Question: I came across your website while doing a Google search for information. Some friends and I are interested in hosting a weekend of scrapbooking/cardmaking, complete with food, cropping space, vender area and classes. Do you have any advice on this? Or, can you direct me to a person/website that might be able to help? I’ve attended these type of events, so I have that as background. Thanks!
Answer: That sounds exciting. I have attended and helped to plan many of those. I wrote an article a while back that gives some great tips on planning and what to include. You can read it here. That article also has websites of groups that meet in your area. Some of them actually plan the whole thing and others just help out. I would suggest deciding if you want to plan the whole thing yourself and put all the work into it or if you want to enjoy yourself more and let someone else do all the planning.
If you are the one doing all the planning with some friends, maybe go through the list in my article and decide together how you want things to go. Then put certain people in charge of certain aspects of your getaway. I love the idea of having a vendor area and classes. Have somone in charge of the vendor areas and someone else in charge of classes. The person in charge of classes can do the research on getting someone to come teach or maybe each member of your group could be in charge of teaching one card class or something (this might help cut down on costs).
I haven’t found really any good resources on planning your own retreat, but I found if you visit some of the websites I listed in the article, you can come up with some great ideas for your weekend. Have fun!