This year, I'm very excited to be attending Wonderland of Play, in Bruges Belgium, on June 4th (2022). I purchased my Early Bird tickets back in 2021, and tickets include admission, a goodie bag, lunch (can you believe that?!!), a tea party, and a canal boat tour of Bruges fabled canals. That is a lot of bang for the buck!
I am so thrilled to be attending a doll show in Europe again, I can hardly contain myself. I'm also very excited that this one is Blythe heavy, as my love for Blythe has continued to grow over the last year. Attending a show like this requires careful budgeting and planning. so that you don't leave disappointed or in debt. Because of this, I've been trying to keep my eyes on the prize, not buying new dolls until I attend the show, so that I'll have the maximum amount of dolly dollars available to spend. This part has been very difficult (and we're only in the 3rd week of January) - but I came up with a solution for myself to stay motivated. You see, this week, I knew I would be holed up in the house for days on end for two reasons: 1. COVID is extremely bad in our area right now and 2. We have snow!! I've been wishing for snow for so long, we haven't had any since 2017, and I woke up this morning to a beautiful blanket of snow.
Ice has continued to fall throughout the day, and there's nothing cozier than to sit at home, in your favorite sweatshirt, holding your favorite dolls, and plan your dolly future! And maybe have a nice cup of tea while you're at it.
My motivation solution was to "window shop" at each of the Wonderland of Play vendors, to get myself hyped up for the show in June! For the past 3 days, I have been compiling links to the Instagram accounts of the attending vendors, filming video segments of each vendor's wares, and making mental notes about what items are must haves, really wants to haves, would like to have, etc. This process was the most complicated and took the most time of any YouTube video I have created thus far, but I'm very happy with the result and I think it's going to be an excellent tool for myself to go back and "browse" the different vendors, to remind myself why I need to save money. It will also help build my excitement for the event, and I hope it does the same for you!
The video is one massively long video, but if you check the video description, I've included timestamp links to each of the sections. This way, if you need to digest the video slowly over multiple watching sessions, it should be easier. Please check the video out here.
I've also created a PDF file of all the vendors and links to their Instagram accounts so you can check them out. You can download it below.