everyone thank you for coming. I'm very pleased that the governor is here with Suzanne Young, his secretary of the agency of administration and Adam Greshan who is the commissioner of the Department of Finance and Management. So thank you all very much for coming and thank you all for coming on a very cold morning. It was 13 below at my house in Hardwick so it was pretty cold here too I understand from what Suzanne was saying so thank you again for coming. We're going to be focusing our conversation this morning on the budget and so this is going to be a combination of questions from the digger staff and from the audience and our readership rather is a better way to put it although there might be questions from you in the audience here too. We had that happen last week. So governor I wanted to start with an easy softball for you. That's what we like. How would you describe your relationship with lawmakers this year? Well thank you Ann. First of all thank you very much for inviting us all here today. It's great to be here at the History Center as well as providing bagels and coffee. Thank you for that. We're enjoying a new fresh clean slate this year. I think it's refreshing in many ways when we look across the country and see all the dysfunction especially in DC and all the controversy that we took upon ourselves. I said that we have to change our approach. We're going to do it differently. We're going to try and do a lot more listening a lot more collaborating and so far so good. We've been well received in the committees, treated with respect and civility is something that is important to me and I think it's important to our future to our kids to be better role models and it all starts with each and every one of us. So I have a role to play in that to acknowledge that and so I think again we've been it's cordial, respectful and I hope it continues but there's always you know there's always controversy. There's always turmoil. It doesn't matter what administration it is, what legislative body it is, there's always tension, natural tension and that's okay but it's how we debate, how we choose to debate each other and how we choose to do that is really what's in coming upon each and every one of us. You want it? Sure, I'd be happy to add to that. I think the governor has just spoken about has actually already played out in terms of budget adjustment. We went into the budget adjustment process with some ideas for the legislature on how to use the surplus one time money that we accumulated to make a start on blood testing on some of our cyber security needs and came down some of the pension liabilities and that was well received. We've worked together and if things go well this week in the Senate budget adjustment process, I think you'll see some success from working together. Great, thank you very much. Okay, Governor, this is a little harder than this question. We've dipped our toe in the water. You took issue last month with a media's focus on what you called small and specific new taxes in your budget proposal. If you did not think this was a significant break from previous years, why did you issue your letter in the middle of the last legislative session stating your opposition to a list of bills somewhere similarly small and specific taxes, including any cigarette tax? Yeah, fair, fair question. And, you know, when I when I talked about our list of accomplishments this year, and maybe some view of changing a position, it was more of an acknowledgement and somewhat of a change in tactic. In some respects, I said why ran my first time out? I said that we needed a correction in Vermont that we're spending beyond our means. I thought we needed to live in our means. I didn't believe that we needed to raise any tax or fees to do it. We presented budgets that I thought would accomplish that. So we and I was steadfast in that I didn't put a line in the sand and said, you know, no more tax and fees now for these two years. And I thought it was needed. And I thought it was it benefited the state. As a result, I think we saw there was economic growth without raising tax and fees. I think it gave Vermont a break individually and the businesses as well. And I think we're better off for it. So during the campaign, I was asked about whether we're going to be raising any fees or whether we're going to consider any new taxes. And I said consistently that I wasn't putting a line the same that acknowledge that we went through the first two years and we may have to change. But it would be a high bar as well that we weren't going to just automatically increase fees across the across the board, or look to increase as a knee jerk reaction to anything. But but there would be consideration of that. So it wasn't I don't think it should have been a surprise when this year came out. One of the surprises might have been with e cigarettes that I said that we needed to I thought this was a public health issue that particularly with our kids, that we should be raising the tax accordingly to prevent more use amongst our youth as well. We looked for opportunities to to to modernize our tax code, particularly with the way fair decision and the island online sales tax that there were other areas of opportunity to make sure that it was we had some parodies that within the with the Brooks and mortar businesses in our downtowns that that we brought that in line. So we found some opportunities there. So across the board, I wouldn't say it was a drastic change, more of a transition. And and so again, I think that will that will all play out. I believe that for monitors of well served. We still are living within our means, so to speak, but we have found some areas that that we could bring in more revenue. The bottom line is that we are seeing more revenue, even after again, two years of no tax and fees for for the most part, we're seeing more revenue come into the bottom line. Unfortunately, the frustration is that we have some upward pressures as well. So a lot of that that surplus that money on the bottom line has been used up in some of those upward pressures. Thank you. Good morning. I just wanted to remind some listeners with more active memories. I remember when we presented the budget last year, one of the questions we got almost immediately was, are there no taxes fees and our response then and it is the same today is, you know, last year, the year before we hit the pause, but there was no religious or spiritual objection to raising fees or taxes, but they were our last resort. And I think that's true today. We've had two years to look over the landscape. We've had a couple of years to look at all the programs we run within government to speak actively with our agency secretaries and commissioners within the departments. And so we know where the pressures are, and we know where the pressures are not. And so I think what you see this year are decisions made that reflect those areas that we believe need some guidance. But you know, we said that and it's still true today that, you know, raising taxes or fees are a last resort, but there's no spiritual objection to that. Thank you. Spirituality and taxes in one sentence. Hugh Williams from Shelburne has a question pertaining to the 2018 tax reform law enacted mid year, which resulted in the removal of any medical deductions on the Mont State taxes. While impacting people, volley just this change particularly impacts those in our senior community, who encountered major medical outlays. Excuse me. voluntary charitable contributions were granted a limited tax credit and yet non voluntary medical expenses received no deduction and credit. Even the 2019 Vermont Taxpayer Advocates report points out that there is a small but vulnerable population with high medical expenses relative to their just a gross income, an area that a taxpayer cannot plan for or reduce, and suggests a proposed resolution and mandatory income tax statute to include a medical expenses deduction and credit. Going forward, what do you plan to do to ensure the tax mitigation in this area is accomplished? Well, I'll take a stab at that first and then maybe let others speak to that directly. You know, there was a lot going on over the last two years, particularly on the federal level with tax changes. And we tried to keep up. That's why we we made some changes to the the income tax as a result from Vermont income tax. So so that we could maintain again, fairness for Vermont taxpayers. This was an area I believe that was maybe overlooked. And particularly in Wake Robin, we've heard a lot of some of the concerns there. And I believe they're founded. And we'll have to take a look and see what we can do. I know our Commissioner of taxes is is looking at that at this point, because we want there to be fairness across the board. We saw that in terms of the charitable contributions. I believe what we came up with was unique. I think it was fair. We acknowledged that we have a lot of nonprofits in Vermont. We want there to be some sort of benefit to giving. So that's why we came up with a concept that we did to maintain that. And we'll see whether it plays out. We won't know that probably until till this time around, maybe the next year as