Hi!

This past weekend I’ve been busy visiting the Stempel-mekka fair in Hagen, Germany, along with my husband, Stuart. This is the third time I’ve visited, and I was SO happy to meet up again with my German and Austrian stamping friends that I haven’t seen now for two years.  A big “hallo” to Regina, Moni, Betty, Silke and their ever understanding husbands Klaus, Ludwig, Sepp and Dirk!

Saturday morning was an early start after a *very* short night’s sleep.  The previous evening we had flown from Geneva to Dusseldorf, then drove to Hagen to meet up with my stamping friends. Of course we just HAD to chat, until finally at 2.30am we headed off to our hotel nearby.

Heidi waits patiently in line with Moni

The calm before the rush!

Once inside I threw myself into the crowd and managed almost instantly to “find” 5 MS border punches and 2 MS snowflake punches and various patterned papers So much for my “I don’t really need anything” the night before! lol

Once I got over the first wave of  “oh I MUST have this”, it was fun to tour the show and see our stamps in stores.

Saturday got very busy and really quite crowded.

About lunch time lots of visitors met up with their stamping groups outside, for lunch and of course proudly inspecting the contents of their shopping bags.  For me too it was time to catch up with a friend…. our lovely Jay Jay, full-time DT member and challenge coordinator here at Stampavie. This is the first time that Jay Jay and I have ever had the chance to meet in person and honestly you should really see her cards in real life, because pictures just don’t do them justice. Jay Jay gave me a cute bracelet charm made from stamped shrink foil, her fabulous tag with a Tina Wenke image on it, and a lovely country-style bowl filled with….. arghhh my hipps worst enemy …..chocolate!  I SO MUCH love to eat chocolate, but I also try to stay away from it.  The reason you don’t see a picture of the chocolate is because I couldn’t stay away from it of course !! Thank you so much, Jay Jay!!

Heidi and Jay Jay snatch some precious minutes together

During the show I had the fortune to meet up with some of our customers and I very much enjoyed getting to know them personally.

Jacqueline from Cute Cards and Stuff. Jacqueline was helping Karin de Graaf from Stempelstudio on her booth.  So nice to see stores working together!

Jessica from Stempelbar in Berlin was just wonderful!  She’d been giving demos all day, non-stop, and was always so friendly and cheery.  You’re a star Jessica!

Marga and John (off camera) from Hobbystempels.nl came all the way from Holland on Sunday just to meet up and it was SO nice to get to know you guys.  We spent almost all afternoon strolling around the show and chatting.  Love you guys!

I wish I had managed to catch everyone on camera, but sometimes they were just so busy.  A big hi to everyone else that I was lucky enough to meet up with, including Susi from the Stempelfee shop and Dani from Creavil.de. A big hug to you guys too, it’s been lovely to meet!

I hope to see all of your again soon, and if it isn’t in Europe, then let’s make it at CHA Anaheim! (wink) !

xoxo