New Items, Setup Changes, and Birthday Wishes . . . and They’re All “Crazy”

I am in Collinsville, Illinois (home of the world’s biggest “catsup” bottle – which I assume is different from the world’s biggest “ketchup” bottle) this weekend.  To say this has been a crazy week would be an understatement . . .

   

It started on Monday with the announcement of three companion Cling Mount Stamp Sets for the wildly popular Bird Crazy set released at CHA in January – continued on Friday with the announcement of a companion Framelits Die Set from Sizzix – and continued even more on Saturday at the show, where the whole crazy craze was one of the main topics of conversation (if you have no idea what I’m talking about, here’s a link to a page on our site where you can see all of them).

And of course we’re taking advance orders, so I taped all of this together and put it on one of the demo tables in our booth.  It takes only a little bit of imagination to see the drool marks on the tablecloth . . .

  

All of that crazy stuff gave me a limited amount of time to deal with my own craziness – oh the booth it is a-changin’.  You may not notice it so much, but my longtime setup/teardown helpers are probably drooling just as much as the Tim Holtz addicts – the smaller items like Spellbinders, Tim Holtz, Faber-Castell, Adhesives, etc. are now on carts that can roll right into place in the booth without unpacking boxes and stocking the shelves at each stop.  Most of the other vendors have been doing this for years – but change happens slowly at Marco’s.

I did not build these, though I have wanted to for a long time and something more pressing always got in the way.  The catalyst this time was a text about three weeks ago from Rick Holland (Rick and Kellie are “Our Daily Bread Designs”).  There was a time when Rick and Kellie took two full booths on the road, but they decided that the simpler life was less hectic and cut it back to one – which left them with several homeless carts that Rick had built.  He wanted to know if I was interested in them – and my response was that I had been lusting after them ever since he first built them.  I thought about it while I was at StampFest in Florida, contacted him when I got back, and we quickly agreed on a price that I cleared with Gary.  I met Rick and Kellie halfway at Cabela’s in Columbus about ten days ago and suddenly had a lot of work to do (with the 4th of July Weekend smack dab in the middle).  There will be adjustments, but for a first effort I was thrilled with the results this weekend.  And several vendors came by during setup on Friday to welcome me into the 21st century . . .

 

And then there is this – it started a little over a month ago when I saw this picture of masks being prepared for a performance by Picasso and Darling Darlene from Stampland at a gallery in Massachusetts the day after the Springfield show (a picture from the performance is at right).  I had only a three-word response – “I want one.”  And Friday, I got it . . .

  

Left to right: a closeup of the mask, a shot of me with mine, and a shot of me with Joel from Heartfelt Creations.  I will treasure it always.  When Picasso and Darlene brought mine to me during setup, I quickly snapped a picture when I saw this . . .

. . . and then when I remembered that Saturday was the Man in Black’s birthday, I posted the following on his Facebook page.

During the giveaway on Saturday, we all sang “Happy Birthday” to him.  Picasso tried to act like he was embarrassed, but we all know that he loved every minute of it.