well. And trying to maintain that because we we want to make sure that they're important to our to Vermont to the way we do business, our tolerance, our compassion for others. And we want to make sure that we maintain that. But the the medical the medical expenses for that, that population is something that is concerning to me. And I know that we're we're looking at that as we speak. Do you have anything to add to that, Suzanne? No, we are looking at that. As the governor pointed out, there was a lot going on with the federal tax reform. Our tax department acted very quickly and very in depth in terms of coming up with a plan in early February to offset the impacts on working families. And again, there are deductions that have gone away that have had impacts. And I think, as the governor pointed out, the tax commissioner has brought that to our attention in his in conversation with legislators and looking to see if there is a solution to that. Great. Thank you. This question is from Robert Anderson of Bristol. And he wants to know many, many Vermont seniors on social security have difficulty with increasing property taxes. Would Governor Scott's administration be willing to consider change in the way the education tax adjustment is calculated? So as to exempt some of the social security earnings, for example, up to $20,000 from household income, this would help many retirees to keep their homes. Thank you. Yeah, there's there's many ways to answer that in some respects. I'm always willing to listen to to a different approach to how we collect our education taxes. So to speak, it's been mostly based on on property taxes. Although this is past session, we did use the sales tax as well to pay for education. But there's a couple of issues. One is that it really does make us it makes us focus on what the real challenges we face in Vermont. And I believe it's about workforce, it's about trying to bring more people into the state. Throughout the campaign, I encountered someone I mentioned at my, and my state of the state address, I believe, or maybe my budget address that someone had remarked, we don't need more taxes in this state. We need more taxpayers. And I thought that was simplistic in some ways, but true. What we need are more people paying in. We have a stagnant population, somewhat of a decline last year. We have more people have more people dying than being born in the state. So we need to encourage more families. We need to be more attractive to families and particularly those seeking opportunities to come to the state. And that's why we're focusing on that to spread some of the some of the burden across all taxpayers. So as we age, you know, we have more of an aging population. So we have more people that have low income, maybe higher value in property. So I understand their pain. And I'm willing to look at that. But we need to look at our whole system as well. We spend a lot for education in Vermont. It's one of it's the the largest state expenditure in the state government, about $1.7 billion. So we have to do things differently. As I've stated before, I believe that we need to to look more in developing the foundation of our kids. We need to spend more in early care and learning. I think that the cradle to career concept makes a lot of sense to try to give them that foundation so that we can provide for them and provide for a career path for them in their future as well in career and technical education as well. So that cradle to career concept is something that is near and dear to my heart and something that I think is doable and we can make we can have the best the best education system in the country as a result, bring more families in, spread the risk and the burden out more amongst our taxpayers. But if we if we do all this at the same time, I'm more than willing to take a look at at ways we can reduce the burden on our on our senior population. I don't think it's fair to take this into the deep into property tax mechanism. But I you know, I would say I think our tax commissioner last year said that there's each individual property owner has to do over 20 calculations just to determine his or her property tax rate. And the more complexity we put into it, the more calculations that have to be done and the more separated you become from the basic decision of a school budget translating into a property tax rate. So I would go back to the governor's original comment that the issue is not our property tax rate system, but more how much we're spending and the growth in the school spending. So I think that's really where we have to concentrate not making our mechanism more complex. On that topic, just a follow up question. What initiatives are you, you know, what steps are you taking this year to address public education costs? Is there wasn't emphasis on that in your budget address? And that's something that you really concentrate on the first biennium. And I wondered what what follow up there is being taken on that? Well, there was a bit of resistance to some of the proposals we've made in the first two years. I don't and I get it. I understand that we we have to focus on areas where we can work together. I'm looking again at at ways that we can enhance our education system, particularly with early care and learning problem more with child care at this point in time. But I think it's it's within we know that child's brain develops immensely fast zero to five. So we need to get to them earlier or provide for more education, more help in that regard as well with child care. I think that that would help in terms of the workforce and be more attractive to families coming to our state. So trying to to to enhance more career technical education, I think is something again that's important to me as well to focus on on trying to expand into early care and learning is something that's important and and trying to find you know reallocating the resources within what we're spending today I think is important. We spend again a lot of money for education and and so if we can find opportunities to reallocate those those resources within the cradle to career approach, I believe that we'll have a a great system, one of the best in the country and that we can highlight and showcase so that we can use that as a as a mechanism to attract more people to the state and help again in terms of of spreading that risk amongst many and I think that that's really important. We need more people. When I said before we we don't need more taxes. We need more taxpayers. It's so true and and when you look at at at how the effect of one person coming into the system and how that the ripple effect of that across the tax system it's truly remarkable how one person can make a real difference in bringing more revenue into the state. Thank you very much. Peter Crawford from Brighport and Martha Hicks Poffitt from Wells both have questions about the clean water programs and come on Martha would like you to explain how you plan to pay for clean water and Peter Crawford wants to know why there's so little mention in your clean water funding plan of the huge he says all caps problem of combined sewer overflows that put over 35 million gallons of sewage tainted storm water in our lakes mostly like Champlain and rivers in 2018. Is it because separating sewer and storm drains is so expensive that it's not possible to fund? The this where to start in terms of focusing on cleaning up our waterways streams and lakes is something that we're committed to. In fact we've had an increase of spending a dramatic increase of spending over the last few years. We're committed to that and finding ways to address that I think the legislature has an interest we have an interest we put a proposal together that we think makes a lot of sense. We have a dedicated source with using part of the estate tax and doing so we think that makes a lot of sense and so we're moving forward I think again this is something that will work out with the legislature but we're all pulling in the same direction. We may have different approaches on on how to do it but but I think we're all committed to to the appropriate level of spending. In terms of the sewer storm separation projects we for the last 20 or 30 years we've had what's called the CSO program and this because a lot of communities have have were combined sewer and storm so we're trying to separate them at this point in time up to the years not a lot in that regard it costs a lot of money to do so but then you know what do you do after as well once you separate the two which is important because we want to make sure that that we're just treating the the septic portion of that the effluent in our treatment plants to take the burden off of that but then we have the storm water discharge as well we want to treat that to that's important to do and we're seeing you know with climate change climate change is real we're seeing it you know we see the dramatic effects of that right here in Vermont right now all the significant snowfall we've seen this year alone I think we've had six or seven feet of snow and it's in its entirety but we've lost almost that much in some areas as well and we've had significant rain events during the winter