A Scrap Store Pilgrimmage

I finally managed to take 2 days off work this week (which was better than none at all) and my sister and I had a great time on our scrapbooking store pilgrimmage. On day 1, we visited Scrap Tease in Carleton Place, as well as Tomorrow's Treasures in Smiths Falls. And we hit the Dollarama on the way back home, 'cause they really do have some cool stuff including some fabric covered brads and really nice ribbon.

On Day 2, we went to The Scrapbox on Canotek Road in the east end of Ottawa, and then drove round big-box mall parking lots in Barrhaven looking for (and finally finding!) A Fine Mess. We ran out of steam after visiting Michaels (where my sister only bought cutter blades and I didn't buy anything) and discovered to our extreme surprise, that we actually have a saturation point when it comes to scrap shopping! Admittedly, it took 2 days, six stores and an undisclosed "investment" to reach said saturation point, but it is kind of comforting to know that we can't, in fact, scrap shop for hours, days on end. Because if we could, then we'd surely go broke.

We took lots of pictures inside the stores and outside the stores and lots of kind people offered to take pictures of us together which was really cool. Here's one of the both of us outside Scrap Tease:


We had actually driven away from the store when my dear sister came up with the brilliant idea of documenting our pilgrimmage with photos (duh, we are scrapbookers after all) so we turned back and re-created the moment!

We have lots of other pictures but most of them are on her camera. When she gets back from California she'll email me hers and I'll email her mine and we'll do layouts and I'll post them here.

I can't even remember all the stuff we bought, between the two of us! In terms of new-and-exciting, I got some Prima Paintables flowers, and the paintable patterned paper as well; some of the new core-dinations cardstock (with the contrasting colour core); some Stickles which I have totally fallen in love with; Thickers; brads, buttons and flowers in colours I was running out of; some hockey patterned paper including some Senators paper, yay!; a template to make flourishes; some white chipboard alphas meant to be coloured/painted ... and much, much more, which I just can't think of right now.

We had several other area stores on our list, but it just would have been impossible to hit them all. We thoroughly enjoyed the ones we visited. Each one had something slightly different than the other; and each one had new product. Scrap Tease had a nice selection of French products. Tomorrow's Treasures is the prettiest scrap store I've ever seen, and a very nice coffee shop next door. The Scrapbox had the weirdest location, but the most stock, and Jenn was by far the friendliest host. A Fine Mess had the least stock, but it is very well chosen, and very nicely displayed; despite the fact that the lady working there told us they are an art store and only carry a small stock of scrapbooking products, it seemed to us that at least 50% of the stock if not more was in fact for scrapbooking, which was fine by us! Michaels had a bunch of new stock in - including a new SEI line with tons of embellishments.

Now that I have all these new toys to play with, all I want to do is scrap! But, I had to go back to work today, and tonight, I had to get ready for a garage sale. Hopefully the garage sale will go well tomorrow; with any luck I will recoup my - ahem - scrapbook shopping "investments" and end the week in a financially neutral position, lol!