WARNING: Very long post ahead with LOTS of pictures! :)
HELLO my dear friends!! How are you??? I am doing quite well. I have lots and lots to tell you today and I thought about breaking this post up into multiple posts so it wouldn't be so long but I didn't want to make you wait any longer to see all of the CHA pictures! So, fasten your seatbelts....here we go!
This first picture is of a new but VERY dear friend of mine. Her name is Brooke and she emailed me awhile back to tell me that she lived close to where we would be at CHA and if we needed anything like a ride from the airport or whatever, that she'd be happy to pick us up! How nice is that?! Now let me just ask you, if you had the option to be picked up by this happy little face or by a stranger taxi driver, which would you choose???? LOL! We chose Brooke and I'm SO glad we did. She couldn't have been sweeter during our entire time in Orlando. Not only did she bring her sweet little baby and pick us up at the airport, but she had fresh baked banana breads in individual little tins waiting for Heather, Mish and I in her car! And not only that, but they were honestly the best banana bread that any of us had EVER eaten! (Martha Stewart recipe, using sour cream) She dropped us at the hotel so we could drop our bags, and then she dropped us at the convention center so we could walk the showroom floor on Wed. which was the retailer portion of the show.
After the show closed that day, we all went to dinner at Maggiano's Little Italy (I LOVE this place!) and Brooke met us there. Have I mentioned how much I love Brooke? Hee. As a side note, she also came to the show and waited in line on both Fri. and Sat. to get into the Papertrey store, and to do the Papertrey make & takes, and she bought bottled water for the whole PTI crew on Friday which we were EXTREMELY grateful for. I don't think any of us had enough time Friday to even realize how thirsty we were! Haha! Brooke, thank you SO much for everything. I'm SO glad to be able to call you my friend. You are a peach, Girly!
So, after dinner Wed. night at Maggiano's, us DT girls and Nichole headed to our hotel room to work on one last project. We were making a cute little pennant banner to hang in the booth, and all 5 of us worked on it till very late at night, laughing and laughing while we worked. All of these shots in the hotel room, working on the banner, were taken by David Heady (Nichole's hubs). (Thanks, David!)
Nichole.....hard at work on a tiny pennant.
Here's me, Nichole, Mish and Heather. Debbie is there too, but she's just out of the shot.
Here's a shot of all 5 of us. Oh my goodness......so much fun. It's not often that we all get to be in the same room paper-crafting together, you know?
So the next day was Thursday, and we were up bright and early to get the Papertrey booth set up for the Fri/Sat SuperShow. Here's me with a whole box of Damask Designs stamp sets! I hadn't ever seen that many of them all together! (It's the little things, right?! Haha!) Oh, and notice all of those boxes in the background??? Yeah.....all Papertrey! We had an entire semi trailer full of product for the booth!
Here's the booth during set-up. Doesn't look like much yet but just you wait! That's David Heady over on the left, putting the walls of the booth together. And that's Julie and Jane in the middle of the photo. (They're Nichole's partners - the 3 of them own Papertrey)
Here's Nichole, reading the diagram she'd designed for how the booth should be put together.
And here are Debbie Olson and Mish Wooderson.....putting hang tags on boxes and boxes of product, to be hung in the store.
Here's a shot of a beautiful poster Nichole designed, featuring the CHA free-with-$100-purchase Floral Fusion stamp set. I know some of you have mentioned that you are bummed that you can't purchase this set, but for the people that paid a lot of money to travel to the show, it was a great incentive for them, you know? Some people paid to fly a long way just to be at the show. I'm happy for them, that there was a special little treat they could earn if they wanted to. Isn't that poster so pretty? It features some of the images from the stamp set.
Nichole put together a whole display of DT cards and quotes from the DT of what we thought about the Floral Fusion set. This photo is a close-up of my card and quote.
And here's the whole display.
Here's Nichole again, hanging more signs around the booth.
Finally, when we had the booth all set up Thurs. night, we headed out for a late dinner together. Here's Nichole and David after a long day setting up the booth!
Like I said, it was a late dinner and we were all tired (I think we slept an average of 4 hours per night) so by dinner time, we were all a little loopy! Haha! And that Mish.......she kept us laughing the whole trip! Here, she decided to feed Debbie a bite of dessert!
And here are Mish, Debbie and Heather laughing their heads off! Haha.....this picture just makes me start laughing all over again. Such a fun group!
