Creativation 2019

Creativation 2019 in Phoenix, AZ was a total blast!

I flew out of Denver on Wednesday afternoon before the show. Flying above the city I was able to trace some roads and find our neighborhood. This is really significant to me, I feel like I am finally feeling more at home! I took an Uber straight from the airport to Scrapbook.com for a tour of their new office and warehouse. If only I could have a cart and gone shopping! It was seriously heaven on earth. For the first time the AC designers got to hang out and really get a chance to mingle before the show. Usually it's fly in the day of, be at our booths, fly out before the last day. So this was an amazing opportunity that Scrapbook.com provided us to all be together! From left to right: Shimelle, Jen Hadfield of Tater Tots and Jello, me, Amy Tangerine, Heidi Swapp, Vicki Boutin, and Kelly Creates. Just missing Maggie Holmes and Dear Lizzy!

Then Scrapbook.com took us to a local painting class and we each painted a canvas with a lovely desert scene.

Strolling along the cute streets of Gilbert.

The next morning I filmed 8 lessons sharing tips and tricks to create layouts with my new Horizon collection. You'll be the first to know when they're live!

I actually get super nervous in front of the camera. Half of me wanted to bolt for the door, the other half said to calm down, this is what I love doing, you can do this. The calmer half won the internal battle fortunately :)

I spent the rest of the day in the break room chilling with some awesome ladies. I got to flip through Amy Tangerine's Hobonichi and decorated one of the pages.

After dinner we all came together for a roundtable and the designers were each given 5 minutes to talk about pretty much anything we wanted. We got to hear each other's stories of how we got started scrapbooking, what keeps us motivated, how collections came to be, and so much more deep stuff. It. Was. Awesome. Not a dry eye in the room after Heidi Swapp concluded. She is superwoman. This is Maggie Holmes sharing how she's a 3rd generation scrapbooker - she's flipping through her grandma's scrapbook. How neat is that?!

The next day I didn't have anything on my calendar until the afternoon so I hung out with Amy Tangerine and got to be her shadow for the day and take pictures of her for an upcoming campaign and we went shopping and ate lunch and it was so fun. We found this epic painted wall and got someone to snap our photo. We cute :) We headed to the show late afternoon to check out our booths for the first time and give a small spiel to the sales team about our new collections. Here's cute Shimelle and her new Sparkle City line!

Heidi Swapp and all her awesomeness. And Jim. Vicki Boutin doing her thang!

I really wanted the new watercolor set in Amy's line but there weren't any extras so Amy gave me hers, such a peach!

Saturday was the first day of the show!

Here is the entire Pink Paislee booth.

This gal is Melanie LeFevre. She was my neighbor across the street from when I was about 11-16 years old. She is the one who first introduced me to scrapbooking. If it wasn't for her, I wouldn't be here! Friends!

Lindsay, Alisha, and I worked as In-House Scrapbookers at American Crafts back in 2008. We go waaaay back! So fun to see them every year at the show, I love that they're still so involved in this industry doing collections for Echo Park.
Even after 7 collections and 4 Creativation/CHA shows, it is still so surreal walking into a booth with my name on it. So incredibly thankful and grateful for everything that has happened to me in my life to lead up to this!

Sunday sunrise.

Truth.

The show was great, I met lots of new people and store owners and hope for some fun collaborations and teaching opportunities this year - possibly even a Cruise & Crop in 2020?!

Counting down the days until next year!