This past weekend, Caro and I attended our first crop and it was fantastic fun! We made cards, met new people, deepened our relationships with others, spotted words in songs for raffle tickets, participated in swaps, played bingo, drank wine and margaritas and stayed up way too late. It was a blast. The New Jersey Crop Weekends are highly recommended. We’re very lucky in that they are at a hotel about 20 minutes from my house so it’s easy to get there – that’s not to say that we didn’t stay over – remember the margaritas? 🙂

We took part in the Secret Pal swap. The idea is that you shower your pal with gifts over the weekend and there’s a reveal on Saturday evening when you find out the wonderful person who was spoiling you. My pal was Jill. She definitely was extravagant and took the showering almost literally! One of the first gifts was a copy of Cardmaking & Papercraft, the UK’s number one crafting magazine. This confused me rather since I knew that Caro was gifting Jill and I hadn’t heard any other British accents – I later found out that Jill found this at Barnes and Noble. Anyway, I flipped through the magazine (didn’t want to waste crafting time and I can read it this week) and found an article on gold gilding. Well, I didn’t have the products but it did inspire me to take the tree stamp that I’d picked up at Michael’s and heat emboss it in gold.

The tree stamp is from Hero Arts – I posted a card with it last week. The text is from Stampin’ Up!’s The Newborn King stamp set. I really love the typeface and the simplicity of the card.I used whisper white for the stamping and matting and adhered it to a whisper white base. I like the white layer on the white card base – it looks rather classy. This is definitely a card that I’m going to be sending myself. So apologies in advance if anyone reading this gets a spoiler on their Christmas card!