Whew!  Turns out when you are sharing a convention hall with 6,000 of your friends, the lines get really long! I knew it was going to be a busy day, but I wasn’t prepared for how much longer everything takes when you have so many people there. 

But we had a lot of fun, saw some great inspiration, traded a ton of cute swaps, got freebies, and wore ourselves out.  

I thought I would share the highlights of the day so even if you weren’t able to be there in person, you could get a feel for what it’s like.  Then if you want to see lots of details, I’ll be posting all my pictures to my Facebook page over the next few days. 

Wandering Salt Lake City

This year I have a number of members of my Fun n’ Crafty stampers group join me at convention, and so I created a packing list checklist and shared it with everyone before we left.  I thought it would be really handy to use while packing for convention, and it was…. but who was the smarty pants who forgot her notebook and water bottle.  YUP! That was me.  So as we wandered downtown while I picked up those items, it was really cool to see Stampin’ Up! logos everywhere!

Visiting the Home Office

I always like to visit the home office in Riverton each year.  They bus us out there and we get to see what the offices are like and chat with staffers and demonstrator support.  It looks like a FUN place to work!

This is the entryway:

And if you can see the people behind the banners, that is the line to get in to the Legacy Museum – a really cool room where some of the setups that are used as the photographed settings for the catalogs as well as tons of samples, history (the first catalog is on display!), and inspiration!  For example:

(PS – If you have your holiday catalog, this table and place settings should look familiar! )

Opening Session

Finally by 4:30 everyone was lined up around the block and starting to pile in to the general session stage to get ready for opening session.  It was a fun look back over the last 25 years of SU history and then a talk about the theme this year “Be the Difference”. 

Here is my group waiting for session to start

We all got cute bags with lots of goodies inside!

And of course there was lots of demonstrations and inspiration on stage!

Opening Night Social

Then the night ended with lots of partying and more demonstrations, kareoke, a service project, and lots of swapping!  The lights were low and the room was packed so I didn’t get as many pictures last night.  But lots more coming today (and I have more pictures from day 1 I’ll be posting on Facebook later today)!

Whew!

Alright, now off to day 2!  Share more soon!