Stampin’ Up! Convention, Stampin’ Up! Incentive Trip and Road Trip – A holiday of a lifetime!!!

I'm back, it seems so long since I blogged and I have experienced so much. All I can say is Oh my Goodness, WOW, Amazing, lucky, happy and tired………….

It was amazing, I had three holidays in one and can't wait to tell you all about them.  This will be a long post as will the posts on the next few days but I hope you can indulge me as I my brimming with enthusiasm and excitement :0)

So I flew out from the UK, via Paris to Salt Lake City to attend the US Convention.  This is the annual conference hosted by Stampin' Up! when we get to celebrate everything we love about Stampin' Up! All the US staff were there to take care of us and to inspire us, 5800 demonstrators from all over the USA and Canada as well as some demos from Australia and Europe.  We were spoilt rotten as it is Stampin' Up!'s 25th year and there were celebrations and giveaways galore.

So here goes….

We missed our connection from Paris to SLC as there was a problem with our plane.  We were stranded in Paris for 24 hours which sounds super glamorous, but let me assure you it was not!  There were 7 of us including Paula Gorry (the UK Country Manager and her husband Paul) which from now on will be known as the Paris 7….

I was rather stressful missing out flight and trying to rearrange another flight, hotel, meals and not getting out luggage back to be honest it was great fun.  We laughed so much, and I loved spending time with these special people, such a bonding experience but I so felt for Teri as she was flying out for convention only and missed a whole day of her schedule. (Teri and Paul are not in this photo…)

But we did make it to Salt Lake the next day.  Poor Kerry's luggage did not however and to add insult to injury we checked into out hotel to find a double bed for three of us.  The hotel was rammed and no more rooms were available to they gave us a put up bed, so poor Kerry arrived a day later than planned, was without her luggage and had to sleep on a put up bed!  I am making this sound awful, it really wasn't, we can look back and laugh and it meant that we had to shower and change super fast as we only had 1 hour before convention started so there wasn't a moment to be tired which was no bad thing.

Convention started with one of the finalists from the Voice singing for us all.  Shelli was joined on stage by her whole family.And they stayed and enjoyed the whole of convention with us.

This is Shelli and her sister Vonna who founded the company 25 years ago…

And this is them now, they had a little interview with Sara (Shelli's daughter about the highs and lows). Vonna is no-longer part of Stampin' Up! and it was wonderful to see her and Shelli together being able to celebrate what they had acheived.

Shelli then shared some WOW projects with us, card that move, spin and pop, I will definitely be trying some of these…

You won't recognise this stamp set but it is from the new holiday catalogue and I was lucky enough to win the stamp set, buttons and ribbon :0) :0) :0)

You may not recognise some of the products used, please do not assume we will get all these wonderful items in the UK market, no details as yet but you know I will keep you posted…

These girls MADE convention for me.  They are in my team and they flew all the way from the UK to attend the US convention at their own expense.  From left to right we have Lynney, Catherine and Nicky W (you can check out their blogs in the left hand sidebar of my blog).  They were so much fun and to be honest I would have been a little lost at convention without them.  They were just wonderful fun and I so loved spending quality Stampin' Up! time with them!!

We were given a sample of a US product line called Paper Pumpkin, this is not available in the UK so we were a little excited to see what was in the these little boxes…

So excited in fact we had to do our happy paper pumpkin dance….

 

There was so much inspiration and samples all around us and loads of display boards filled with ideas.

Look at this beautiful card using lovely as a tree!

There were freebies galore, we all received a colored wrist band and with every colour that was called for Prize Patrol won some Stampin' Up! goodies.  There were also all attendee giveaways too where they handed out gifts to all 5800 of us!  At the end of the event all but 25 people had received a prize patrol gift.  Those poor people must have thought they were going home empty handed but Shelli announced that those special 25 people would be getting ALL the stamp set from the new US seasonal catalogue- can you imagine, I would have keeled over!

  

I met some of the most amazing people, here is one of my idols, Teneale Williams, she was a complete delight and she exceeded my expectations and my expectations were high!!!

We also got chatting to the lovely Brandy Cox, such a lovely lady with some great advice…

We took a turn to pack some birthday boxes to be given out to the local children's hospital so that any children having a birthday in hospital get a free package of goodies from Stampin' Up!, I truly love the ethos of this company.

And we managed to find some time to do a little shopping and have dinner together at the Cheesecake Factory. We could not resist going into Tiffany and the lovely shop assistant indulged us by letting Nicky try on her favourite rings – decisions decisions :0)

Such wonderful memories.  And here is my convention bag and all the products I received at convention alone….

Just WOW!

So three days came to and end and it was time to say goodbye to my lovely Pinkies and get ready for the Incentive Trip to begin at the St.Regis in Park City SLC.

More of that on the next blog post as I have taken enough of your time.

Have a wonderful weekend, it is great to be back x