On Saturday July 29 to Sunday July 30 we held our 35 for 35 Stampin’ Up! Demonstrator event. My co organisers Simone Bartrum and Pam Jorgensen had been planning this event since November last year. Nine months of discussions and planning! At the end of March we received the fabulous news that our event, Creative Connections, had been chosen to be one of 35 demonstrator events globally to be recognised by Stampin’ Up! to celebrate the 35th Anniversary of Stampin’ Up! We were over the moon with that news!!!!
I will break up this post into a few as there is so much to cover in order to let you see how terrific the event was. We have had wonderful feedback from our attendees and I want to share it all with you! This is Part One, Set Up.
Being a 35 for 35 event meant we had the honour of hosting one of the Stampin’ Up! Executives. We were very excited to learn that Jill Taylor, the Vice President of Sales would be our guest. We also invited Emma Parkin-Wilson our Demonstrator Development Manager for Queensland & New Zealand to attend. When she was able to confirm that this was going to happen we were thrilled! Clare Langsford the DDM for Australia, our Manager for Victoria was unable to attend as she was too well advanced in her pregnancy to travel.
We manged to get a photo of the three of us as we unloaded our cars on the Friday in preparation for setup. That is me on the left, Pam in the middle and Simone on the right.
Our venue was a beautiful blue stone railway goods shed that has been restored into an events centre by the Ballarat Railway Station. The Goods Shed was fabulous! We had access to great audio visual equipment and our AV technician for the event, Dave was awesome!
We had 115 attendees. Demonstrators were from our combined three teams, then we invited demonstrators who are direct to Stampin’ Up!, that is they have no upline, they report direct to the company. Finally we opened the event to all Australian Demonstrators. Everyone was very excited to be meeting up inperson as Stampin’ Up! was not holding any inperson events this year, only virtual events.
Here is our event space half way through our setup. We had display tables around the room perimeter, a stage and two viewing screens.
To assist us get the event up and running we had the assistance of our team leaders. Seven of them were able to assist in the planning and execution of the event. We could not have done the event with out their ideas, support and help. Here they are in a photo taken prior to doors opening on Saturday. From left to right we have Rebecca Hall, Heather McCarthy, Rebecca Scurr, Cheryl O’Bree, Rose Packer, Tracy Penn, Lynette Boehm, Pam, myself and Simone.
Here are some of the celebrate 35 years decorations and displays.
The gorgeous vases of flowers were created by Simone and featured flowers created using the Paper Florist dies. These dies featured in a lot of our displays and presentations over the weekend. Do you recognise the signs in the vases? They have been die cut from the lids of Stampin’ Up! kit boxes using the Scalloped Contours dies. Each table had a vase of flowers as its table decoration. A massive and wonderful effort by Simone! 20 vases created in total!
Our big 35 balloons marked the spot to come and sign an Anniversary congratulations card to Shelli and Sara Gardner. Another vase of Paper Florist flowers decorated this table too.
Our stage backdrop was created by Cheryl. The giant blooms were so colourful and a beautiful back drop to the stage. A wonderful effort by Cheryl! They were greatly admired all weekend.
It took us about five hours to complete setup. Our final activity in order to be prepared was filling our attendee swag bags. The style of these was specifically chosen as they would hold 12×12 cardstock easily. A terrific souvenir to have celebrating 35 years of Stampin’ Up!.
Set up done we headed off to prepare for a dinner outing with Emma and Jill who arrived in Ballarat as we finished setting up.
Head to my next post to see all the fun of our 35 for 35 event.
Happy Celebrating!
