Friday, July 25, 2008

CHA!

Hi People! I am still sorta in a daze. I had an AWESOME opportunity to attend CHA (a.k.a., Craft & Hobby Association Convention & Trade Show). My PTI forum friend Lynn generously offered passes to anyone who was able to go. I jumped at the chance to go but had NO idea what I what to expect. I had always heard about this convention, especially since I live close to Rosemont, where's it's been held for several years.

This is a picture of Me, Lynn & Debbie at the Mrs. Grossman booth, posing with the Ace of Cakes cake.

I'm totally behind in the posting seeing that everyone else has already posted...but here it goes! And just to warn you, this is a very long post but it has lots of pictures!

My first day I got there and met up with Lynn and her friend Debbie (side note: there are a lot of crafters out there named Debbie!). They were SUPER nice to have let me tag along with them. I had so much fun hanging out with them and seeing all the things that had to be seen. Thanks Lynn & Debbie!!!!!!!!

One of our stops included the Marvy booth and guess who's there demo-ing their new fabric markers? None other than Lisa Johnson of Poppy Paperie & PTI Stamp Designer extraordinaire! I kinda geeked out but she was so nice to me - even took a picture of me in action! Check out her site. We used her stamp set, Flower Garden from PTI, to create designs and color them onto canvas bags. Incidentally, I was due to get an order from PTI that day and Flower Garden was in the box when I got home!

Here we are at the Provo Craft Booth - it was HUGE! They were doing a raffle when we happened to walk by and guess who made an appearance! The Cricut and purple thing (?)!! I had to have a picture... too bad my eyes were closed!

The one cool thing was that not only did all the companies have out all their wares, they also had tons of completed projects on display. Here is a wall of scrapbook pages (sorry, don't know where from). I was again, overwhelmed and didn't know what to take pictures of or who or even what to stop & see. Kinda just followed Lynn & Debbie around. :)

We stopped at the Ranger booth, another HUGE one and they had like a ton of well-known crafters doing demos. This is Claudine Hellmuth doing a demo on sticky backed canvas. I didn't even KNOW she was famous until I saw the sign over her head. This is what I'm talking about... how clueless I was :).

Here of course is Tim Holtz, the rockstar of the crafting world. It was so funny because when he came up to start his demo, ladies came out of nowhere and surrounded the table. If you look really closely at the blond lady behind Tim, that's Ali Edwards!!

After spending close to 8 hours on the floor, we still hadn't seen everything! But there was still dinner! "What!" you say, there's more?!? Oh yes, there's more! Kimberly Crawford, also from the PTI forum, organized a dinner. At first it was going to only be Lynn, Debbie, Kim & myself. Then we kept hearing that Nichole Heady and some others were coming. Little did we know that 4 would soon become 12! But what a 12 it was!

Here we are post dinner... there was Jennifer Buck, Lisa Johnson, Dawn McVey, Nichole Heady, Heather Nichols, Michelle Wooderson, Kimberly, me and two of Heather's friends. Lynn & Debbie missed the group pic!! I wish there was more time to sit and talk to each of these ladies. The surprising thing was not only were they NICE, they were so REAL :). That's a compliment, I swear! I felt like I knew these ladies but only through the blogging world, it was beyond AWESOME to not only meet them but HANG out with them.

Here's a picture from Dawn McVey's camera, thanks for sending it my way - I may need to frame it :P, dorky, I know! You can tell by my smile just how dorky I am :).

I have just a few more pictures to post from the Day 2 so stay tuned... and I will start posting some crafty things too, I promise.
Thanks for reading!

4 comments:

Lynn Mercurio said...

What awesome pictures, Deb. I was in the bathroom when the picture was taken at the RAM!!! ARG...

FYI, your e-mail isn't complete on your "email me" link. I tried to reply to your comment, and I noticed that it wasn't correct.

I'll answer you here: I think we had a little miscommunication. Boy, oh boy, do I have nestabilities: Regular, scalloped, square, rectangle, oval, round, long rectangle, hearts and the double ended tag. They are almost as addicting as PTI stamps...lol

Niki Estes said...

Looks like so much fun, Deb! I would be dorky, too! lol Glad you had fun!

Jennifer Buck said...

Your the cutest! It was wonderful to meet you! I had so much fun and am only sorry there wasn't more time to chat! Hope you are doing well! :)

Amy said...

AWESOME!! CRICUT!! hahahah