so our climate is changing dramatically which further puts burden on the storm water systems that we have in the place which further burdens some of the the treatment facilities so we we have a long ways to go again we're committed to doing as much as we can in the meantime in trying to separate storm and sewer but but at the same time treating some of the storm storm systems with storm water discharge ponds and different concepts as we as we move forward I think we've we've committed to about fifty million dollars and Sam can go into maybe a little bit more detail on this but about fifty million dollars in this year's budget alone for storm water thank you governor the clean water act is I think in its third year of implementation now and with the when the scott administration started back two years ago in january we were hearing a lot of questions about what are we spending all this money on there is this money going and treasurer peers that have suggested a bridge plan using capital dollars primarily for the first two years we very much appreciated that the clean water board has been working with the clean water initiative which is a combination of employees from agriculture commerce and de c to really handle on where is the money coming where's the money coming from as the governor pointed out there's forty eight million dollars in this budget of either state or federal money that passes through the state's offers and that doesn't count the federal dollars and the private dollars that are going into clean water that we don't have a way to count the clean water initiative has done a masterful job of pulling together all the pieces of cards into one budget and we have proposed what is actually I believe fourth funding stream into the clean water fund this year we have about two million dollars a year coming from the students on bottle deposits we have about five million dollars coming from a surcharge in the property transfer tax we have another 10 to 12 million in the capital bill plus the governor's proposal to direct some of the estate tax towards the clean water fund alone so we're making great progress and if anybody really wants to see the work that's gone on in the state in every locality the the department of environmental conservation is clean water initiative website is so granular it will tell you projects within your area that have been funded with the clean water fund and other funds thank you very much at this point I'd like to open it up to the audience I don't know if folks have questions they want to ask me yes please governor based on their economic benefits provided to the rural water economy by maintaining our trouser program and your state goals of improving that economy through initiatives such as bull red what steps are you going to take to work with the department of fish and wildlife to keep the Southbury Fish and Wildlife Association when the fish and wildlife department came to us this year they're facing a deficit of about a half a million dollars as you probably are well aware the licenses number of licenses are decreasing the costs of protecting our our natural resources and that program and and maintaining our wardens and so forth enforcing the laws are increasing so we are looking for opportunities to to fill that and one of the the steps one of the proposals that came forward was to raise the costs of licenses hunting and fishing licenses I didn't think that was a good idea because I felt as though with the decreasing amount of licenses sold that we're putting more burden on those who are just utilizing them I I know myself I buy my hunting and fishing license every year I think it's important to do and I think that we have to find ways to increase the number of licensed sales and I don't think raising the price of a license accomplishes that so when we we ask for further ideas on how we could fill that gap that half a million dollar operating a gap they talked about the Salisbury fish hatchery now the Salisbury fish hatchery for those who who are aware is one of our oldest facilities it's it's facing a capital expenditure in the very near future of about 12 to 15 million dollars top grade and it's it's it's nutrient rich in that area and it's discharging into an impaired stream so there's a need for a capital investment now they're also saying that even with the capital investment of 12 to 15 million dollars that that may not cure the problem so my suggestion was there's four or five employees at the Salisbury facility and can take into account that we had Roxbury Roxbury fish hatchery which was destroyed by Irene was it's just being built as we speak we had a groundbreaking there where it's going to be another year year and a half before that's put online but when you take into account the production in Roxbury Roxbury produces anticipates producing about 75,000 fish Salisbury produces about 25,000 fish so when I do the simple math on on the costs associated with Salisbury and and the looking into the future with that capital investment it makes more sense for me from my standpoint to put more resources into the existing existing facilities that we have including Roxbury so Roxbury is going to produce three times as many fish at a reduced operating cost in Salisbury and when you compare it to some of the other fish hatcheries throughout the state again it pales in comparison we we produce about 1.3 million fish out of our fish hatcheries every single year so while Salisbury very important it's it's the smallest of all and the most the most costly so I'm just looking for opportunities to do things more efficiently I believe that again we've been without Roxbury those 75,000 fish over the last eight years since Irene and when we put that back on the line we'll actually be increasing the number of fish produced in Vermont I'm very impressed by your fish numbers you really have arms around that one you were ready it's important you know it really is it's important to the the sporting community and and I just thought it was important for me to take out to take a look at what what we were actually doing I certainly don't want to put push put our outdoor community at risk the sportsmen at risk and I don't believe this doesn't so but but I'm always open to the ideas we also use you know over the years I was chair of the of the institutions committee and and for years I advocated and worked with the Walleye Association to try and use capital dollars fought for that over a number of years and we were able to include that in our capital budget every single year and they do it privatized they do it themselves and they do it at a at a reduced cost in some respects so there may be other opportunities as well for us to work with the sporting community to make sure that we we highlight benefit and expand in that regard because we're known for good fishing in Vermont and we want to maintain that thank you do we have other questions governor and maybe all of you what I'm wondering with you know as you mentioned you need new taxpayers one thing that you're doing for that or you know I'm like what are you doing about the world internet and also one of the things I moved here two years ago and I wasn't able to take advantage of the home set if you have new homeowners coming into the state you know they're going to have a higher tax than those who've been here for a while is there any way you can reduce that tax or make it more advantageous well again we're looking for a lot of opportunities any opportunity we can to be more attractive again I think some of the some of the tax burdens that's why I'm so resistant to to adding to the tax burden in the state because I believe that we're competing with other states for for people for the workforce and and and so forth so we're we came up with a couple of concepts working with the legislature as you might remember there was the the remote worker program that that offered that's just coming online now that offered $10,000 per person to come to the state and we received our share this was a legislative initiative that I thought I wasn't sure how it's going to work out but certainly we have 3,000 inquiries about that one program alone we have enough money for about 25 people so it's not going to satisfy the need but but we received a share of criticism as well about from people in the state saying you know that's great and you're trying to help these people come to from up what about me what are you doing for me how are you helping me out how about sending me a check for $10,000 I mean we got that a lot and I understand that but but again when you do the math and you look at the ripple effect when you when you have that one person that can work remotely and buys a home and pays their taxes and sales taxes and so forth and so on it only takes a couple of years to pay that back so it's a the return on investment is pretty good so from from that standpoint we're looking for other initiatives to bring people in what was the first part of your specifically well the rural internet oh yeah that's right I lost that part so that's important obviously there have been a couple of other couple of other governors who have made a commitment by a certain period of