Scrapbooking really is everywhere...including Royal Carribean's cruise ship fleet. On deck 5 of our ship was a promenade of small shops--a perfumery, a liquor store, a fine jewelry store, a casual jewelry store, and a gift shop for acquiring t-shirts, postcards and other RC items. On the 6th deck was the photo gallery, where they sold camera supplies (and cameras) and displayed the shipboard photos that were available for purchase. I was impressed with the quality of the photos taken by the many ship photographers and we bought several, (like this one of us as we were waiting on the pier in Cozumel) even tho the prices were a little more than normal. The photo gallery also offered memory card to disk services and photo printing services.
The very first day, as soon as we cleared US waters, I made a beeline to the shops on deck 5 to check them out. (The shops are only open when the boat is in international waters.) Of course, my first thought was how wonderful it would be to have a scrapbook store on board--but no such luck.
Fast forward to the fourth day (our final full day). I took the days schedule with me to breakfast and was thrilled to see that RC was offering 2 classes on scrapbooking that day. I attended the morning class and found it a bit dull, but plenty suitable for beginners. The woman conducting the class was Angela. She showed an 8.5x11 album of perhaps 12 cruise ship page possibilities and each person attending recieved about 6 ocean-related diecuts and two pieces of cardstock. She had a few small thumb punches, the largest collection of deco scissors I think I have ever seen, some templates, tons of pens (non-archival) and glue sticks. Her handouts for the class included two pages of tips and ideas.
I heard several participants indicate that they use the larger CM albums so they didn't complete the pages as shown but for the most part, the other attendees received the project ideas enthusiastically. The class lasted about 15 minutes and then participants were free to work on the project for 30 minutes. It was very interesting to sit back and watch the others. I really had to hold back...everythng in me wanted to turn loose and really share about scrapbooking. The scrapbooking that goes beyond just having a place to store your photos...the projects shown covered only the very basic 5W journaling. There's so much more. You probably know how deep this runs in me. It was almost stressful to sit back and not intrude with my over-zealous desire to share what I love so much.
After the class I spoke with the teacher and found out that she is an "avid scrapper" and she teaches exclusively for Royal Carribean. She taught on a different ship the day before, got off it in Cancun, drive down to Cozumel and got on our ship to teach. She would be "catching a ride" with us to Galveston and would disembark our ship in the morning and board another ship at Port Galveston in the afternoon. What a whirlwind!! What a cool way to teach...it made me want to give some of those scrapbooking cruises a second look.
On the flight home the next day I was talking to Joal about all this and he suggested combining my two loves--the beach and scrapbooking--and call it "Beachbooking". Wouldn't that just be blissful? I have heard there are some stores on the eastern seaboard that offer beach retreats...maybe that would be a little more doable.
I thought it was really cool that RC offered scrapbooking classes. If ever there was a perfect time to explore a new hobby, it's on a cruise vacation. Afterall, you can only go so far with towel-folding and your body can only stand a finite number of massages. Why not scrapbook?
I took 80 keepable photos and we purchased a dozen or so shipboard photos. I have requested a compilation disk of all the photos taken by the man in our group who was the acting company photographer. Before it's all said and done, I'll proabably have a book of 30 to 40 pages. I am thinking of assembling them all in an 8x8 album. I'm having them printed in 5x7 and will be doing the journaling by computer.
Each member and spouse of our group was given a 12x12 RC leatherette folio containing 2 8x10 photos--one of our group on formal night and one of the ship. It's a very nice photographer's presentation folio so I'll probably leave those 2 photos in it and display it on the mantle for a while.
I captured all sorts of memorabilia--our shipboard passes, copies of our passports, daily schedules, menus, sand and shells from the beach, napkins, wristbands, etc. Lots of stuff to work into our book...I can't wait to scrap it all.
I feel pretty confident that we'll be going again next year and I have volunteered to produce several items for the group that would have made things easier on us. I'm thinking about the possibility of assembling a readymade scrapbook (or a kit) for the other couples in our group or perhaps teaching a class of my own for our group.
Ideas...ideas abound when I am feeling "up".
Later...
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