Hello from St George, Utah! I’m here with 125 of my demonstrator friends being spoiled by Stampin Up for a few days. Founder circle is a retreat for the top 100 demonstrators in U.S. And Canada. It’s something special and actually the last year for it so we are treasuring every moment.
We take over the whole hotel, just us, for 4 days! It’s bliss and full of chocolate, stamping and lots of chatter as you can imagine!
We arrived late afternoon Wednesday and I immediately headed to my room to see the personalized name plaques:
And then down to the hospitality room to see all the stamped vignettes and treats:
In the evening we had to find our team, based on the name on our badge. We are the Sunglasses team and what a fun table we had! Top left to bottom right- Karen, Angela, Brian, Kelly, Angie, me and Lorri:
They set each place setting with an easel with a little hand painted canvas. Altho it said BBQ, it was such an elegant dinner.
Back in the room was a pillow gift of some new Products coming out in the next catalog in January- SO pretty!
The hospitality room is filled with samples using our new stamp set. here are just a few:
Every morning we go down and through the beanbag to win a prize:
After breakfast I worked on swaps and others worked on various projects along with our making takes. ( I haven’t done mine yet so I will post those later.)
Stampin Up spoiled us with this beautiful display of olives, cheese and look at real honeycomb honey, which was absolutely delicious! I think the table was so pretty more of us were taking pictures of it instead of eating 🙂
In the evening we put on our pajamas and headed down for our Share and swap night! Lots of good business tips and then the big task of getting us ALL together for a group picture! Then we formed a line of 110 people and swapped our cards. Afterwards we enjoyed these pretty refreshments:
My bag is full and I cannot wait to go through them! I’ll Grab a few off the top to show you:
This cute snowman was created by Eldonna Epp. Love the clouds!
nice card with a pretty red foil ornament and gold glitter paper behind it was created by Kim Vogel.
Love the use of the designer paper and the flower punch card, which was created by Tamra Davis.
Stampin Up gave us this cute bag to put our swaps in!
Love this elegant card with white and silver using the Jingle All the Way stamps and edge kits! Created by Karen Duke.
The icing on the cake was coming in to my room and finding this neat pillow gift:
A make up brush collection with a Stampin Up pouch. Very nice and useful gift!
Tomorrow we all take a bus trip to the Stampin Up manufacturing plant, which is always a real treat for us to see everyone who works there and get updated on all the new additions. It’s fun to see how our stamps are made and even though I’ve seen it many times, I never tire of it!
More later
Linda
Thanks for the wonderful post and great pictures! Such an inspiration and delight! Cannot believe this is the last gathering for FC. So sad! You folks truly deserve this awesome event!
Awesome post ‘n pix Linda! So happy you are enjoying FCR but it is sad that it is the last one… Safe travels! Biggo hugs!
Excited u will b sharing all those great ideas with us. Miss u. Thank God for facebook. Enjoy for all of us.
Hi Linda, love hearing all about your trip and all the cool surprises, but I am absolutely over the moon about the addition of the Wink of Stella brush!! Such a smart addition to SU’s line. Wish they’d release it before Christmas!!
Love that new flower stamp set and the paper behind it! You know I don’t usually fall in love with all their paper. Food looks delish.
Why is it the last year for the retreat? Is something else going to replace it?
Can’t wait to see the other swaps. The ones you showed were great!
Claire