I was up in Birmingham this weekend for a ground-breaking event. The first ever Green Buttons House retreat!! Woo hoo! What a great time we had. We stayed at Harbourne Hall in Birmingham, which was an interesting choice, A bit run down and spartan, but my room was clean and had been freshly painted - you could tell by the painty footprints on the carpet. The scrapping room was perfect - large and airy with french doors onto the extensive grounds. and even better, there was a huge Horse chestnut tree outside so I was able to gather a big bag of conkers to scatter round the house - perfect for September, which is, as we all know, Spider Month.

So down to the scrapping. we had some wonderful classes, volunteered by participants on the retreat. First of all we all had a play with masks, templates and misting, with two projects by Alipeeps. In the first layout, we masked and misted a background with three different colours. I used a gorgeous tree mask to create the first background:

And then the same mask used as a mask and as a template to cut out the shape of the mask as an embellishment.

I loved this class and have resolved to do more masking - which is lucky because when I got home there was a little parcel of stuff I’d ordered, including 4 new masks!
Next I did a class myself - or at least gave out some written instructions and answered any queries! This was for a kind of flip book made from a Graze snackbox, which was fairly complicated to put together but I was happy to see that people managed it without mishap. Here’s the one I made, charting Maddie’s trip to Uganda:

And inside:

On Saturday we started the day with Jayne’s Easel project which was lush. The flower is cut from a beer can, curled and alcohol inked.

In the afternoon Jemma led us in a mini album made form money envelopes. I just love this little project - it’s so clever and neat and you could easily knock one up for a gift. I filled mine with snaps of flowers that I took ina single day around Loch Morlich on holiday;

It’s also filled with tags so you can get lots of pictures in!


Next we had a sketch challenge from Mary - I’d run out of spare photos so watch this space because I’m going to do it this week!
On Sunday morning claire gave us a class on creating borders with stamps - another great technique that I’ll be using again very soon. Perfect for this pic of Maddie chilling out at the Welsh Golf Open, with an Iced coffee:

We finished off after lunch with a Speed Scrap Class from Thriftycrafter. Good fun and brilliant to see how differently everyone’s layouts turned out!

All in all a wonderful weekend with lovely people - can’t wait to do it again next year!