The Creative Connection

 Ok, so the whole "what I know for sure" thing didn't really work so good for me. Life has been crazy! I iwll just blog normally and add a few here and there!

A couple weeks ago I went to St. Paul Minnesota to help out at The Creative Connection. My friend Stacy was speaking at it and her company Big Picture Classes was having a booth there. So I went to work the booth and have fun with old friends! I hadn't seen Wendy in so long! She and I go way back to working at Simple Scrapbook Magazine. We used to travel a lot together.

We arrived on Wednesday and we spent the evening gathering supplies for the booth and meeting up with our good friend Cathy Zielske. She took us to a yummy Chinese restaurant. It was so fun catching up with everyone.

Kayce (co-owner of BigPictureClasses), Wendy, Cathy, Me and Stacy

After a two hour trip to Target (we went to the very first Target!) we went over to Cathy's house. It was so cute. She's been doing lot's of remodeling.

Kayce, Stacy, Me, Wendy and Cathy

This convention was pretty cool. It was different than the normal scrapbook conventions that I usually go to. It was for women in creative businesses-mostly for themselves: authors, designers, crafters, artists, sewers, food writers, small store owners, jewelers, marketers, publishers, everyone blogging and some people who blog BIG…a lot of people who make things and sell them, some in a big way.  There were people just starting out, people mid-stream and people who have been incredibly successful. There were classes on different crafts and all the meals had big keynote speakers. Most of them talked about how they "made it" in the industry. They had classes on how to make your craft a business and make money from it. There were publishers there to sign up book deals and stuff.  My friend Becky Higgins made a cute video showing all the things that went on... click here to see it.

This was at a book signing. Cristina Ferrare was there and spoke one night. She has an amazing story. (if she looks familiar, it's because she used to co-host GMA and substitute for Kathy Lee and now she has a cooking show on Oprah's network!

  

This cute girl wrote a book about saving the birds during the big oil spill. The lady in the glasses is

Jo Packham, she is the editor of Where Women Create & Where Women Cook magazines.

They had a market place where lot's of crafters had booths set up selling their stuff. This is our booth! We had a photo-booth in it! It was great. People had to sign up for an account at Big Picture Classes to get a photo taken.

We had lots of fun in the photo booth!

I grabbed this picture of the market place from the house of smiths blog. It's amazing what you find when you google!

I had a great time! But as always, it was good to come home! This trip was a little long for me.