It's a New Year

Not sure where November and December went, but now we are almost three weeks into the New Year and I still have not posted anything on this blog.  I do blog occasionally but when I do, I usually do it for the Canadian Scrapbooker blog. There is only so much time in a day.   I'm teaching university again this term in my 'free' time and just returned from CHA in Anaheim. 

Typically CHA is around the end of January, so it was earlier this year (seemed like Christmas had just ended and I was headed to the airport) and is supposed to be even earlier in January next year.  That might play havoc with the holiday season for a lot of people that need to prepare projects and displays for booths at the last minute. 
Every year the CHA show in California seems smaller.  This year was no exception, many of the usual manufacturers did not have booths, or the booths were downsized from their 'usual' display.  It is still an amazing trade show to attend - so much to see, so many crafts and colours and textures down every aisle.  Booths for other crafts and hobbies such as sewing and knitting and even cake decorating were interspersed between scrapbooking type booths.
I am getting lazy and hardly taking any photographs while I am there.  Here's one I borrowed from Cathie Allan.  The weather was quite chilly by California standards, but for us sun-starved Canadians, still warm enough to eat lunch outside. 

There was lots of scrapbooking inspiration on the show floor and many beautiful new products.  There seemed to be trends towards many companies to offer 'smash book' style of mini-albums, lots of speech bubbles, arrows, honeycomb/hexagons and mixed media.  I adored the new lines from Glitz Designs, Webster's Pages and Basic Grey.  Oh, and don't let me forget KaiserCraft.  I always love KaiserCraft.
 

 

Just love the patterns and colours of this line.

 

 

Perfect for boy pages.

 

 

 

The DCWV booth was spectacular as always.  Check out this elephant!