My trip to the Craft SuperShow and CHA Winter Trade Show was great. Exhausting, huge and overwhelming, but great! The night before we flew out, the Huntsville tornado touched down in our neighborhood very close to our house. I was on the other side of town, but Nathan was at home, and had quite a scare. Thankfully, he was safe and we didn't sustain any damage at our house, but the power was knocked out for about 12 hours. Needless to say, I therefore did not get to do any laundry for my trip and had to pack in the dark (Nathan let me borrow his super cool head flashlight.) It was a pain, but our hotel had coin-operated laundry, so I was able to wash some jeans when we arrived.
My boss and I stayed at an Anaheim hotel that had a great location between the convention center and lots of restuarants. Nothing was too spread apart, but all that walking was hard on my poor little feet. Add in that we didn't have time for lunch even one day, I thought I would have lost a few pounds, but alas I didn't. Bummer!
The Craft SuperShow was so much fun - not super huge, but definitely very big, and I spent tons of money. I got some fabulous papers and crafty goodies, saw lots of cool products and got some great inspiration. I got to meet Kathy Cano-Murillo (CraftyChica), Cathie Filian, and Debbie Stoller.
The trade show itself was HUGE - we barely made it through 1/3 of the whole show on the first day, breaking for a 2-hour craft workshop (handmade books out of recycled materials with the author of Re-Bound - great class) and one of our business seminars (about global craft trends with Donna Downey).
The second day we saw most of the rest of the show and attended two more business seminars; and the last day, we finally finished out the show, went to our most interesting seminar of all (on consumer behavior within the craft market based on this year's CHA research) and made some fantastic contacts. It was an extremely successful last day all-around, and we even made some great purchases, including a couple Slices, which I'm so excited about. I even got to meet Mark Lipinski, who was hysterical and so nice. He wrote a note to my mom (a huge fan), took a picture with me and gave me about 5 bear hugs.
We also got to stop by the studio/office of and have dinner with one of our best (and most fun) designers, Kari Mecca, who lives in Anaheim. It was part-business (wrapping up plans for photographing and outlining her second book that we will soon publish) but it was also really cool to see her new projects and her great workspace. She is great to be around and so insanely creative - check out her site. She also agreed to ship back our HUGE lot of purchases, freebies, catalogs and other goodies from CHA. Can't wait for the box to arrive so we can sort through everything we stuffed in there.
Anyway, the trip was excellent and I got so much out of it, but I was thrilled to come home. Even though I STILL have been unable to do any laundry (plumbing problems - it's finally getting fixed tomorrow) it's always good to come home, and I'm pretty sure sweet home Alabama is more my speed than California.
Next up -- weekend trip to my sister-in-law's in Atlanta. I'm pumped to spend my IKEA gift card she gave me for Christmas!
I can't even imagine how much fun that had to be. I've seen some good reports coming out of this years CHA and hope some of the goodies make their way to stores in Huntsville!
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