Founder's Circle Day Three

Day three at Founder's Circle started bright and early.  After another delicious breakfast buffet we were on the bus for the hour long drive to Kanab. 

The wonderful employees at our Kanab facility give us a warm welcome (I always get emotional when they do this at convention too.  Stampin' Up! has the most incredible people working for them and I appreciate them so very much).

This is the home of our 80,000-square foot manufacturing plant.  This facility is not only beautiful but it is also where all our stamps our made, along with our ink pads and other Stampin' Up! products. I've really been looking forward to our tour here so I took a ton of photos:

Your stamps start here, my friends, as a big roll of rubber!

The rubber is then cut to size.  

 

 

These are the image plates that the rubber pieces are burned onto.

   

The rubber that was cut earlier is then placed on top of the plates and placed in the oven to bake for about 6 minutes or so.  There are quite a few ovens here so many stamps are 'baking' at once.

Once the stamps are out of the oven they need to be cut apart.

Our wonderful tour guide, Alan, shows me how to add the stamp 'pages' to the foam backing.

My turn to cut! (I'm really diggin' this whole process!)

Next up is perforating each image in the stamp sets so that we can just 'pop' them out when we get them in our orders.

Once the stamp 'page' is positioned in the machine you hold onto the handles, bring the machine lid down,  press the buttons on the handles and "POOF!" they're cut!

 

The wood blocks are ready to be placed into the clear stamp cases.

Voila! Stamp sets ready to come to your house!  We were given a set to take home ourselves too! Did you notice that everything here is done by hand? Nothing is automated.  So now you know that your stamp sets really are hand made - I think that's super cool.

Empty foam pads have been mixed with Cherry Cobbler ink and are ready to go into their cases!

The cases have been labeled and now they're ready for a bit of glue and then the ink pad itself.  Next, it's put into plastic and then zapped in a oven to shrink wrap and it's ready to come to your house too!  We also watched how the bottles of ink refills are made and were even given a whole set to take home!

 

This is where are gorgeous card stock is cut and packaged.

Once the card stock has been cut it's sorted and ready to be shrink wrapped, labeled and then shipped out in your orders.  Do you recognize these colours? It's our new 2013-2015 In Colour collection!  We were given a package of Coastal Cabana card stock to take home too!

 

We even toured Shelli's gorgeous apartment, located on the same premises. In case you don't know, Shelli is the co-founder and CEO of Stampin' Up! and we all just love her to bits.  Unfortunately, Shelli was recently in an accident and wasn't able to join us at the retreat this year.  You can visit her wonderful blog at www.soshelli.com

Gorgeous, right? I love Shelli's style.

Even Shelli's laundry room is stinkin' cute!

Sara Douglass, Shelli's daughter, was on hand for the tour of the apartment.

Time for lunch!

This delicious meal filled me up for the entire day! Mmmmm!

After our fabulous tour we enjoyed a yummy BBQ with the wonderful employees and then got back on the bus for two more stops before coming back to the hotel.  The first stop was at a lovely park that had a playground with our recycled rubber as the ground! Super cool. 

Our Canadian group take a photo opp at the park!

 After a relaxing time there we continued a few more minutes down the road to a place called "Denny's Wigwam" for a bit of shopping.  By the time we got back to the hotel we were tired, but happy campers.  But our day didn't end there.  We were back on the buses by 7pm to go the Tuacahn Amphitheater to see Mary Poppins.  The Theatre is set amongst 1500-foot spectacular red cliffs and it's positively breathtaking.  And the setting was the perfect place for Mary Poppins.  



What an incredible production - I loved every moment of it.   By the time I got back to my hotel room I was so tired I almost didn't see my beautiful pillow gift!  

Today is a 'free' day to do whatever we like so my friends and I have rented a mini van and are off to the Zion National Park.  The weather is hot and sunny so I'm looking forward to enjoying the great outdoors today (especially since we've already had frost back home!).  Tonight we'll be whisked away somewhere for our final event and dinner.  I'm sad this amazing retreat is almost over - I've made the most incredible friends here and I know I'm going to miss seeing them.  Speaking of friends, they're waiting for me for breakfast so I've got to scoot! 

Enjoy the day and HAPPY STAMPING!