Creating Keepsakes Convention weekend

I am coming off an awesome weekend of visiting with The Beastie, cake baking, and attending CKC-St. Louis! I hadn't seen The Beastie since last summer, just after we moved here. We Skype every week, but it's just not the same. So when we discovered that there was a scrapbooking convention here and she had a flight voucher that made a cheap airfare even cheaper....it was a date! Thursday we ran some errands, had some 5 Guys burgers for lunch, ate yummy Thai food for dinner, and baked this gorgeousness (which is a recipe in Sky High, a cook book she gave me a few years ago). I love this cake and can easily see myself making it again.

We exchanged birthday gifts. You can read all about her gift to me here.

And we took a walk and basked in the amazing spring weather.

......and, we attended CKC-St. Louis (!!), which you can learn about here. I'm going to give a short review then show you the one whole page I completed while there.

Review
I am so glad we went! I wasn't sure what to expect. I was sort of afraid it was going to be small and sad, and it wasn't at all. The vendor hall was pretty big and included booths from some big name scrapbooking companies, like SEI and Studio Calico. The Beastie and I picked up big packs of textured cardstock; I got 2 whole sheets of patterned paper and a handful of embellishments. We each took 3 classes. I took:

Scrappin' with Sketches (Creating Keepsakes)
The swag was great--we got a whole package of one of the newest lines of stuff. I made two layouts, one of which I've added journaling to (see below), the other of which I still need to put the last touches on. I learned one technique: if you have a lot of horizontal photos and one vertical, put the vertical at the end to focus the set of pictures and direct the eye.

Misting & More (Studio Calico)
We didn't get much product in this class--basically just what we needed to do the class project. I loved getting the chance to try some techniques I probably wouldn't have tried on my own. I'm not sure if I'll become an ardent mister, but it was fun and I'm happy to say I've done it.

Latest & Greatest with Basic Grey
Like the SC class, we didn't get much more product than was necessary to complete the class projects. The class went through 4 layouts (I think), but I only made about 2.5 of them. I learned more technique in this class than in the others. I think I'm going to invest in glue dots.

In conclusion, I had an awesome weekend and was sad to drop The Beastie off at the airport this morning. She shared many pictures with me, but this post is already long. We talked about whether we'd go to another CKC, and we both felt like we might, but that we'd wait a few more years. The vendor hall is great if you're on a mission to find something. And the classes are great for getting updated on new products. I'm not sure I need to do either of those things every year though. Maybe I'll change my mind next spring. :)