The day started out very early for us – we got to the venue at around 7am to begin set up. BlytheCon Vancouver was hosted at the Sheraton Vancouver Wall Centre Hotel, located in downtown Vancouver, BC. It’s a fairly central location in an area with a lot of hotels, a beautiful pubic park right in front, and easily accessible via public transit – all major selling points to us when we were deciding on a venue!

Vendors started coming in at 8am to start getting set up at their tables, and we had a small line-up forming of attendees who were eager to start having fun! Such early birds hoping to get the proverbial worm (or HANON dress, as the case may be):

We had some photo displays set up for people to take photos, and some included props and stands or chairs so your own dollies could join in the fun! My favourite had to be the set up for the Vancouver 7 Kenner Blythe dolls. In the back is Lillian, Primrose, Heidi, and Chunk. In the front row and sitting is Dusty, Hayley, and Audrey. The fun thing about these dolls is that they were all originally owned by the same woman, and now they’re all owned by members of the Vancouver Blythe Bunch (what we call our local doll group).

Click to read more of this entry.

Saturday, August 8th was the pre-meet and pre-BlytheCon Vancouver dinner – both kindly spearheaded and organized by Kimberly/Smitten Kitten. It was super fun, the pre-meet was at the Jack Poole Plaza at the Vancouver Convention Centre in downtown Vancouver, BC. It’s home to the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic cauldron, it overlooks the water and it’s just a delightful place in general. Click to read more of this entry.

So this past Saturday was the pre-meet for BlytheCon Vancouver (there was also a pre-BlytheCon Vancouver dinner that was kindly organized by Kimberly C. – and we took over the majority of a Cactus Club Cafe in downtown Vancouver), and Sunday was the main event in which I got very little sleep before hand, got some sugar to keep me going, and the food was amazing. I heard so many people rave about the food! I will share photos from the weekend and recap the events on Wednesday because I’ve been busy, umm, catching up on sleep. I slept in until about 9:40am this morning when I remembered that I was supposed to meet up with some fantastic people who were still here for a while longer.

The Pavilion Ballroom at the Sheraton Vancouver Wall Centre Hotel
the day before when hotel staff were setting up!

Thanks to everyone who came to BlytheCon Vancouver, and safe travel for those heading home!

Are you tired?

You don’t know it, but I have been up since the crack of dawn today. (A possible exaggeration as I wrote this nearly a week ago…) But I will have been at the Sheraton Vancouver Wall Centre Hotel in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia since 7am today. There’s just no rest for the wicked! Or the BlytheCon planner.

If you’re not in Vancouver and hanging out with us in the biggest Canadian Blythe party ever… You’re missing out! We do have a livestream that is being hosted over on Ustream.tv. You may recognize it as it was used at a few previous US BlytheCons.

»» BlytheCon Vancouver Livestream is LIVE starting at 10am ««

If you are in Vancouver, be sure to find me! I’ll be one of the people at the Registration table until 11am, and then afterwards I’ll be wandering around the venue making sure things are going smoothly. I will have some animal ears on, so I should be pretty easy to recognize! If you do see me, mention BlytheLife and I may have some goodies for you!

I will have lots to share with all of you next week about the event. In the mean time, I will be running on sunshine & adrenaline!

I can’t believe it’s finally here!

On August 9th, 2012, I created and shared this simple little image after talking to Juliet about the idea of hosting a BlytheCon in Vancouver…

And now it’s just grown into so much more.

Literally 3 years to the day, it’s finally coming true. It’s all grown up and ready to be shared with the world. I can’t begin to tell you all how overwhelmed with BlytheCon planning I’ve been, and it hasn’t been easy at all because there’s just so much time and energy that goes into an event of this size. We’ve had so much support from family and friends. There’s been ups and downs, but we’ve had a pretty solid team working to make this day the best it could possibly be.

I’m so excited that it’s finally here, and it’s a vision that has been realized. We’ve received words of encouragement from BlytheCon organizers the world over, and we’ve had so many donations that have just poured in, it’s been crazy. All for the love of Blythe. It is truly an event organized by the fans, for the fans, of Blythe.

(Luckily our graphics got a lot better after Chun of Puppy52Dolls got on board. Our convention would be a sore sight to behold without her magic and if we were all stuck with my Photoshop work.)