time to to have you the cell service of broadband I have not made that commitment but but I think it's important to our state we and the reason it hasn't been accomplished is it's expensive but we are putting money in the connectivity fund this year we think that that will be beneficial we are proposing to to have some beta funding for communities that that don't have any in there in their communities and and have a plan that they want to put forward we want to help them in that that respect and again we're looking forward to working with the legislature find other opportunities so that we can expand in that area yeah just specifically Lee the the governor mentioned the connectivity initiative and most of our effort in fact virtually all our effort this year in the budget is to work with both providers and with end users on that famous last mile which is so challenging so the there is just under a million dollars in the governor's proposed budget for the connectivity initiative which would be targeted most of it towards providers and sending them to bring capital and expertise to bear in rural communities there's also a small amount of money that is going to municipalities or or towns to help them devise plans to become connected and as the governor mentioned a little earlier we're also ceding a revolving loan fund to work with Vita that will provide loans to providers again to try to incent them and make it economically worthwhile for them to roll out broadband into rural communities so yes the promise I think very smartly has not been made that will be universal broadband but we are putting our money where we think the need is and that is one of the major needs in Vermont super well it's it's the witching hours approaching I think it's 849 so unless do we have any other questions oh Anne has a question thanks Governor as you probably know that you were probably going to see a minimum wage bill this year is there any minimum wage that you would support that minimum wage increase well first of all the question is about minimum wage and whether that I would support any increase in that first of all I want all Vermonters to make more money that's my goal as well so we're looking common goals I want Vermont to be more prosperous I want Vermonters to make more money I just am very concerned about the rural areas of our state particularly the eastern part of our state we share a border I don't know if some of you have heard but we share a border with New Hampshire New Hampshire is known for low taxes low no income tax no sales tax no corporate tax that I know of and but also they have a they have a low minimum wage as well 725 so we're we're in conflict with them all the time I'm just concerned that artificially raising the minimum wage is going to have a detrimental effect on a rural economy and that's something that I would like to avoid we look at I travel the state a lot and I see some of the communities who are struggling tremendously we were up in the northeast kingdom last week up in Essex County and Canaan and Charleston and Island Pond and and it's just you know you get a sentence for what's what's happening to our state so again I want people to make more money we'll see where it goes in legislature I don't think it's I don't believe it's passed out of either body at this point but but I haven't put any lies in the sand it's something that I will contemplate but but again I would just advocate that this could put our rural economy at risk there there are businesses that are just on the edge at this point in time particularly on that that eastern border and that and I believe that that would just force them to either reduce their hours work these mom and pops would just end up working more hours and and I'm not sure that that would benefit all of of the rural rural economy Thank you Karen did you have a question? As you know we're at Dallin's Rural State that means that towns can only do those things that the legislature actually gives them permission to do this year we have a proposal we hope it comes out in no form this week that would set up a pilot project which would allow towns to apply for self-governance authority and to be able to make their own decisions about what happens within their borders affecting their local governance and I'm wondering what your thoughts could be on that Well I appreciate local control at the same time I'm not sure what the ripple effect of that would be certainly willing to take a look I hadn't heard that to be honest with you Karen but we're more than willing to take a look and see what what effect that that would have on the state I'm just not sure at this point in time but I would be happy to take a look anything? No I hadn't hadn't heard about that either so take a look but as the number points out the ripple effects will be interesting Good well anyone else we can call and then have an answer question yet Okay then we'll we'll call but sorry I think your approach to the legislature this year has been much more consistent with the sort of attitude that you brought to the state house as a senator and I guess I'm wondering during the two year during the last two years sort of why did you think taking a more combative approach to the legislature would be more effective? Well again I was I ran on the premise that we didn't need to raise tax and fees and that was you know my approach was I put a line in the sand admittedly put a line in the sand we weren't going to raise tax and fees I was going to resist their veto anything that did and that set up a bit of controversy obviously but but I thought it was important and I think it was beneficial it gave there was a correction that transpire as a result I think it did put more money in the pockets of Vermonters gave them some breathing room and I think the approach while it was it was controversial difficult but I thought it was necessary but now is the time to again reflect do things differently I don't want to I think we need to to be respectful and civil I will say throughout that whole our ordeal as messy as it's a gut as much drama as there might have been I never mistreated anyone I never I always listened I was respectful I was civil and and I tried to follow through on anything that I said so I wouldn't say that it's disrespectful but it was it might have been difficult and it certainly had its share of drama and I guess tax and fees is sort of one of the main issues the other one is really putting a lot of pressure on downward cost of pressure is on education and it seems like that's something you're not doing this here is that because you just think it's useless essentially well again there was a lot of resistance to that and so I acknowledge that and so I have to to put put our resources towards areas that I think that we can accomplish together and I still believe that we spend a tremendous amount for education it's one of the largest cost drivers for our property taxes and some of the the tax pressures we're feeling the burdens that Vermonters are feeling and that's going to be ongoing but I want to be collaborative I want to work together I want to to find a different way to to accomplish the same thing and so I'm just looking for different ways to do that there's always a way if you can if you can agree to the goals then it's just it's just maybe a different approach on how to get there and it's like I think of it as a map when you want to get to point A to from point A to point B we all have different ways of getting there and so we just have to respectfully debate on on how to do that and I'm looking forward to doing that kind of one more question down in Bennington there's been sort of the main news story for us this week has been Matt Smith going to court for illegal magazine is that saying illegal magazine devices I know that piece of the bill was something you didn't really support and I guess I'm just wondering what you think of the situation down there whether you have concerns for the way it's being handled and I feel like that well again it's law so if you violate the law I understand that that's was part of the investigation and he was cited for that and it's the law whether again I signed every single bill so in the end I did support that it wasn't something that was high in my priority list in terms of the magazines but I but it's but it's law now and we'll debate that I think today it's in the Supreme Court so so we'll find out where we go from here thank you so probably where do you stand on your questions? yeah well it won't be a long answer I've you know I I believe in a woman's right to choose I'm pro-choice and I believe that it's got a long ways to go as it works its way through the legislative process I think that what this is a result of some fear on the federal level of what was going to happen to that woman's right to choose and I'm I'm not sure if that's the still the case protecting road v-way is important and codifying that was what that was how was it explained to me in the beginning and I'm supportive of of codifying road v-way now what road v-way means to to each and every one of us is probably an area that's going to be debated and I think that that's what we'll see in the legislature but I think it's for them to work the way through it but but again I believe in a woman's right to choose and I'm I'm pro-choice Governor thank you so much for joining us this morning thank you so much thank you thank you Adam it's great pleasure to have you here thank you thank you all


