friends and crafts

We've had our Maple Memories weekend planned for months and it was even MORE fun than I had expected.

A beautiful house with fun, colorful bedrooms full of twin beds for all 12 of us to sleep, and our own personal table to spread out and do whatever we wanted!

On Friday night we got a complimentary trolley ride to see the Christmas lights all over McPherson. It was so sweet of Shannon at Maple Memories to do that for us!

AHHHHHH.....48 NON-interrupted hours, except to fill our tummies, with no responsbilities.

And it was so fun to do this with 11 other wonderful, amazing women.


Alyssa is a sewing QUEEN! She taught me tons and she made these ADORABLE art binders for her kiddos!

She found the instructions HERE

I made one too, for a gift, but I am SOOO not in love with my fabric choices. It was a last minute run to Walmart for whatever fat quarters they had that would work for a boy. Not a lot of choices. But here's my finished product - which I'm quite proud of since this is the first thing I've sewn since home ec, besides birthday number shirts.

I can't wait to get some CUTE fabric like Alyssa's and make some more of these!

Some other girls made these cute notebooks to give as gifts too...


You can get instructions over at Ashley Ann, HERE.

I did some scrapbooking, not as much as I thought, but the best thing I did was finally organize all of Taylor's pages to see exactly what I had for her. I've been saying FOREVER that I'm still working on her first year book - she's 3 now. But really, I have ALL of this for her first year, and I even have pages up to 18 months.

So it was nice to get it all organized, into plastic sheets, into the books, in order, and see if there are months I need to add more pages. Honestly, I feel pretty good about what I have for her. So maybe I'll start on Mason soon. I'm thinking I'll be going mostly digital for him!

Another popular craft for the weekend were these photo tile coasters.

They make great grandparent gifts!

Here's what you need:
4 x 4 tiles (from Lowe’s or Home Depot) - white or biege
*mod podge
*felt stickers
*sponge brush
*pictures cut to 3 1/2 x 3 1/2

It's SUPER easy. Just use the modge podge to stick your picture down on the tile. Then modge podge all over the top of the tile. On the botton side, cut felt (with the sticker back) into small squares (1"x 1") to stick to the corners for padding and protection on tables. Stack them in sets of 4 or 5 and tie a cute ribbon around!

You can do this with other than pictures. Go HERE and see how you can do Christmas ones or even monogram ones to use as gifts for ANYONE!

There were other fun crafts being done too - seriously some amazing creative juices flowing with these girls.


And not just scrapbooking and crafts...

Megan wrapped all of her Christmas presents - now, isn't that smart!?!?!? I'll be doing mine on Christmas eve.


Some other things accomplished this weekend:
Blogging
Photo editing
Gift Tags
Blog books
Typing (Sarah was typing out her grandfather's journal ALL weekend!)
Christmas cards
Movie watching
EATING (oh my, we had so much good food!)
Coffee drinking (not me though)
Sleeping in (TOTALLY me!)
Talking
Laughing
Sharing
Growing
Learning

WOW, is all I have to say. So much fun. I probably could have stayed for a few more days.
I was so blessed by ALL of these girls - SO BLESSED!

If you are within driving distance to Maple Memories - I highly suggest you going with a group of girlfriends! You'll LOVE IT!!