Home from Stampin’ Up Convention 2012!  Wow, what a whirlwind of fun!  I am hoping to actually stamp today with all the free stamps I came home with but thought I should show you some of awesome things I got!

I’ll start with “the bag”.  There are definitely better pictures of the Convention bag on many other sites but here is mine with some of the Make & Take cards.  The Your Amazing card was such fun to make (those little tickets are just a quick punch with the new Ticket Duo Builder Punch.  The little 3×3 cards go into a Kraft Gift Box (which I will be putting together this week, I hope).  They use the Daydream Medallions stamp and the Floral Frames Framelits.  I altered them from the originals just a little bit and I LOVE them!!  There are more M&T projects but I don’t have pictures quite yet.

The first picture here is a bag tag created by Cindy Elam.  Now I can say that this picture doesn’t even come close to showing you how pretty this is.  It used the new Champagne Glimmer Paper from the Holiday Catalog and it sparkles like you cannot believe!!  The back of the tag is all Glimmer Paper!!  WOW!!!  Lots and lots of demos were taking pictures of this since they loved it everywhere I took my bag.

The second picture is my notebook from Heidi Baks.  This amazing notebook was created by Heidi using My Digital Studio (MDS).  It looks so professionally made that other demos were asking Cindy (she got one too) where she found it at Momento Mall.  I have all my notes from Convention in it and can’t wait to show my customers this book in person!  If you have ever wondered what an MDS print product from SU looks like, I can verify that it is strong, sturdy and beautiful!

Well, back to unpacking and getting back to reality.  I’m on reserve again starting tomorrow.  Trying to get my cards ready for SUO Challenges and Freshly Made Sketches this week.  Hope to see you for those!!  Thanks for stopping in today!

My roommates for Convention are two amazingly talented stampers!!  Cindy Elam of Heart’s Delight Cards and Heidi Baks of RunningwScissorsStamper are also on the design team with me at SUO Challenges.  How exciting that I get to be one of their roommates!!  Needless to say, I could not just make any old thing for these two so I went out of my box and got to thinking about 3-D projects.  One thing led to another and this is what I came up with.

I found these adorable little mini paint cans at the Container Store and little tins too.  I decorated them with Floral District DSP and created flowers for the tops of the paint cans out of  Floral District fabric.  The flowers are made with the Fun Flowers die and I used fabric stiffener to add a little oomph to the fabric.  The tags were created using My Digital Studio and then printed by the print services at Stampin’ Up.  They came just the right size and with the little hole punched.  I just had them laminated to protect them.  I promise that Cindy has a tag too, you just see the back side of hers in the tag picture.  Actually, I made two for each.  One for their paint cans and one to add to their Convention bags (to help tell them apart from the thousands of others that are just the same).  I filled the cans with some little goodies to make the trip better.

Yesterday was the most amazing and inspirational day I have had with Stampin’ Up!  My second upline, Lisa Curcio, took this picture right before my 5 year walk.  What an wonderful 5 years it has been!! The theme for Convention 2010 is I Am….  My classes yesterday were I Am Doing Business My Way with Rhonda Wade and Tami White; I Am Savvy with Dawn Griffith, Laura Mulligan and Meg Wheeler; and I Am Reaching Out with Emily Montoya.  So many great ideas for classes and clubs, ways to be a better demonstrator and, of course, amazing projects!!  I feel like a groupie at a rock concert as I meet demonstrators whose work I so admire.  Can’t wait for more today.  I’ll have more picture tomorrow of Make and Takes and updates on today’s activities!  If you want to see some more pictures, run right over to Heidi’s blog (posted above) and see the great convention bag, Main Stage and project wall pics and the cool things from Momento Mall!

Hope your week is going great.  Thanks for stopping by today.  Another swap tomorrow.  This one was for the Control Freaks swap.  See you then!

 

As promised, I have the first of my swaps for Convention today.  This was for a swap with the Stampin’ Addicts.  We had a Meet & Greet get-together last night and I signed up for a general swap with them.

I just fell in love with Pleasant Poppies as soon as I saw it in the new catalog.  I thought it would be nice to watercolor the flowers using Blender Pens and combine the image with Floral District DSP.  The texture in the background comes from the new Fancy Fan Embossing Folder and I LOVE how it coordinates with the print in the DSP.  Of course I needed to tie on some of the lovely Rose Red Seam Binding to finish it off!  The flowers were colored first with a Pink Pirouette Stampin’ Write Marker (direct to paper) and then I added Melon Mambo and Rose Red ink with my Blender pen to add layers of color to the flower.  The stems were finished with Lucky Limeade and the centers with Basic Gray.  The swaps I got back are so fantastic and I hope to share some of these with you in the upcoming weeks.

Well, back to the fun of Convention.  Tomorrow…roommate gifts!

Stamps:  Pleasant Poppies, Just For You; Paper:  Whisper White, Basic Black. Floral District DSP; Ink:  Black Stazon, Pink Pirouette, Melon Mambo, Rose Red, Basic Gray, Lucky Limeade; Accessories:  Big Shot, Fancy Fan EF, Rose Red Seam Binding, Blender Pen