Live from Bellevue, Washington, it's theCUBE. Covering Smartsheet Engage ATG, brought to you by Smartsheet. Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Smartsheet Engage 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick. We are in Bellevue, Washington, or as I like to call it, not Vegas. Excited to welcome to theCUBE, Robin Sherwood, the senior director of product management at Smartsheet. Hey Robin. Hi, how's it going? Great, this has been a very buzzy morning for Jeff and I here on this set. Lots of people, this event has doubled in size. This is your second annual, so big growth in just a year. There's, I think, Mark Mater, your CEO shared some stats this morning. There are 1,100 companies represented here, customers, from 20 countries. There are more than 50 customer speakers, which is, I think there's no better validating voice than the voice of a customer using the technology. When I was doing some research on Smartsheet, I was looking at, you guys are partners with some of your competitors. One of the things I wanted to understand is where do you have integrations with technology versus where do you have connectors? What's the difference between those two and how does it work in a Smartsheet world? You know, I think of the integrations really are where you're going to, you're really interacting with that other product directly, right? So maybe it's, I want my outbound messages and notifications to go into a Slack channel, right? That's an integration. Or I want to be able to connect to a Google Drive or a OneDrive document in those native stores. So that's where we really see an integration. It's something that the end user themselves is really interacting with. Where you see connectors is more around where I've got big systems of record in my organization and I need data to flow between those tools. Like a Salesforce or a Jira or something like that, Microsoft Dynamics, right? I've got data there. When something happens in that system, I need it to flow magically into Smartsheet or when something happens in Smartsheet, I need it to flow back into those systems because those are the systems of record that my company cares about. So a connection is a much bigger step than an integration? They're just different. Connectors are really about the flow of data back and forth between systems of record and integrations are more about user content and user direct interaction. So things like Drive and Box and Dropbox and Slack and Teams and stuff like that. Or the web content widget which we just announced, right? We want to be able to embed a YouTube video in a dashboard. That's an integration. There's no data really flowing back and forth. It's just a link, right? Got it, thank you. Yeah. So a lot of customers, I think 50 customers presenting which is amazing out of 2,000 people in the whole conference. I don't know what the percentage is, but it's awfully large. So just some of the whole chatter here. You've been here for a couple of days now and you guys had some early training yesterday. What are some of the things you're picking up? You obviously love to hear back from the customers. Kind of what's the buzz on some of the new offerings and what are you hearing amongst the constituents here? I mean, it's always, it's always incredible. Like, you know, this is our only our second year but the energy from them is always amazing. And, you know, people were, I was talking to someone earlier and they were just blown away but it's just the big list of things that we shipped this week.  So it's hard to say if anybody latched on to one thing or another. Obviously, there was lots of applause during the product session and we're really excited to have shipped the multi-assigned to feature which has been our number one customer request for a while. But it's not a, it's not a, like, you know, game-changing feature whereas I think some of the, you know, automation rules and updates there and the workflow builder are really, are really people are going to go back and it's going to change the way that they work and so people are really excited about that. They're really excited about dynamic view and being able to really tailor the information that is shared across their organization. The word collaboration, like symbiotic or bi-directional collaboration popped into my mind when Jean Farrell, your SPPF product who we had on earlier, was talking about some of the features and it was a really interesting dynamic with the audience in that number of times you mentioned the audience broke into applause and it probably feels pretty good, like, yes, we were listening to you were doing this enabling them to have technology that allows them to collaborate within and amongst teams and functions within an organization but you're also taking their feedback directly and collaborating with customers to further innovate your product. With the spirit of collaboration, we had Margot Bizitacion on from Forrester and she was talking about the collaborative work management, CW as an emerging market. With perspective collaboration, you guys can enable sharing. I could be a licensed user and share with you who's not. How is that type of collaboration a differentiator for smartsheets? Well, I think there's a lot of tools where they're collaborative. Oh, we can both comment on a Google doc and that's great but I think where Smartsheet really excels is in this sort of free collaborator model that's not bounded by your particular organization or your team and it really allows you to spread and create connections across customers and vendors and other orgs within your team and this is where you're starting to see these sort of step function changes in these organizations where you see this Office Depot example and he talks about taking a workflow in their organization going from four to six weeks down to 24 hours and enabling people who are putting in a budget request to take action on that request the next day and those are the kinds of things that are going to fundamentally change those businesses and so that's where I think the collaboration piece is really powerful is you can't get that kind of compression in time unless you can really span those traditional business silos. So Robin, one of the great things that happens always with tech companies is there's the application versus the platform exchange, right? Everybody wants to have a platform, it's really important to get an ecosystem lost up going on but nobody's got a line item in their budget for 2019 to buy a new platform, right? It's always application centric, right? I got a problem, I got to fix it. At the same time, you guys have, you do have a platform meaning it can go across a lot of different applications. So when you're trying to balance out your priorities with the platform priority in terms of more of kind of a general purpose underlie versus an app priority, like you said, multi, multi, how do you call it? Multi-assigning, yeah. Multi-assigning, you assign two people to the same, to the not correct product management protocol but everybody wants it because it's a real world. You know, how do you kind of prioritize that? How do you kind of look at the world when you're deciding what are you going to roll out next? What are you going to roll out next? What are you going to roll out next? I mean, I think it starts and ends with having conversations with real people. You know, we take in lots of data and we have all enhancement requests and usage data on how people use the product. Multi-assigning actually was less than 3% of all enhancement requests in the last couple of years but it's our number one request. And so it sort of speaks. Wait, wait, wait, so it was less than 3% of all enhancement requests. But it was number one. But it's our number one. So you've got a giant laundry list. There's a giant laundry list of things, right? So we can't just look at some metric and go, these are the next features we should build because we have this really strong signal. We actually have a very, very weak signal when we look at it from a quantitative standpoint. So what we have to do is we really have to dig into these customer use cases. We have to meet with them. All of our project teams have dedicated researchers and dedicated user experience people that are going out. We're actually talking to people. We're testing stuff with them. And we're trying to understand what commonalities exist between multiple cases across all of these different use cases because there's so many different ways that people use the product. There's not enough people asking for one thing. They're all asking for slightly different things. And so we really have to dig in and have a real qualitative conversation with them to understand and bring that back and say, okay, these things are related. We can build something that solves all of these problems in a compelling way. Well, there's definitely more than 