The new catalog!

Today is the first day of the new Stampin' Up! catalog year, and I am planning my day around when I think the best time will be to hit the SU servers to place my first order. Fortunately for me, I do not NEED this stuff for my July workshop, so if I wait until early next week, it might actually be a better idea. Yeah, right.

The new catalog is GORgeous, and the first time through I got stuck in the Accessories section. I MUST HAVE every piece of paper in there! LOVE IT! The Prints Designer Series Papers, where you can get 6 2-sided designs in 16 different colors! Oh, the possibilities!

And the new Basic Gray color - YUM! I am even pondering the chipboard stuff, and that is sooo tough to Demo, since there is not enough of any one thing to go around for a group. ;-( I'll make samples and let them drool over those!

And we have a Scallop Punch! YAY! So many things that pique my creativity. One thing SU does VERY well is to coordinate not only their sets and papers with each other, but they also make sure their sets work with their punches! I made up a template last year for my Customers - a laminated 1/2 sheet of card stock with all the punches punched into it. You can use it to place over images in the catalog to see if they match up with the punch. A LOT of them do. This is how I figured out the Fancy Flexible Phrases expressions (now sadly no longer available) fit perfectly into the Small Oval Punch. That actually sold some of my Customers on both the set and the punch at the time.

The only down side of this catalog is I was not over-enamoured with a lot of the new stamps. I guess they are just not my "style", whatever that is. Sometimes I look through the new catalog and mark almost every page! Then I have to budget so I have something left to buy at the end of the catalog year...how embarassing when I already have everything I want out of a catalog and in June I have to select a free set. Luckily, this year I could select one out of the Preview catalog since I waited so long! (Great how that worked out, huh?)

So my challenge this year, outside of not buying all the papers TODAY, is being really creative and getting a few stamp sets that I can use to demo with all that PAPER. I may not be able to follow my personal rule of "buy it if you like it, not just to sell". Outside of all the flourishes, which I do like, and maybe some of the Western stuff, I may need to wait for some of that awesome SCS creativity to start showing once these sets start arriving on people's doorsteps so I can be inspired.

I am SURE I will snap out of this once I get my hands on a few of the sets myself. Who knows, I may find myself buying it ALL. It could happen. ;-)

Off to do triage on my Wish List. This could be a really expensive day.