Know Your Fools - Laura

For the next couple of blogs I thought I'd tell you a  little bit about the Fools.

My name is Laura - I'm the Head Fool. I just turned 55, and am married to a great guy, Jerry, who has put up with a lot of my “crap” over the 20 years we’ve been together. I have one son, Jason, who takes care of our computer stuff – website, FaceBook, etc., who is getting married over Memorial Day weekend to a really lovely young woman, Irina, in Portland, Oregon. I’m also lucky enough to have 3 really nice stepkids – one son, Mike, and two daughters, Brenda (who is getting married in August – yes, 2 weddings in our family in one year), and Sandi (who is married and has given us a cutie pie granddaughter named Chloe, who is, of course, a genius) – they all live nearby in southern California.

I’m originally from Ohio but I lived in Ohio and Indiana and Pennsylvania until moving to California when I graduated from college 35 years ago (oh my gosh, that long ago)! I have a lot of family all over the country and am especially lucky to have 3 sisters who I’m very close to and a great dad. My family helps me do the conventions across the country too. If you've been to our booth at one of the conventions you've probably met a sister or niece or nephew or great niece.

I have always been a crafter – if it was available, I learned how to do it – knitting, latch hook rugs, t-shirt painting, macramé (of course), bread dough ornaments, punched rugs, Christmas light balls, paint by numbers, crewel, quilting, rubber stamping, and so many more I can’t even remember them all. 

I love to travel – especially cruising - and I love to read – romances or suspense (but only if it has a romance that has a happy ending). I also love to golf when the weather is good!

At the store, I’m the one who does the ordering and sends out the emails. At the shows, I’m the one who packs everything up (and occasionally forgets something important). I’m the organizer and bean counter too.

How Stamping Fools Got Started

This is our first blog . Thought it would be appropriate to start with telling you a little bit about how Stamping Fools got started:.

A little over 15 years ago I was invited to a DOTS party (the forerunner of Close to My Heart - a home stamp party). I enjoyed the party but didn't exactly catch on to how things worked - I bought a stamp and some embossing powder but did not have an embossing pad or heat gun - hard to make it work without those two items. Right after that another friend became a DOTS demonstrator so I had to have a party, and finally started catching on to stamping and embossing. I was thrilled by how "cute" my cards were by just stamping with black and coloring in the image - using only white card stock because that was the style! Looking back, it's amazing how simple the cards were but how excited I was to be making them.

Anyway, my sister-in-law, Valerie, also came to the party and enjoyed making the cards. We bought some DOTS stamps and went to a couple of stamp stores. About two months after we started stamping we had already spent several hundred dollars on stamps. We were talking about how much we enjoyed it and that we would probably save money if we opened our own store. That brief, joking comment grew to a discussion of how I had always wanted to own my own store in the crafting business. Within the next couple of months we came up with the name (thought of by Valerie's husband, Steve because he thought we were "fools" to do it), found a location (down the street from where we are located now), bought some stamps, and put an ad in the paper. We were now partners in our very little store Stamping Fools". We did everything wrong in starting a business but still survived!

Stay tuned for more blogs - "know your Fools" and more.

Head Fool,
Laura

Our Ladies and Men Created from Punches