After spending 6 days at my parents, I am finally heading home.  I’m so happy that the Amtrak train is running.  After the ton of snow the Pacific Northwest got over Christmas, the water levels were high from the melt-off.  Then, this week it started dumping buckets of rain causing tons of flooding and mudslides, including mudslides over the train tracks!  The train was cancelled up until this morning.  Its been interesting watching through the train window at areas I thought were ponds with high water, only to have the conductor say they are actually fields that are normally dry! 

So, I’m going to try to take pictures of a couple cards I made this weekend using two more new stamp sets (Game night and Petal Pizazz).  But in the meantime while I still have internet, I thought I would share with you some of the exciting news I’m hearing about the new Spring/Summer catalog.

New Catalog Highlights:

• New Stamp sets – when I first saw the preview stamp sets, I thought “here we go again with more flower sets”.  Well, from what I’m hearing, there are a ton of cool new stamp sets and they aren’t overwhelmingly flowers!  We are getting more masculine sets, some new cute tree sets, some coffee based sets, and even some fairy tale based sentiments, and I’m sure lots more. 
• Awesome accessories – Oh man, from what I’ve been hearing, my wallet is going to be in trouble when the new catalog comes out.  There are some great new colors for the button bouquet (chocolate chip!), courdoroy buttons, bigger brads, crystal rhinestone brads,  crochet flowers, canvas die cuts, multi-color rubons, and more! 
• BigShot expansions – Stampin’ Up! is going to be expanding the line of BigShot items including the introduction of some new dies.  With the new catalog we will be getting texture plates for embossing, new shapes including a new alphabet and bag templates, plus even more coming out in a couple months.
• New Paper – I can’t wait to see the new designer paper.  I’m sure there will be lots of cute patterns, plus we will be getting black and white designer paper, and even textured cardstock.

I’m sure there are lots more goodies in store, but these tidbits have been enough for me to start buiding my list of have-to-haves. 🙂 I think it will be time for me to finally get the BigShot and I think my nose is going to be buried in the accessory section of the catty for about a day while I drool over everything. 🙂 Ok, off to try to snap some photos!