The Stampaway Friday Night Preview Party is a lot of fun – especially for the customers. The smaller crowd gives them an easier shopping experience, and time to enjoy the demos, make & takes, and such. But it’s a long day for the vendors – most of us started setting up our booths at 8:00 a.m., so by the time the Preview Party ends at 11:00 p.m. we’re pretty much fried.
I saw this on a poster during setup and liked it – it was in the Verses booth and I was delivering some of their gridwall. We carry booth materials for several vendors in our truck so they can fly back and forth to shows. I suspect that my life is vanilla enough that most of the time I can get by with eight crayons – only occasionally do I need a few more. But some of you need the big box of 64 with the sharpener in the back!
I like to refer to Stampaway as the “I get to sleep in my own bed show” – I only live 40 minutes from the convention center. But it always seems to take me longer to get there – when we’re on the road, if something is missing from the booth we just have to deal with it. But here at home, if something is missing I head for the store late at night. And something is always missing – so it was about 12:45 when I finally put the key in the deadbolt at home. And I left for Sharonville at 7:15 Saturday morning – the only living being who saw me while I was at home was Zoe.
But even with the fatigue, it’s easy to get back into gear when the line is wrapped around the building at 8:45 . . .
I always get a kick out of this – it’s in the Rubber Cottage booth next to their cash register. Since they were across the aisle from us this weekend, I got a chance to take a picture of it.
These were taped to warming units on the loading dock behind the concession stand – with the rants I have made over the years about thanking customers and appreciating our jobs, it was nice to see someone else put it into words.
I got a big kick out of this – instead of printing out her e-mail to get the $2.00 discount in our booth, she printed out the picture from a recent e-mail of me holding Ryan when he was born 25 years ago. Loved it . . .
Finally got to meet Janet Winkle – she has taught Stampscapes classes in our store several times and we have e-mailed back and forth a lot, but I was always either out of town or busy when she was here, so we had never met in person. I’ll see her again in October when we go to a new show in Sevierville, Tennessee – she lives there.
Did you see this in the Northwoods booth? Pat and Paul’s daughters were just kids when we first met – now Emily and her husband Kyle have a newborn son, and Liz and her husband Matt are expecting a daughter any day. Liz’ doctor assured Pat that she could get to Stampaway and home before Liz went into labor – but Pat flew home on Saturday night anyway.
Two t-shirts that caught my eye. I know there are three in these pictures – I have seen the pink one everywhere. But not with the companion shirt. And FDR was right during WWII . . . but apparently he left off the last part.
Connie Williams was out visiting in the booths and taking pictures – I didn’t realize she was using a flash until she just about blinded me while I was shooting a picture of her shooting a picture . . .
We had a lot of action in our booth as well. Joe Rotella was manning the USArtQuest portion – Robin and Keia Arnold were handling Envelope Punch Boards and the new Faber-Castell Gelato Kits. Not sure how much longer we’ll have Keia working with us – she was about ten years old when she and her mom first started helping us, but she recently graduated from Indiana Wesleyan and hopes to eventually land a teaching job in the mountains of North Carolina.
Looks like the Stampaway stories may stretch out for another day – I have some editing to do on a couple of special pieces to include with another story, and it doesn’t look like they will finish before 3:00 EDT when the blog post e-mail goes out. So stop back tomorrow . . .
No comments:
Post a Comment