3% of the people cheered when that feature was announced, that's for sure. So the other kind of dichotomy that you got to wrestle with is kind of a low code, no code. We want to be for everybody. Yet at the same time, you want a sophisticated application. You want integrations and connectors to all these other applications. So again, that's kind of a delicate balancing act as well because you want to let everyone have access and be able to manipulate the tool, work with the tool, set up the tool, but at the same time, you got to keep it pretty sophisticated to connect to all these other things. How do you kind of balance those priorities? We just try to hide as much of that as possible. Smartsheet's always been this tool where it's like it sort of looks like a spreadsheet and it sort of looks like project management, but it's got this underlying flexibility built into it, right? We don't force you to, if you've got a date column, we don't force you to put a date in there, right? If you don't know the answer, you can type in TBD, whereas a lot of purpose-build applications, they're like, oh, this is a date, you have to enter it in the proper date format or it doesn't work. And we've always had this sort of flexibility and complexity trade-off. The trade-off is if you give us real data, if you give us something that looks like a date, we'll draw a Gantt chart for you. We don't need much more, it doesn't need to be more robust than that. We just won't draw the bar if you type in TBD. And so we've always sort of danced this line with like making the tool super flexible and letting it just, assume the users knows what they're doing, right? When they're interacting with the tool, we assume they have an intention and they're trying to do something and we shouldn't force them down a particular path. And that sort of plays out in all these features. The other thing that we do is, like I mentioned earlier, we do a lot of user research and we get in front of a lot of customers and we put stuff out there well in advance of releasing it in a situation like this.  And I think that it's a complex feature set. That's gone through more iterations of design and review and scrapping it and back to the drawing board than any feature I've seen at this company. But it's probably one of the more complex features we've ever built as well. And so that's what we would expect, right? We're not going to get this right by just having a bunch of designers and engineers sitting in a room go, oh, we know the perfect solution to workflow management. Most of our customers don't even necessarily use the term workflow, right? And if you look in the app, it doesn't even say what work is. It says alerts and actions, you know?  We have technical writers that are very specific on what we label something. It's not an if statement, it's when this happens to this. And there's a lot of nuance and subtlety into all of this to try and drive the complexity out of it as much as possible. You can't avoid it, but you know. So in hiding it, the last thing which you get to do going forward is machine learning and our official intelligence. Which we hear about all the time, but really the great opportunity in that field is for you to leverage that under the covers to hide the nasty complexity to help suggest the right answer, to help suggest the right path. So I imagine that's got to be a huge part of your roadmap, integrating those types of capabilities underneath the covers. Yeah, and you know, there's been a lot of, we have had tons of discussions and obviously we bought the Converse Chatbot company back in January. And that's been a huge sort of arrow in our quiver, so to speak, right, in that regard. Like we feel that we have a lot of really good information but at the same time, we know there's a lot of talk about machine learning and AI and the reality is like that relies on huge data sets and it relies on a lot of analysis and that data is not something that we can just look at, right? We take our customers' data security and data privacy very seriously and we don't have access to that kind of information. So we need to look at this, the machine learning and the AI capabilities from a very different lens than say a consumer product that's sort of, you're getting to use it for free, they sort of do whatever they want with your data and you don't really have a lot of recourse other than leave the product. We don't start from that, we start from, your data is yours, you own it, we can't look at it but we want to enable you to turn these types of features on. So we need to look at more like an off-end model where a customer can say, oh, if I'm a big enterprise user, a smart sheet, I can turn certain capabilities on for my users knowing that that information is going to stay in our, it's going to comply with our data governance and our data privacy rules that our IT team puts forward. So in the spirit of talking about abstraction, abstracting complexity, hiding it, abstracting it, I'm curious when you walk into a customer, because here we are in Bellevue or not Vegas, but we're neighbors with AWS, with Microsoft, Microsoft announced teams about 18 months or so ago. You partner with both, you compete, also you're competing with teams. When you walk into a customer in an enterprise likely has a mixture of tons of different software applications, right, they probably have Office 365, Power BI, Excel. Why would a customer who has such familiarity with, say, on Microsoft, work with Smartsheet versus this way? Well, we'll just extend our Microsoft expertise and bring in something like Teams. I'm just curious what you've seen in that. You know, I think it's that Smartsheet's always been good at sort of orchestrating the actual work that's being done. And there's a lot of tools out there where you're having conversations and a lot of the tools out there where you're creating content. And there's not a lot of tools out there that are sort of bringing the conversation and the content together in an actionable and accountable way, right? And that's the sort of gene, Gene will sometimes use this term shared fabric. The Smartsheet really provides this shared fabric that ties a bunch of these tools together. And we really, we want to partner with all of these people because every organization is different. Every organization has a different set of tools that they've already embraced. They have a different set of goals around how many tools they're going to embrace. You know, you talk to some customers and like, I love Smartsheet, it's going to allow me to get rid of 10 apps. And you talk to another customer that's equal size or equal complexity two minutes later and they'll be like, I love Smartsheet. It allows me to work with all the tools I've already got. It's very different and they just have different corporate goals and objectives there. And so I think that the reason people like Smartsheet is it doesn't, it's back to that kind of, hey, you don't have to put a date in a date cell. It's flexible. It's going to work with you and not force you to adopt the Smartsheet way about that. So it's going to say, look, oh, if you want to use teams for your communications vehicle and OneDrive for all of your document storage, great. You want to embed PowerPoint document in a dashboard in Smartsheet? Great, we're not like, we want that to be the case. We do that internally, right? We use all those, you know, if you look at us internally, we're just like every other modern company. We have a dozen tools or two dozen tools that we're using and it's different from team to team and department to department. So it's all about just embracing the reality that is modern business and modern application, you know, the ecosystem of applications that we all deal with on a day-to-day basis. So that flexibility is key. So we said about 1,100 companies represented here at this event, 2,000 people or so, 50 plus customer speakers. Is there one customer example that comes to mind whether they're speaking here or not, that really is a great demonstrator of, we have a plethora of applications in our environment. We need, we want to work with Smartsheet because it enables us to integrate and use these tools so much better. I don't mean to put you on the spot. Yeah, no, I'm trying to think of a good, I don't know that I have a good, you know, standout example, I think that, you know, we hear little tidbits of that from everyone and it's not, it's a very common theme. So I don't know that, it's sort of back to the 3% thing, right? Like nobody really stands out because everyone is doing that.  So, you know, you should sort of take some and give some on the same sentence almost. Yeah, you can do both. Yeah. Well, Robin, thanks so much for stopping by. We appreciate your time or excited to be here. This is our first Smart Sheet event and we have some customers coming up. So looking forward to hearing some more news cases in action. Great, thanks a lot. Thank you. Thanks. We want to thank you for watching The Cube. I'm Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick. You're watching us from Smart Sheet Engage in Bellevue, Washington. Stick around, Jeff and I. We'll be right back with our next guest.


