Convention 2012...WOW!!!

   Hello!  As promised I am back with some of the highlights from Convention!  I flew to Salt Lake City, Utah very, very early last Tuesday morning!  I was gone from Tuesday through Sunday and although the time flew by it felt like we did a month's worth of stuff in that short week!  I have tons and tons of pictures and thought I would share a few with you!

First things first!  When attending a Stampin Up! event it is a tradition to present your roomies with gifts!  So much fun!! :)  These are the gifts I made for my roomies.  The dvd case opens up to hold a pad of paper and the flower pad opens up to hold stir into your drink mixes.

This was my beautiful gift from Julie!  LOVE it!!  It holds tea and the cookies were delicious! Thank you Julie! :)

This is my fun holds everything gift from my other roomie Coleen!  How cute is this?!  She sewed it!!  It came full of snackies...which were also delicious! :)  Thank you Coleen!  Love it!

This was the view from our hotel room.  :)

First night we were there we wandered over to the new mall!!  It is gorgeous!  I have never seen anything like it!  There were several fountains and water with beautiful landscaping running throughout.  Part of it was open and you could see the beautiful scenery outside and part was enclosed.  Really, really cool place!!  We went to the cheesecake factory for dinner and this was my dessert!  Yummmmmmm!

We got up bright and early Wednesday to go check in and collect our bags and check out the Momento Mall to see what shopping fun was in our future! This is a picture of the Convention Center.

This is my lanyard all decked out and ready to go!

These welcome signs were on doors all over near-by restaurants and businesses!

These were our bags!  They came stuffed with stamp sets, our convention book, a glue stick, a pen. a pin, a lanyard and the traditional wrist band.  I was purple flowers, but there was no luck in it this year!  Oh well!  Maybe next year! :)

This is Coleen!  She is my upline, upline, upline, upline!  She also runs an online demonstrator site (which explains the bazillions of lanyards around her neck!) LOL.  She was handing them out to members as she met up with them!

This was what General Session looked like Thursday morning before things got rolling!  There was fun music blaring and tons of swapping going on!  There is always so much excitement in the room!

There was a cool video intro into convention and as the video came to an end the folks in the video were singing and dancing and then the same folks came onto the stage and finished the song and dance!  Too cool!  

This is Jason Dorsey.  He was the keynote speaker and he was hysterical!  I laughed until I had real crocodile tears rolling down my cheeks!  He spoke about the differences in Generation Y,   Generation X and the Boomers.  Funny, funny stuff!

This is Bonnie Thurber doing her presentation.  She is one of my all time favorite presenters!

  

This is Shannon West.  She is also a favorite of mine!   She came out on stage dressed as a witch since her presentation was on Halloween!  She had great projects!

Here she is with Brian Pilling.  He was the cat to her witch!  Too cute! :)

I got to do my 5 year march across stage this time!   That was fun!  Time sure flies!

This was from our Make and Takes!  Just 3500 of my closet friends...all crafting together!  Does it get any better than that?! :)

We went to the Distribution center in Riverton for the tour.  It is such a pretty building!

This is the foyer where the employees eat their lunches!

This is from one of the rooms in the museum there.  Love all the decorations!

This is where the boxes are made...

...and this is where the orders are filled!

View from outside of the building!  Just beautiful!

This is my very sweet and funny friend, Jackie!  We are in a blogging group together and I was so happy and excited to get to meet her!  

These are some fellow SUDSOL-ers!

This is Blythe.  We met online through SUDSOL also.  She and I have some things in common that created a bit of a bond between us and after exchanging several emails and chatting with her it was a pleasure to meet her in person.  She is a little ball of energy!

More SUDSOL folks! :)

This is Linda!  She was so nice and so much fun!  We ran into her a couple of times and then spent the evening of the Party with her dancing the night away! 

After a little bit of persuasion I was able to get Coleen and Julie out on the dance floor!  We had such a great time!! The music was great.  There were tons of little desserts all over the place and the energy was over the top!  Fun, fun, fun!! :)

Here is a picture of one of the lunches provided by Stampin Up!  They also provided fruit each day and an additional treat!  One day was candy and one day was ice cream! :)

The next several shots are of different displays they had:

They had board after board of cards displayed:

This one is for my sweet friend, Kaye!  (Hiya Kaye!!!)  I went and found it first and took it's picture for her!  (She loves green!)

Theme of this year's convention was "I am..."

So, I am...

I am...

                                  
                                                                   I am...

This is a picture of my roommates and I!  We spent most of  Convention together and had an absolutely wonderful time! :)  I chose this picture, but also have the ones of us doing the Charlie's Angel poses! LOL

This one says it all!  This is how we all felt on the last day!  LOL

It is such a wonderful and amazing experience to do something like this!  You get to meet so many fantastic people and it is just so much fun!  I started throwing my change into the bottom of my bag while I was there and plan to keep throwing change into a jar to save for next year!  I have already set my countdown clock and am making plans!!  

I managed to swap all of my cards, and albums and scrapbook pages!  I got some really beautiful swaps in return!  I made lots of new friends and tried new foods!  It was AWESOME!! Until next year...

I will be back soonest with more crafty goodness to share! :)