I am enjoying a leisurely Sunday afternoon.
Cisco and Annie are in the next room (the bedroom) watching Wall-E on the laptop, and I am here, in my workspace, getting my ideas together for my next workshop this coming Friday morning (Dec. 5th) in Barcelona. But more on that later. I have to finish my "catch-up" post that I started last night:
Just following the airing of "Karakia", the Catalan culture+gastronomy tv program that I appeared on (see the previous post) early October, I went up to France, together with Roser from Scrap House, to a city near Montpellier to attend Celine Navarro and Karine Cazenave-Tapie's "entreartistes" mixed media and scrapbooking event. It had been awhile since I'd experienced a road-trip in any shape or form, so despite the "madrugon" of having to get up at 4am in order to drive the 3 1/2 hours to Montpellier in time for the morning session, I was pleased to be going--armed with my thermos full of caffene (and Roser with her respective can of Coke), we fired off into the eventual sunrise and the time passed quickly. It was a Thursday-Friday event, with 6 workshops over the 2 days. And as I soon realised, our event was quite a bit smaller than their Montpellier event the following Saturday-Sunday with some 60 attendees. That was to our benefit, as it was much more intimate, with lots of time and opportunities to chat with Celine, Karine and the other participants about the wonderful world of scrapbooking and mixed media, on the French side of the border. The workshops were well organized, the kit designs were fun, with a couple of nice techniques thrown in; the two of them as workshop presenters were fun and easy-going, and the general atmosphere of the 2 days was very pleasant and sociable. The evening of the first day, we all went out for a supper meal in Frontignan, which was good and the company enjoyable. I got a kick out of being able to speak French after so many years of not using it. Well "being able" is a far stretch, as most of the time I was saying "uhhhhhhhhhhh...." as I tried to thrash my way through the jungle of Catalan and Spanish vocabulary overpowering my little pea brain!!
At any rate, general opinion of the experience: enjoyable. I'd encourage anyone thinking of going. If only for the experience of comparing how differently the French scrapbookers work in comparison to those here in Spain. I mean, I'd probably chalk it up to the French scrappers having a couple more years experience over their Spanish counterparts, but it was interesting to note how--as a rule--most participants were attentive during the technique demo-ing, but then immediately went to work on their projects, completely doing their own thing and making the project their own, as opposed to reproducing their original design...And seeing that was quite refreshing! Here's the group photo shot:
and here is one of the workshop projects that I happened to complete (the rest of them I think I just resigned to finishing them up at home!)
Lisa, let me know if the colour is right on this layout! I think I got it but I might be way wrong! It's easy to fix if it's really wonky.
