It’s a Busy Time in the Stampin’ Up! Year!

Aloha, all!

     If you're wondering where I've been, I've been in my Craft Room getting ready for the new Stampin' Up! Catalog – which is just a week away from being published! Yay!!!

     So two things have been going on, with many steps involved in each:

• First, I have been clearing retiring Stampin' Up! products out of my shelves, drawers, closets and other places where I store my supplies. Here's evidence of one part of that process:

     This is all that's left of my stash of 12" x 12" Designer Series Papers from the Stampin' Up! 2017 Occasions Catalog. Yes, they're all cut up into pieces that will fit on the front of an A2 sized greeting card. Those cards are 5-1/2" x 4-1/4" when folded, and these pieces of paper are 5-1/4" x 4", which leaves a nice margin of the card base around the paper. That size is also fairly easy to cut and I end up getting 6 card front pieces from each full sheet. Of course, much of what I had left weren't whole sheets of paper, but they were still easy to cut.

     Today I finished cutting all the left over papers from the Stampin' Up! 2016-2017 Annual Catalog, and organizing all my 6" square "stack" papers into piles. I have a total of 4-1/2 pounds of paper cut up and bagged for my sale of retiring products (which will be in late summer/early fall).

     Everything else, including my retiring stamp sets (I'm keeping three, two of which I'll be using in a scrapbooking project next month), ribbons and other embellishments, are already packed away in boxes to be stored until I get them ready to be sold.

• The other part of this project is studying the NEW Stampin' Up! catalog to determine what I should be buying to demonstrate here and in person over the next year. I think my list is pretty well complete.

     These two projects go hand in hand, of course. My Craft Room is cleaned up and ready for the new product shipment! It may not look like this by Wednesday as I do plan to do a bit of crafting with products I've been able to pre-order as Stampin' Up! demonstrators can do. I'm really itching to get those other new products, though!

     In case you're wondering about all those punches in the storage units – those are products that I hardly ever get rid of. I've had to really retire some as I've run out of room. But these babies are really hard to find and, even if I only need one once or twice a year, it's worth it for me to keep them, and they don't take up much space. And, yes, I'm rationalizing!