Here's Me and Nichole that same night at dinner. Heather snapped this photo for us.
And now, may I present to you the finished booth!!! Friday morning, right before the show opened, I ran around and snapped these pictures. It's a good thing too, because about a half hour after I took these pictures, you couldn't even get IN the booth. Well....you'll see.... :) This was the first wall you saw as you entered the booth. It was one of two Color Walls, that contained all of the color collections of card stock, ribbon, ink and buttons.
This was the back wall of the booth -- the Stamp Wall. All 60 of the sets that we brought with us were on this wall, as well as an index sheet of the stamp set so you could easily tell what it looked like, and a couple of DT projects per stamp set, to give you ideas for what to do with the set!
Had to snap a picture of Damask Designs! *wink*
....and one of Scattered Showers!
And here's the other Color Wall -- it was to the left of the Stamp Wall. Isn't it so pretty, seeing all of the colors lined up like that? (By the way, all of these are existing colors, so if you're trying to see if there are any new ones that you haven't seen yet, there aren't.) ;)
This was an adorable little display that Nichole put together using lots of Papertrey goodies. So creative, that girl!
Here's the cash wrap area......that's Julie and Jane. They were in charge of manning the cash register area and ringing people's purchases up. And see that adorable pennant banner??? That's the one we made in our hotel room Wed. night! Not too shabby, huh? Hee.
Here's Debbie (Nichole is on the left) making last minute preparations at the make & take table. Mish, Debbie and Heather took turns manning the make & take table and helping customers put their projects together. (The Papertrey make & takes were all free, by the way) And when Mish, Heather and Debbie weren't at the make & take table, they were meeting customers and passing out free pens and pads!
And here we are.....David shot this photo of the 4 of us DT girls and Nichole, just a few minutes before the show opened on Friday. We're all wearing our new Papertrey t-shirts! L-R: Mish, Debbie, Heather, Nichole, Me
Just a close-up of a few adorable cards.....
.....a couple more cuties!
Oh, and this is the outside of the booth. Both of the Color Walls made up the two sides of the booth, and on the outside of each, were these big banners and display boards containing hundreds of extra DT projects for customers to take pictures of.
We also had free Papertrey pens and notepads. I think my heart actually skipped a beat when I saw these Raspberry Fizz pens!!! LOL!
Nichole and David got in one last squeeze right before the craziness began!
These sweet ladies almost ran to get the first spots at the make & take table!
And about a half hour later, this was the scene outside the Papertrey booth!!! These ladies are all waiting in the make & take lines! These aren't even the people waiting to get in the booth to shop. For most of Friday, the line just to get in the booth and shop was about an hour wait! Once they got to the booth, Nichole and I were at the entrance of the booth to greet everyone. Then they made their way thru the booth and and on their way out, Jane and Julie and their 2 helpers rang up purchases. (Free Papertrey tote bags (hibiscus burst colored) were given with each purchase!)
This was the view of the inside of the Papertrey booth pretty much allllllll day Friday! Saturday was a bit slower than Friday, so at least people weren't having to wait a long time to get in the store, but it was still steady all day Sat. too. We heard from customers over and over again that the Papertrey booth was the most popular booth in the whole show! And based on how many Papertrey tote bags were seen walking by all weekend, I think they might have been right!
David and J.D. would go into that crowd, see what product needed replenishing, they'd run back to the storage area, dig out the needed products and bring them back out to the booth, fight their way in (haha!) and load up the shelves. Then they'd see more product that we were running low on, and they'd repeat that whole process. And they did that for the entire two days that the show was open. They worked their fannies off keeping that booth stocked! We were SO glad they were there!
Here we are on our last night together, after all the customers had gone and after the booth had been dismantled. We went to dinner together, and David shot this photo of the girls. (Thanks again, David) L-R: Me, Julie, Heather, Debbie, Mish, Nichole, Jane
This was such a great trip and I'm so glad to have been a part of Papertrey's first ever 'public appearance'. I can't tell you how much I enjoyed being able to meet so many SUPER sweet customers and blog readers! Each of you were so warm and friendly and it was so nice to put a face with the names I see when you comment or play along in my color challenges! I thoroughly enjoyed meeting each of you! Thank you for being such a blessing to me Friday and Saturday! You truly made me feel so loved!
We at Papertrey, all worked really hard at CHA and were certainly exhausted by the time it was all over, but I wouldn't have traded it for the world! :)
Smooches!
