are not many, that would match well with the colours of the photos.

It took me a while to finish it off and the result is, to say the least, really basic and simple. Even so, I was glad that I finally prepared my very first layout, which is the following:

In addition to that, Irini had also prepared for us the materials and gave us instructions for a make-and-take mini album. So, not only did I prepare my first layout, I made my first mini album as well! Here are a few pictures of the mini album:

Isn't that lovely? I liked the mini-album so much that yesterday I spent some considerable time online looking for more inspiration... I ordered a couple of books and as soon as I receive them and decide over what to do next, I will get my first kit and give it a go...

Last but not least, I have to mention the lovely presents that we got from sfragidomania.gr and Cherrynest... We got some chipboard from someone else too, but I have to confess that I was too focused on my layout that I didn't hear who gave it to us :S (Plus the fact that I have a horrible difficulty with remembering names.... :S)

So, again a big thank you to Irini for organising this, and to the lovely ladies I met... Hope I'll see you again soon!