CHA, it was good to see you

We thought that after a year of being in business and not doing any marketing or anything it might be a good idea to let the world know about us. CHA Anaheim seemed like a good place to start. It is, afterall, supposed to be like the biggest scrapbooking and craft convention in the world, right?

When you become a CHA member they send you all these scary documents that talk about the show rules and stuff. One of the weirder ones says that unless you can set up your own booth by yourself (1 person) without the aid of anyone else and without the use of any tools in under 30 minutes you have to hire a teamster union dude to help you and you have to pay them like $100 an hour (or more!).

Now, we're not cheap by any means, but we are a little company (just 2 people) that pays for everything in cash. Plus it just seems wrong to pay somebody that much money to pop a few screws into some wood. What can you do.

So after a few visits to Ikea this is the set up we came up with. No tools needed and everything went up in about 10 minutes.



Pretty lo-fi, but since we are new exhibitors anyway, they stick us down in the dungeon with all the other newbies in our own special section. Next year we get to be upstairs with the grownups. Oh, and the funny thing is that nobody was going around making sure we were following the silly rules anyway. I guess it is an honor system!

Here Martin of The Pink Donut preps me for a video interview. Wicked embarrassing.



You can see the interview on their site or right here...



Do I really sound like that? Seriously, it's like I'm still 14. Anyhow, Martin and Martine are both super rad! Check out The Pink Donut and you'll see what I mean.

Lots of rad people stopped by to say hi. Some old friends and some new. This is Chantel Mernickle of Treasured Memories and her awesome family. We love these guys! They are loads of fun. If you're ever in Edmonton, Alberta stop by their shop and pick up some BAM POP!



Martine was super sweet and gave me a copy of issue 10 of Scrap! Magazine, one of my new favorite publications from Holland. Actually, I don't read dutch so well, but I like to look at the pretty pictures.



There are some nice features on BAM POP in this one. And check out our homegirl, Fauve van Maanen, on the cover! She has some bad ass layouts in the issue including this one. It's our favorite ^__^

chipboard: concept to product

We had this idea to make some nested comic bubbles. Jen has been wanting to do something on chipboard for a while, so this seemed like the perfect medium for the nested bubbles.

Once we knew what shapes we wanted to make, we drew them up in illustrator and sent them off to a company that specializes in making dies for cutting these sorts of things. While the die was being worked on, I got busy drawing.


Here is the digital art.




Since the die line can't change, you are stuck with one set of shapes, so we thought it would be fun to do a variant colorway to get the most out of our die.




And this is how the final product turned out.




Ready to be used in scrapbooks or collages or whatever!