I attended the Scrapbook Expo this morning, as planned, though I didn’t stay for much more than 40-45 minutes. There were plenty of booths in the exhibit hall — enough to actually make me dizzy, what with all the colors and stuff to look at — but a lot of it was just stuff I’d already seen at local scrapbook stores or online.
I did manage to find a large cutting mat for the Coluzzle templates, after not having seen any in local stores. Everyone seems to have the smaller one, which works fine, but gets tricky if you want to cut larger items. I also picked up some glassine envelopes from Clear Envelopes, and I’ll probably use those for packing up mini envelopes I make.
The only other thing I walked away with was a strong urge to research and possibly buy a custom cutting machine. Basically, they’re little machines that look like a normal desktop printers, but instead of printing ink on a page, they cut your paper in whatever shape you want. There are a few companies that make them, and a few were at the show this morning. It was really neat to see that not only can you cut things from a readymade set of shapes, but you can also create custom shapes using a graphics program.
My idea was that I could use one of these machines to cut out envelope shapes of whatever size and style. However, these things cost a pretty penny, ranging from $450 all the way up to a whopping $3000! The one that sounded ideal for me is in the middle, at about $1500, but this is really not something I can justify right now, let alone feel comfortable trying to. Maybe if I can find someone or some shop that has one I could try out, that would be helpful, but so far, I haven’t come up with anything. Just another thing to add to my wishlist and probably never buy, I guess. 
I’m somewhat curious about how many people just go to these shows to shop, as I do, since there are usually workshops or classes available to attend. I mainly just shop because the classes either don’t interest me, I don’t have the time to stay all day, or everything’s full before I could even consider going.
Anyway, that was about it from this show, at least for me, and now I know what scrapbook shows are like. I don’t know that I’d attend one again, but it was interesting to see at least.
I was surprised to see these papers, since they don’t sell them at the store in Sunnyvale, but they’re really quite lovely, made from various shades of pearlized paper (one of my new favorite papers) and with designs like bamboo and butterflies printed on them. I haven’t yet tried making envelopes from them, but it looks like they’ve made the paper a bit thinner, so that should work out well.
