stampsandbagsandsuch: designs and thoughts by laurel ross: Beadfest Philly Summer Edition!!!!

We headed out to Philly again last Friday for the biggest bead show of the year!!!!

First stop, Abigails!!!!

We got to Philly and the boys had sent us an SOS for coffee since they had driven through the night, so we grabbed them a whole box and smuggled it into the show in my bag!!!

Of course, we had to take the pre-requisite selfie once we arrived at the show!

And then we made our first stop, the boys! Of course!!!!!

They were really busy when we got there, so it was a quick hello and on to the show!!!!

Our second stop was at this booth that Alison had suggested. They were doing a show hop, where several artisans had planned a project that you pay a flat fee, pick out your components and assemble the project. SO COOL!!! And we had SO much fun!

After that, we shopped until we dropped. I wanted to take a nap sooooo badly! Look at my eyes!!! Dry and tired!!!!

It was 5 intense hours of beads, beads, beads. If you can dream it, it was there!!!

We did get to meet a lot of the artisans of the art bead section and it was a ton of fun! There are so many talented folks out there in the world! One of our favorites is Candie Cooper. She does a lot of live videos on Facebook and is super excited about beading, and techniques and really cool projects. I'm not gonna lie, we did kind of stalk her, but it was worth it to put a face to our names and give her some love!!!!

Here was the one of us going to see the boys. We just HAD to re-introduce her!!!!

I think I still have some star struck-ness going on. She did a video on Sunday to wrap up the show and I kept commenting, go here, show this, the things you are finding are so cool, how did I miss THAT, hahahahaha! I think she thinks I am nuts! Maybe, but I love me some Candie!!!!

Anyways, I didn't get to go through my loot until Sunday. But when I did, of course I took photos!!!!

Here you go!!!!

And yes, I bought this amazing African basket! The lady was SO cool- she hid it at the bottom of her pile and when I came back to her booth several hours later, she was like- here, I hid it!!! So I HAD to take it home!!!!

Here is my loot....

It doesn't look like a ton of stuff, but this is my 'I use this bag for traveling and toting my life around with me' and it is one of my favorite things EVER from The Black Bunny Boutique!!!

See what I mean??? That's a big pile of stuff to carry around all day!!!!

So here it all is, vendor by vendor. I won't bore you with details of why I chose what, and if you like what you see, all the contact info is on the business cards. Enjoy!!!!!!

(This was our art bead hop necklace)