Sara's Blog

We’ve just finished up with a fantastic trip to Chicago for the CHA-Summer craft trade show. This is where your local retailer goes to buy the latest product, and where we go to show our new things. (It’s also where we shop for Paper Wishes!) Big trends from the show included lots of pirate and princess images as stamps, rub-ons and embellishments, plus glitter and flocking and lots of bird images. Our brand-new clear acrylic stamps and templates were really popular, as were our decorated and shaped brads, like our cute little Bats.

This week I’m headed to London for QVC’s Customer Appreciation event. On Monday I discovered that all 14 boxes of class kits had not arrived at the event that started on Thursday, so the first part of the week was dedicated to frantically working with our HOTP warehouse and shipping companies. Throw in a 9-hour time difference and you have even more complications. Yikes!

At any rate, I’m so happy to see my friend Dawn, and spend some time in one of my favorite cities. Then I’m looking forward to going back to Amsterdam and going on a date with Keith—it feels like I haven’t seen him in ages!

This week has been super-hectic…I think we filmed something like 4,000 Webisodes in two days! (Okay, maybe more like 14, but still!) We also filmed a DVD that’s going in the September Personal Shopper Scrapbooking kit. The DVD is over an hour and a half and I just know our Personal Shopper members will love it!

And on Wednesday we headed to Chicago for the CHA trade show! This is my 12th year at the show and I remember being soooo nervous that first time. Now we’ve got the system down pat: Classes, presentations, showing the newest items in the booth and hoping retailers will love them as much as we do! We’ll keep you posted on the most popular items as the show opens this week. Then next week I’m home for a day and off to London for the QVC London Customer Appreciation Day with Dawn Bibby. I love teaching at this event and I’m really looking forward to seeing all my UK friends—and Keith, who I really miss! He’s spent time in Geneva watching the Tour de France and I’m hoping he’s managed to get some great photos for scrapbooking!

It’s good to be back in the USA! I’ve had the best vacation this week… Mom and Dad picked me up at the airport on Monday and I got to spend the whole week with them! (My mom is the best cook on the planet.) Wednesday my sister and mom and I drove up to Sisters, Oregon, which is a gorgeous town about two hours east of Eugene, to go to the famed Stitchin’ Post quilt and fabric store. The three of us want to learn felting so despite the fact that we have no clear idea how to actually do it, we each now possess enough felting supplies, tools and idea books to open our own store. Thursday night I came up to Canby for webisode filming on Friday, then I’ll go back to Eugene for the weekend and my dad’s 75th birthday. (Yes, more great food too!) Then more filming and we’re off to Chicago for the CHA trade show. Whew! I’ve missed my family so much when I was in Amsterdam and this week has just been a treasure.

I’m also super-excited to pay Mom back for her great food with a set of our new stamps, which are the most amazing and gorgeous designs. I’ve had a prototype of the Winter Swirl stamp set since March and told Paulette I loved it so much I wasn’t giving it back! They stamp beautifully, and I love that you get so many great designs on one sheet. Love them, love them, love them!!! Check them out, if you’re a stamper you will definitely need these little guys! And check your local store for them, they’re debuting at the CHA show next week and I’m hoping store owners will like them just as much as I do!

Okay, I’ll admit I’m not a techie. In fact, Keith had to give me a tutorial on my new printer last night. So when everyone started talking about digital scrapbooking, I just stopped listening. After all, I like using my papers and supplies and doing things by hand. However, I am also faced with a lot of unscrapped photos…more and more every day! Especially since I use a digital camera—now I’ve got tons of photos stored on my computer and I’m frankly getting a little overwhelmed by them all. So when we at HOTP decided to create a website that allowed scrappers to drag and drop those digital photos onto a pre-designed layout…well, now I’m listening! And in fact, it’s really, really easy (even for a non-techie like me).

It’s called Paper Wishes Digital–and it’s exactly for people like me who love taking photos, but don’t always have the time to make a traditional scrapbook. And this is so easy…no software to buy or programs to install. Just upload your photos, drag and drop them, type your journaling and you’re set. You can get pages printed and delivered to you (I placed my order this morning!) or email them (I also did that this morning—my mom loved it!) or print them yourself (this would involve that printer I struggled with, so I think I’ll pass). Even better, you’ll get your pages done. I was really excited to get these four pages scrapped in about half an hour! That’s a miracle for me!

If you’re intrigued by this method of digital scrapbooking, check out Paperwishesdigital.com. You can also read loads of photo tips and techniques on DigitalScrapbooking101.net. Let me know what you think!