The fun begins ...

After we set sail the group got-together before dinner to meet Tim, Wendy, Jim, Mario, Wendy's hubby Rick, Keychain (Karen) & Michelle, and Jaci & Jan from ScrapMap. We received our tote bags and our name tags.

Inside the name tag pouch was our little booklet with our schedule of events:

After our little "meet & greet", we went for our first dinner at 6pm in the Rhapsody in Blue dining room at Table 300. We met some wonderful ladies at our table: Eileen from NYC, Barb 1, Margaret, Barb 2 (I was going to put their last initials, but they're both W's! LOL), Mary Ann, Sandra, Wendy, Sue, myself & Andrea. We also met our wonderful waiter, Robert, who we referred to all week as "Charlie", because he called us his angels, and our Assistant Waiter, Jude. We all introduced ourselves and became fast friends.

Margaret mentioned that she had signed up for the bottle of wine each day, thinking she'd be able to sit on her balcony each night and enjoy some nice wine. Unfortunately, she was informed that she could only have the bottle during dinner, so she was very generous and shared her bottle with us.

Dinner lasted a full 2 hours, and we were exhausted and ready to go to our cabin. We were so excited to see our first towel animal ... a turtle!

Our cabin steward, Alester, put Andrea's sunglasses on him, and he was just adorable!

The next day we woke up early because we were told the market place would open at 8am. We arrived just before 8, and were not too surprised to see a line already waiting to get in! We were in Group D, so our first class was with Wendy at 11am, which gave us plenty of time to shop and bring our goodies to the room.

Well, let me just say that the market place on this cruise had at least twice the amount of stuff (maybe 3x) than the Alaska cruise, and I spent a pretty penny on that one, so I knew I was in big trouble! LOL Mario gave us raffle tickets for every $20 we spent, and I'm trying to black out how much I spent. I tried to get all my shopping done in one trip. Yeah, right.

I was so excited about Wendy's class. I had never heard of her before the chatter of this cruise, so when I checked out her blog, she had an instant fan. Her art has the cool distressed, grunge look like Tim, but with a feminine flair.

We received these pre-stamped aprons, grunge paper with some pre-stamped flowers, and lots of other supplies. Wendy taught us how to make her awesome flowers and we decorated our aprons. Although grunge paper is safe to go through the wash, she gave us pins to attach our flowers to our aprons to save on the wear & tear. This is a photo of Wendy's apron ... I never attached my flowers because I was having trouble with the metal pieces & the glue.

After Wendy's class, we had a break before our class with Tim at 4pm. And, Tim didn't disappoint either. We made these awesome 7-day journals to record our adventures. We used sticky back canvas to decorate the covers (Tim's crew pre-printed the maps for us which we colored with Distress Inks.). We also got these cool paper bags that are only about half-an-inch thick. Perfect to slip in a tag. At this point, Tim turns on his iPod to the tune of the Mexican Hat Dance ... and Keychain, Tim & Michelle passed out these awesome stamps so we could stamp the tags and fill in the details later. In this 1-1/2 hour class, he must've played that song 5-6 times, each time handing out great stuff, with our cheers getting louder & louder each time! What fun!

After class, Wendy popped in, and I had the perfect chance to get a photo with both of my favorite designers! This is turning out to be another fabulous cruise!