Craft Club marches on! On Saturday, December 6, my friend Stephanie had a turn hosting our monthly club of creativity, and we nourished both our craftiness and our bellies by designing holiday cards while eating pizza.
The Friday before last (December 5), I went down to Steph's Canton condo for a pre-Craft-Club sleepover. We were supposed to watch the first two
Home Alone movies, as I had stopped at Target earlier that day and was
de-freaking-lighted to find that they were being sold together in a combo pack for only $19.99! However, we discovered in the twelfth hour that the box set I'd purchased was in fact full of Blu-Ray discs, and not DVDs at all. #Impostors. This terrible realization led to much fist-wagging and cursing of the inventor of Blu-Rays. So, confronted with that fail, we just colored in my brand new coloring books (also purchased at Target that afternoon) and watched
The Roommate on TV till bedtime.
The Roommate, by the way, is a movie so bad that you can't really turn away. We watched the entire thing.
The next morning I ran across the street to get us some Dunkin Donuts coffees, which we sipped while waiting for our Craft Club companions (Lauren and Anna) to join us. Steph prepped her living room by covering the floor with a big white sheet to protect the rug from the glitter bomb that was about to go off. And boy did it.
Once everyone had arrived, we spread out on the sheet, surrounded by all of the supplies that Steph and Anna had bought:
- blank white and off-white cards/envelopes
- tons of embossing glitter and accompanying clear rubber stamp pad
- heat gun for embossing
- sparkly paper in christmassy colors
- scissors
- glue sticks
- stickers
- rubber stamps
- Sharpies in tons of colors
Steph turned on some Christmas music and showed us how to use the embossing materials, and we all got started on our cards. I felt like each of mine took a really long time to conceptualize before I actually began making each one. But whatever - not like we were in a rush. There's no rushing in crafting.
Check out the below pair of owls haha! The one on the left was an example card that Steph had made before we arrived, using embossing glitter on both an owl stamp and a Merry Christmas stamp. The one on the right was Anna's first attempt at using the owl stamp, and since the owl looked so drunk we suggested she hashtag it #eggnog.
I'd never embossed anything before, and though the glitter was
very messy, the end result was really cool. I ended up making four cards...
My first card was made with embossing glitter, a Merry Christmas stamp, and red, green, and white glittery paper:
My second card featured a strand of Christmas lights around the perimeter, with Merry Christmas stamped in the center. I drew the black cord with a Sharpie, but each gold light socket and each colorful bulb is individually embossed. Here's a little step-by-step:
The third card I made was the classiest, I think. Using gold glitter, I embossed the snowflake stamps, and cut out lots of different sized circles from some white and gold glitter paper. The end result was trimmed down so that the circles weren't overhanging, but I forgot to snap a picture of that!
My last card was my least favorite, but the other girls said it was their favorite that I made! I tried to split the Merry Christmas stamp into two different words, but as you can kind of see each stamp left some trace remnants of the other word in it. Mreh. The gold, silver, and red were each individually embossed.
Here's a snowflake card that Steph was working on:
And of course we can't forget about the other important aspect of Craft Club... the food and drink! Here's what we enjoyed that day for vittles:
- pizza
- holiday brownie bites
- red velvet cookies
- popcorn
- wine
- prosecco/cranberry juice mimosas
Steph's boyfriend Gerry had asked us the night before how long we'd be crafting that day, and my response was that the first rule of Craft Club is that there's no "end time" to Craft Club. With that no-limit attitude in mind, we probably spent about 5 hours playing around with our card project that afternoon. Craft Club is seriously the best.
On an unrelated note (you know how much I like my notes to be unrelated), I neglected to post a
nail polish blog last week - but it wasn't because I hadn't done my nails. On the contrary, my nails looked awesome and holiday chic, but an unexpected work project found me using my hands extensively to pack up an entire office worth of documents, and my nails were destroyed in the process. My hands and fingers were even covered in paper cuts, so my digits were altogether unphotographable. Apologies. I hope it didn't ruin your week. It certainly didn't ruin mine.
And to bring it back to a related note... you can read about our other Craft Clubs
here. :)
Do you send out holiday cards? I don't normally, but this sure gives me a good reason to.
