More TCC Gushing

The Creative Connection Event has influenced me and I figured I might as well apologize now if I get annoying.  Not that I would every be annoying to anyone other than my husband, who already tunes out half of what I say.  He calls it a coping mechanism; I call it rude.  What was I talking about?  Oh yeah, here is my humble attempt to get it all out of my system and into the blogosphere.

My Peeps (Did I really just say that?)

I met so many talented women at TCC and I haven’t given them their proper due.  Until Now!  Let’s start at the beginning…

Wednesday night thanks to making some connections via face book, and a chance encounter in a hotel lobby, a pre-conference dinner was had and I was able to meet these lovely ladies!

Carol Van Zandt	Erin of 123 Cute As Can Be
Heather of The Sewing Loft	Karen of The Graphics Fairy
Lisa of Wallflower Art Boutique	Shellie of Stone Water Productions

  Each one brought a unique perspective to the night’s conversations but more importantly when you walked into a room, or stood outside a class or panel, waiting for it to begin, it was nice to have a friendly face to say, Hey how’s it going?  What class did you just take?  How did your pitch go? 

The chances to connect with fellow creative types was literally around every corner and these are the additional standouts who helped make this such an enriching event for me! 

	Shalene Ziemann of Hazy Shade Baby and Hazy Shade Primitives pictured left Tina Kim aka Knitting Contessa  A fellow Missourian! Xio Raman at A Styled Fete
	Kathy Hester author of The Vegan Slow Cooker pictured left Marilyn Scott-Water  aka The Toymaker  pictured left

There were other friendly faces, shared moments, and exchanged cards too numerous to list!  I have new blog reading material for months!

The Classes

My first official class was made up of two panels on Self-Publishing and Working With a Sponsor…  They were both very informative and despite the numerous photo ops I didn’t get a single one…sorry.

Next up was Lovely Ladies, Layers and Lines with Jenny and Aaron.  This was a fun class and I enjoyed learning about gesso and how they create their art.  Here is my Lovely Lady, I think I’ll call her Enid.

Ain’t she a sassy doll?  From a distance I’m not completely distracted by my mistakes, like the blended grey hair I created on her part, the missing curve of the bridge of her nose, or her really strong shoulders.  She must be wearing a power suit.

	I also picked up these stickers to play around with, with the kids.
Friday I started my day with Traci Bautista, artist extraordinaire.

I was draw to this class by the sheer color and fullness of Traci’s images.  It promised a LOT of info and I have to admit I was skeptical that we’d really cover that much.  But we did!  Then I looked at my sheets afterwards and wow, there was even more, plus the class included access to Traci’s online class.  Awesome.

My last class was with Brenda Schweder who I’d met while roaming around the Marketplace.

This was really one of those classes I was so excited about and when I realized how hard it was to get the curves in the metal perfect, well, I wished Nate was there.  Where I’ve got patience to deal with Essie’s weird catatonic moments he’s got patience to carefully and perfectly bend wires.

    Still I think my bracelets didn’t turn out too bad!  Shalene was also in this class and had bottle cap charms she shared with everyone! Thanks! P.S. I cheated and used the time in class to create a caged item.

Just because I think it’s cool, I’m in a couple of pictures here,(looking horrible-truly my profile is just icky) and a portion of this video is when I was taking part in a make and take with The Crochet Dude!

The amount of swag given away was truly staggering and there are a number of great giveaways out there, including this one, this one, and this one.  Plus I’m pretty sure that Heather at the The Sewing Loft is planning a giveaway for Monday! 

To wrap this up, and get back to actual creating, I have to say this was such a rewarding experience.  From the Pitch Slams (which I’ll have to share about another time) to the Cupcake Farewell, my spirit has been rejuvenated and I’m ready to take on the world!