My second retreat

I returned home from the Artful Gathering last Sunday and left again on Monday morning for our LBH (Little Blue House) Gals retreat!  The one good thing about doing back-to-back retreats is you don't have to do much unpacking/repacking.  I just added to the pile...

This retreat was much smaller - only Tracy (store owner), Elaine (other instructor) and myself were there the entire time. We were intermittently joined by Rhonda (store manager), Kristen (sales associate) and Rachel (part-time sales associate and prep assistant).  Kristen and Rachel are Tracy's daughters, so this was an intimate, "family" affair.  We each had a six-foot table to ourselves plus another room to spread out our stuff. We ate, slept, talked, laughed, rested and arted for three whole days! Awesome!

I wasn't as prepared as I could have been for three days, but I did manage to get several projects finished as well as getting caught up on much-needed sleep.

As teachers, we don't always have time to do the class projects for ourselves, so several of us took these projects to the retreat.  This is our patriotic star door hanger which I finally was able to create. It is now hanging on my front door - a little late for July 4th, but at least I'll be in time for Labor Day!  That's the great thing about patriotic decor - it can last from Memorial Day through Labor Day.

The three larger stars are wooden and the smallest is painted paper mache.  The largest is painted with a metallic "Rich Espresso" paint with the flourishes stamped in white paint.  The red and blue stars are covered with embossed and sanded Ten Seconds Studio art metal.

Then I made this darling plaque to hold paintbrushes or art tools. Tracy had made this as an inspiration sample for this month's Front Porch Kit (still a few more available).  I still had leftover papers and supplies in my kit so this was easy to recreate.  It uses the wooden plaque (Hank the Plank) from our very first kit.

I also made this 8" x 10" canvas using more leftovers from the kit.  I painted the canvas dark brown and adhered a piece of denim, two patterned papers, a piece of mesh and a cardstock photo mat (all from the kit).  The photo is of two of my daughters, Kelly and Sara, in Chicago this spring, just before Kelly moved to Austin.  

The white flower and butterfly were made for my tutorial on the Front Porch Kits blog here, so it was fun to be able to use them for another project.  The paper flower under the silk teal flower was misted with Maya Mist.  The title in the upper left is a sticker from the kit that I added to cardstock and popped up for added dimension.  This will be going to one of the girls so I am now in the process of recreating it for the other one!