Camp Friendship 2009

Wow! What an experience this was!

This past Friday, I taught a scrapbook class to 130+ special education kids. We made a 3-Ring Binder to put pictures in of their week at camp. It was a blast, I tell you!

The process of making it all happen was wild & crazy, but I knew God’s hand was in it all as every aspect fell into place. Whew!

In the 10+ years I’ve been scrapbooking, I have never tackled a project like this. Just to imagine ordering that many of one item from Close To My Heart was wild.

Here is what my original order consisted of…

136 3-Ring Binders

86 Tinkerin’ Level 1 Scrapbook Kits

50 Animal Cookie Level 1 Scrapbook Kits

7 Pkgs Summer Craft Buttons

6 Pkgs Clear Craft Buttons

6 Pkgs Sunflower Waxy Flax

5 Pkgs Memory Book Glue Dots

4 Pkgs Euro Replacement Blads

3 Bottles of Liquid Glass

2 Pkgs 3/8” White Daisy Ricrac Ribbon

Here are a few visuals for you…

CRAZY!!! I was amazed that I could order all this in one order and have absolutely NO backorders! CTMH Rocks!!!

Unfortunately all didn’t go as planned…the 60 Tombow glue sticks I ordered from another company did not arrive…I got a total of 8 glue sticks in the order and the rest were backordered, so I had to shift gears, cancel that order and buy glue sticks locally. All worked out just fine though.

This whole project was under a tight time table. I placed my order on July 3rd and because of the July 4th holiday, didn’t receive my order until July 9th. That gave me only 1 week to prepare everything!

So, you can only imagine how many hours I have put in this past week preparing…long days and long nights…with very little rest! Oh, but it was so worth it! That’s why I love this job so much. :O)

By mid-week, I was beginning to panic a bit…especially when I got a phone call that they had 7 more kids that had not registered…eeekkk! But all turned out fine with help from one of my amazing downline, Sylvia. She helped me out with a few extra binders and kits and she even came over Wednesday evening after working all day and helped cut a few of the kits for me.

On Thursday I managed to have the kits ready for the 57 elementary kids and I delivered those that afternoon. I didn’t end up teaching those kids. Instead, I showed a few of the teachers how to put the binders together and they taught them on Friday as my SIL and myself taught  the 82 junior high through college-aged kids.

So, after dropping those off, I headed back home to work on the 82 Tinkerin’ kits. My SIL followed me home and with her help, we got all the little pieces of the kits made and ready for me to finish up later that evening. This is what I sat down to at 11p to finish…

Keep in mind…to the left of this pile were 82 Level 1 Pre-made layouts which include 4 layouts in each kit…for a total of 328 pieces I had to cut 3 – 5x7 pieces out of…each sheet. I calculated that I cut out 984 - 5x7 pieces.

So, I had a very long night/morning! LOL! I managed to get them all completed and ready to go and get a few winks in before I had to be at my SIL’s house to pick her up at 830a.

Our first stop was at the junior high school all the way across town to teach 29 kids, then 1-1/2 hours later, we were back to the other side of town to teach 14 college students and another 1-1/2 hours later we were in the middle of town teaching 39 high school students. So, in 4-1/2 hours we taught 82 students how to scrapbook. What a joy it was! I hope they enjoy their scrapbooks filled with memories of their week at Camp Friendship 2009!

Have a blessed day and make it from your heart!

P.S. I’ll share some pictures of the finished Tinkerin’ binder in my next post.