Day 1 of the CHA Convention has been terrific. And, boy, are my feet tired!
To give you a little perspective on how huge this show is, I’ll explain the layout. It takes up three huge halls or buildings and is divided in the following categories: Scrapbooking & Paper Craft; General Crafts; Art Materials; Fabric/Quilting/Needle arts, License & Design; International; and New Exhibitors. Scrapbooking & Paper Crafts comprises about 60 % of the total area. And, we only made it thru about 75% of the Scrapbooking & Paper Craft area. So, needless to say, we have a lot of additional territory to cover tomorrow!!!
My favorite things that I saw today include:
• Tim Holtz’ “Alterations” Sizzix dies and embossing folders. All I can say is, “Wow! It’s about time!” I’m probably more excited about this than anything else I saw today.
• Tim Holtz’ 12 new distress ink colors by Ranger. He has lots of softer colors that are absolutely wonderful!
• Tim Holtz’ new “Ideology” embellishments, including tissue tape. He also has new paper!!!
• The Zutter Kutter - cuts thru chipboard, corrugated board & clipboard
• The Zutter Distress-It-All - it’s an electronic distressor that you can run several sheets of paper thru at a time. If you run it in one direction, you get a slight distressed look; if you run it the opposite direction you get a real distinct distress look.
• GCD Chip Art – lines of chipboard shapes and metal “dies” to emboss into the chipboard. Very fun!
• Canvas Kits by Quick Quotes.
• Staz O’s new metallic ink pads.
• Options new storage bags, totes & containers in new colors. They have a great bag for the Cuttlebug!
• Cuttlebugs new longer plates, 12” border dies, new metal embossing envelopes! Yea!
The most unique thing I saw today is the new Cricut Cake. Yes, you read that correctly – the Cricut Cake. It’s a new Cricut, the same size as the Expression and it’s red. It is food safe and has special stainless steel and plastic parts that make cutting sheets of gum paste safe to eat. They’re even going to have food coloring markers and sell gum paste and frosting sheets. It works with all the regular cartridges, as well as Design Studio and Gypsy. It was inspired by an actual well-known cake decorator who wanted a Cricut to cut out sheets of gum paste to decorate cakes. Learn more at:
http://www.cricut.com/cricutcake/Some of my favorite new paper lines are by: KaiserCraft, Glitz, K&Company, Donna Salazar, 7 Gypsies, Basic Grey, Little Yellow Bicycle, Prima, Bo Bunny, Cosmo Circket, and Jillibean Soup.
I really enjoyed looking at stamps by: Loralie Art Stamps, Hero Arts, Impression Obsession, Unity Stamp, Stampers Anonymous/Tim Holtz.
Other interesting information or products:
• Glue Glider is making a new removable Wall Art adhesive refill and have great glue-dot type adhesive squares.
• Tombow vellum adhesive works great when adhering transparencies. I used it today and was amazed. (And, we already stock it!!!)
So, that summarizes my first day. Stay tuned for additional information tomorrow night!!!