Hi there, I'm Sandy Allnach, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and I'm going to talk about watercolor sketchbooks and I'm going to give you some specifics on 11 of the many that I have tried. I've tried tons of them as you can see and I've tried to paint several things in all of them so I can get an idea what I like and what I don't and I actually came to some really interesting conclusions at the end so I will share those with you. This one is one of the first ones that I got because it has arches paper in it. I bought it at a local art store so I have not found it online but it does have arches in it a little more expensive but you can practice your actual techniques that you're going to use if you do a finished painting when you're working on really good paper and whatever it is that you're using in your sketchbook if you use the same kind that you're going to paint finished paintings on your techniques will improve. A lot of the other sketchbooks you're going to see here there's different things I learned from them than painting techniques. This one has of course arches so it's good heavy paper and you can come out with something. I was so pleased with this. You can come out with some really beautiful little sketches like the Washington Monument that I did and really get some nice effects from them because of the kind of paper that it is. So if you're used to a particular kind of paper get a sketch book with that kind of paper and there's lots of reasons not to though and I'll share a lot of that with you. This one is by a company called Pentallic and it's cold press. All of these are mostly cold press except the ones that are just really super lightweight paper. This one is good heavy paper. It takes a lot of pigment. It comes with a brush that I wasn't super thrilled with but it's great for travel so I put I'll probably put my silver travel brush in there because you guys know I like my silver brushes. I will link in the doobly-doo to the silver brushes as well for those who might not know about my silver brush fetish. This one is a book from Stillman and Burn is the name of it and it's got really really heavy paper and it does not seem to curl at all. I really like that about it and I started doing a few landscapes in here. I've been on a cloud fetish of late. I just can't stop painting clouds so you'll see lots of clouds throughout this and practicing some scenes doing foreground, mid-ground and background types of things. Just a lot of the stuff that I'm learning in my watercolor classes that I keep taking from all kinds of different instructors. This is a Windsor and Newton that I also only found in a store. Did not find this one online though I looked. You can check for yourself. Decent paper. Definitely decent. Not spectacular but I've got some really nice paintings out of it. This one I tried to do in just a few minutes. Frederick Douglass and succeeded at that. What I'm trying to learn how to do in my sketchbooks is paint quickly because even on my regular paintings I labor over things and I overdo them and so I'm trying to figure out how to get myself to paint quickly and I will be sharing a little more of that as we move on here through the sketchbooks. These will all be over on my blog by the way so you'll be able to see a lot more of them. This one by Fabriano which is a good paper and it's another hardback book that you can decide whether you want hardback or soft and whether you want a book with a spiral binding that can fold back on itself or if you want a hard cover like this one. You want to make sure if you're looking at them in a store that they will lay flat because that will be a problem if you're out in the field. Here I'm just trying to do some wood textures.  See I had crazy clouds. I was trying to make the clouds rain wasn't that fun. Another scene with some crazy clouds on the beach and a little sunset and then of course Salvador Dali who is an amazing artist. He was quite the man. I loved his mustache when I was in college. He was one of my favorite artists because of that. Then there's books like this where this is the backside of the paper and the quality of the line that you'll get with this quality of edges is not what I like. This is what I like more and this particular paper these these particular Strathmore books you can't paint on two sides. So here I kept trying to get some fun edges and I didn't. So I ended up painting on every other side. I have two sketchbooks like this where I'm only doing on one side of the paper. So you may find that with some of the sketchbooks that you get. But just because you find one that's like that don't freak out and not use it. Use it anyway. Use every piece of paper to learn something from. Just try things on it. Even on the back sides of this if you just want to test out some colors and do some swatching. They're fabulous for color swatching. So you can try things out that way. So don't get upset because you bought one that wasn't quite what you thought it was going to be. So this is another one that is in the same kind of family where you can't paint on one side. There's well I mean I guess you could paint on one side but you just don't get that line quality. But it's a decent sketchbook nonetheless. So you can see I can do a decent painting. This is from a park in Italy that I was at. And then I did some tree studies but I just have to do every other page in this except for if I wanted to do some swatching of colors. These would be great books to do that in. Now here's a Strathmore book that was fascinating because what it had was alternating drawing paper with watercolor paper. And it's for people like me who like to do a pencil sketch first then do a watercolor sketch then do a finished painting. And this one is going to be fun to play with. Sometimes I might just dive into a watercolor painting without a sketch first. But look what happens when I can work out my layout I can work out where my shadows are going to be. Where do I want my light to come from. And then work it out in a watercolor sketch. If I were to take that to a finished painting I'd have a whole lot of detail already worked out by going that route. This is a book that is really fun. I like the format of it like the little bow tying around it. But I use this for my Bible journaling. So you can take black and white line work. So I'm just noting different things from sermons, words from songs, verses, etc. and sketching them out so that they are seeds for different Bible journaling ideas. The paper takes watercolor but it's very light and it's for really light sketching and light watercolor. Not for in-depth heavy work. But these are really nice books otherwise. Now we've got some Montvall and Montvall is I think the student line from Kansan. And so it's decent paper but it's not fan tabulous but it makes it a little more affordable. But you can see you can get a pretty decent painting out of this paper. It comes in various sizes. So you can get a little long tall one like this. I've started liking doing these long tall vignette type of paintings since I have been taking some classes where teachers are doing more of that. The plein air types doing just a slice of a scene. But also just practicing to see what kind of paintings I can do on paper like these. Just to see how much paint can it handle. Can it handle a lot of moisture without warping. And the books I'm showing you pretty much do a fairly decent job of that. So that's the Kansan Montvall. Now next we get into mixed media books. This one is just a really inexpensive Kansan book. And I used this for a Bible journaling challenge that I did. So I did 30 pages in a row 30 days. And I used brush show on a whole bunch of these. So this took a lot of I guess you can call it abuse. And a lot of watercolor and stuff. And it didn't take it in a way that's going to be permanent or anything. But these are all seeds of ideas for Bible journaling someday. And it's a great idea to get yourself a book and do a monthly challenge. Just challenge yourself to something or find an online challenge to just get your mind going. Now this book is probably one that I'm going to use a lot. I'll be getting a lot more of because several artists that I've taken classes from use this book. It's got a hard cover and spiral bound. And it's just lightweight paper. But I'm starting to do like I said these sketches before I do a watercolor sketch. And then I do a painting. So I'm trying to make myself work out my layout my lights in my darks figuring out what colors I might use what what colors are going to work on something like this. My background wasn't light enough I didn't get enough depth in it. So I know if I take that to a final painting I need to change some things. There's ones like this I really want to paint. But I need to learn how to paint that loose or this one just just learn how to be free with it. But on this paper I seem to be a lot looser and a lot freer. And that's got me really excited. I want to learn how to do this on the good paper when I finally get to it. But I'm just going to practice a lot like just tons every day. I'm going to try to sit down and do a couple of paintings. And these are these sketches here these drawings are like 10 15 minutes half an hour at the most. Just throw some paint on try to get some some sort of a picture done. This one I took to the dog park and I sat on the bench while the dog was swimming and there were people standing around by the bank of the river. And I'm trying to just do things quickly and not think about it too much. Well here's one in a class. I did think about that a lot because I had a long time to do that. But these sketches these these two little paintings at the bottom this this top sketch and the two at the bottom were like 10 minutes each. And I was working out whether or not that statue should break the horizon line of that building or not. And I could work that out in a sketch before getting to my finished painting. And see it in a small format. This one was one where I was trying to work out from the photograph it had these big people in it. Or did I want the people to be much smaller and then allow some light to come in from that window. Because I didn't like how dark that came out in my my practice one. And then this was a rehearsal I did for some trains. And I ended up painting the trains large and using the knowledge that I gained from that sketchbook. So my overall recommendation is to get a small sketchbook that has decent paper in it. And get a large one that has some sort of mixed mini paper in it. And try both of those. Don't buy a million of them. I did that. You can see I have a ton of them. And I I serve as a warning to you. Don't buy all of them. Figure out what it is that you are going to use your watercolor sketchbooks for. Because for me it's going to be a great place to practice and loosen up. And that is going to be my goal for my sketchbook. If you're trying to paint specific techniques get the paper that you're going to use with your finished work. That's going to replicate more exactly what you're going to do in your finished piece. But if you're trying to just get it get the hang of drawing and painting get yourself a mixed media book. They're not expensive and they're going to help you become a better artist. All right thank you so much for joining me. I will talk to you guys later. I will see you in the next video.


