Wow! The third Scrap-a-Palooza of 2009 is over, and we are thrilled with the wonderful response to this mega-crop. We had a record 204 ladies in attendance, and a record number of other vendors participating, including Lawrence Photo, who gave free prints to everyone. We gave $25 goodie bags to everyone, hosted a free card class for everyone, and taught three free mini-classes including a Christmas tag, a paper bag Halloween card, and a Halloween treat bag (using the cute "Boo-tiful" collection by the Springfield-based company Nikki Sivils, Scrapbooker (Nikki is shown with me in the above photo). Allison Davis taught the free card class, a free 12x12 layout class (with materials donated by Crate Paper!), and gave great big-screen demos on Glimmer Mist and how to vary a sketch five ways.

As I've told you in earlier posts, we had about 50 new collections, especially in the areas of Halloween, autumn, and Christmas, although most major scrapbooking themes were represented. People shopped like crazy! At times, the best way for me to describe the cash register line is that it looked like Best Buy at Christmas! We are sensitive to the fact that while we loved that image from a financial standpoint, we also hated for people to have to spend time in a line. To fix that for future Paloozas, we already will be getting a faster computer to replace the one at the store that we are doing the remote hookup from, and we'll have two laptops at Scrap-a-Palooza so that there will be two checkout lines! That should make the shopping experience quicker for everyone!

And for those of you who were unable to attend, we'll have SG transformed with hundreds and hundreds of new papers and embellishments just as quickly as we can get it all unboxed and out on the shelves! Even though people shopped freely, all of the collections are still available and intact, because I ordered extra supplies of just about everything! We don't want to shortchange our regular, loyal customers!