What's up everybody, I'm Jason here for jasperjasecaserace.com 2020 Panini Contenders draft picks football 3 box break Pickers number three just sold out where we're randomizing the bangles slash Joe Burrell to the break So you grab a spot in the break or team you got a spot and the chance to win the bangles Joe Burrell So we copy and paste of the names, but I'm gonna randomize the number one gets the bangles There you go Two and a three five times. Good luck one two three four five times Jeremy Anderson. There you go. Congratulations You just got The bangles in the break. They changed it now to five to six Stop sending these alerts that you're not gonna have it wrong. Hi, I'm Luis Moreno. If you're watching here on the main channel Personal break is ready for you on Instagram. So at Jasper's breaks Again, I also got that either mentioned it, but for the previous one same thing here group break checklist is what we're gonna go by for the autographs of course and Players on the checklist. So there you go You guys have that in there as well, and we're just tagging the autographs Alperts college ticket, I'm not even gonna try to attend this guy's name Although it's probably easy. I'm just Trying to embarrass myself anymore There you go.  Hi, next pack guys Harrison Bryant College ticket a little cracked ice. It looks like yeah, there you go. I Love cracked ice, but you can't really even tell that this is a cracked ice It's really tough to do it unless you do like that barely there you go 18 out of 23 though That's a nice one there fellas you It's browns though like back-to-back rounds right there. Again, we'll go left or right before the players as well inserts Tommy Stevens AJ Terrell College ticket. Alrighty next box guys. Do we even get an on-card in here? Wow. We didn't even get an on-card But we got a cracked ice delpit. Maybe delpit was supposed to be on card Steven Montez College ticket. That's Redskins Tony Jones Jr. Adam Troutman The first drafted Dayton I remember correctly player He's a tight end. Where do you go? Saints again as well We still have a lot of autographs to go Derek. I'll play to the whistle for you, man But I think you do have him in the next break right now. I'm in all four. All we need is that one Johnson Taylor Good dream College ticket in big tickets James Robinson Jacksonville and CJ Henderson Bullticket tonight and I that's Jaguars as well. Alrighty last box guys again. Number four is also sold out. We'll be doing those after a Golf break and then after that Hopefully there's something else that's sold out Denzel Mims Out of 15, it's a nice one DM Is the auto that's going to the Jets Jets Jets Jets Adam. Oh, there you go. Michael Warren That was a out of 15 as well. So that's pretty nice Eagles Michael Warren Now it goes Matthew with that one. All right four more autos guys Antoine Windfield Jr TB When Eric Anthony McFarlane, Jr This guy was a stud in Maryland. I think he went to the Steelers, right? New Steelers running back Steelers going to Michael Willichie. I had two more packs Jovon Kinlaw 49ers going to Victor a James Proche Proche did you get into some gold right there? Yeah, those those Honestly are fun. They're inexpensive is a good thing, but There's usually just like one big card To make up for like all the packs and if we haven't hit it yet somewhere in there But you know, that's why we also have done our own Ravens of that one All righty guys, and there you go And I'll do left or right to see the doubles of course, but all these teams here hit a couple repeat teams But I mean hey, it's the way it goes right draft picks has a lot of players in here Remember all the players are pretty much draft that are in this product Again number four is on the website are also sold out sorry So let's see who gets left or right on here and again number four will be coming up soon There could be some other nice hits hiding in number four There's a last three boxes of the case so We did hit a herbert, but I thought there has to be a little bit more than just herbert So we'll see Let's roll it and it's five times two and three one two Three four go to the right side today. Okay coming up next is a little SP a gulf appreciate it


Hello my crafty friends and welcome to another card making video.  So Ginger is making an appearance today, he decided to check out on what I'm working on and I will be using foiling plates from the June foiling kit by Spellbinders. It is all about a happy birthday this month so you will get a big happy birthday which is going to make a great focal point for your card. Notice that it fits perfectly fine in landscape as well as it works great for slimline cards but if you try it portrait you will see that it is going to go outside of the borders. Just like always in the kit you will get a foiling roll and lots of small secondary sentiments as well as a die to cut them out. So for today since I have a big focal point to work with which is the happy birthday I'm going to create an inked background. I'm going to make a sky using a stencil that has that cloud design. I'm starting from the bottom and I will move towards the top slowly. I'm using different shades of ink from my Distress Oxide collection and I will start from darker and gradually go all the way to lighter color.  I don't care if I make a mistake or if my stencil moves slightly after all most of it is going to be covered up at the end. I don't have a blending tool for every ink pad but for different color families. I usually wipe them off on my kitchen roll and I just move on to the next color however I do have one blending tool for lighter shades of blue and another for darker shades. As you can see here I reached all the way to the top and the background looks just stunning. There are many cloud stencils like this one available in the market I'm going to link to the one that I used but I'm sure you will be able to find a lot of them. I absolutely love the result that you get with these stencils and here is a close-up look so I'm going to put that aside and let's work on the foiling. Now I want to match the blues on my background that's why I went with this blue foiling roll. Of course I went with a big happy birthday foiling plate as well as a smaller one that says wishing you an amazing day.  I like to do that a couple of times to get a good impression and then I'm going to peel it off and you can see the result. I was super happy with the result love how that blueish foiling stands against that white background and I didn't have any over foiling at all so I'm just going to use the dies to cut out the bigger and the smaller sentiment and really with focal points like these ones that do have a shine and they are quite big you don't really need to do a lot for a card you can just use this sentiment and stick it on top of a very busy background of a colorful background you can create a watercolor wash at the back and stick it on top. I am going with my inked sky. I did that foam tape at the back of both my sentiments so they really stand out. I'm going to add the secondary line and you can leave it as it is however I cannot stay away from my bits and pieces from my own collection. I will be using the sweet birds so that I can dress it up a little bit more and I cut out the branch from brown cardstock as well as their feet and I went with yellows and oranges for my birds. I did put them together are just three pieces for each and every one of those birds plus the feet if you want to add them I did share how you can put them together in a previous video. Now the branch and the leaves do come in the same die set as the birds so I wanted to embellish the top corner a little bit with that so I'm just sticking the leaves on my branch mainly staying at the tip of the branch since that's the only part that I'm going to use. If you want you can also dress it up even more and add tiny little flowers. My berry art glue was perfect for the job since I was working with tiny pieces and that a fine tip really helped. Also notice how my die cut pieces interact with the main focal point so some of the birds are standing on top of the sentiments and that leaf is also covering up one of the letters. I did make sure that even if I cover up some parts of the sentiment it is still readable and I always love some sparkle on my cards that's why I'm using blue gems that match nicely with the blue of my background and I'm going to call this card done. Here is a close-up look with all the shine and sparkle. Falling is really difficult to photograph but in any case here are some close-up photos where you can see the details better and that was the video for today. I hope that you had fun, that you got inspired. Don't forget to like the video, to leave me a comment and also subscribe if you haven't done so already. Down below the description area you will find a list of all the supplies that I used. Thank you for joining me today and I hope you will have a lovely day.