Craft Club #5: Floral Arrangements

Goodness, I almost forgot to post a recap of Craft Club #5!!!! WHAT IN THE HELL WAS I THINKING?! *Slaps self on the wrist*..... *Immediately thinks of slap bracelets*.... *giggs*

First of all, yes - I'm back from my trip to Panama, and YES - it was AMAZEBALLS. I've still been getting back into "non-vacation mode" brain, which means I haven't even bothered blogging about any of it yet or editing pictures. I'll get to it, obviously. And when I do - I suspect you'll know about it.

Anyway, back to Craft Club. In late March, my friend Kim hosted our monthly craft seshhhh, and this time we were learning some basics about floral arrangements! Fun bonus fact: Kim was super preggers at the time, but she has since given birth to a bouncing baby boy named Benjamin. I haven't officially met him yet, but I assume he's the best.

Joined at Kim's house by Abby, Jenna, and Anna, we spent a late weekend morning/early afternoon munching on brunch foods, gabbing, and arranging beautiful flowers into glass vases.

Kim had prepped for the day by purchasing a ton of flowers -  blue and white hydrangeas, cream, yellow and pink roses, green and white mums, and hypericums for accents. She also happened to have about a million spare glass vases around her home, thanks to her wedding last summer! #Recycle.

Admittedly, we spent most of the time chatting and eating. The food spread for the day was spot-on: fruit salad, 2 different types of homemade quiche, donuts, Waldorf salad... mmm!

A couple of the tricks/tips that Kim taught us...

1. Arranging flowers in 3's (triangles) makes the overall look balanced, rather than rigidly symmetrical. For example, the pink roses in the below pic are forming a triangle (even though the one in the upper right is hiding a bit!):

2. Don't be afraid to wind/weave the stems of flowers into each other. You don't need them each to stand up beside each other like soldiers. LET THEM MINGLE!

Here are all of the finished arrangements from the day.... though I can't for the life of me remember whose is whose! Mine is the only one I know for sure - it's the top-center in this picture:

Another successful Craft Club with good food, good friends, good conversation, and good creativity! I believe the next one will involve drawing/coloring/picnicking out by the Charles River in Cambridge, and I am very much looking forward to it!

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Craft Club #4: Creating Collages

I've attempted to write this blog at least five times, but it just keeps getting knocked off the table, so to speak. How's about we do this thing now, hmm? LEGGO!

On the last Sunday in January, it was my turn to host Craft Club! For our fourth meeting of the crafty minds, we spent a few hours making collages and nibbling on apps and pizza.

Before Stephanie, Kate, Kim, Lauren and Abby arrived, I set up a table in my living room and covered it with the craft supplies for the day's collaging:

• magazines
• rulers
• cutting boards
• x-acto knives
• scissors
• glue sticks
• rubber cement

Around the perimeter of the living room, I also set out several framed collages that I've made over the years. These were for both inspiration and decoration, since my place was pretty bare at the time.

Once everyone arrived, I gave the girls a rundown on the techniques that I typically use when making my own collages. Then we all just dug in and began poking through all of our magazines, pulling out pages and figuring out what kind of collage each of us wanted to make.

As usual, it was awesome to see how differently everyone's projects turned out.

Here's Kim's - her collage has some ornate gilded age details to it:

.  kim's  .

I loved Lauren's woodsy, animal- and nature-inspired collage:

.  lauren's  .

Steph's was filled with just the right amount of crafty angst:

.  steph's  .

Abby's was pretty and peaceful and seemed to fit her personality perfectly:

.  abigail's  .

Mine was just nowhere near finished by the time my guests left, because I apparently take days longer to make collages than anyone else does! Here's what I was playing around with on my canvas... and hopefully it will be completed someday.

And apparently I didn't get a picture of Kate's because it's nowhere to be found. OOPS! Sorry Kate, I'm sure yours was beautiful.

Of course, Craft Club would be a sad affair if there was no food involved, so for munchies we had:

• vanilla frosted mini-cupcakes
• carrots/cherry tomatoes/hummus
• crackers
• pizza
• soda

Kim has offered to host our next one, when she's going to show us some of her favorite tips for putting together floral arrangements. That's going to be a fantastically useful craft to learn, for sure. Can't wait to share that with you!

What sorts of crafty projects have you been getting into lately?

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Craft Club #3: Making Holiday Cards

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.

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Craft Club #2: Crochet 101

So many numbers in that title.

If you will recall (and you should), my circle of lady friends launched a Craft Club earlier this fall, because we really liked the idea of combining friends and crafts and hosting and food/wine. Our first craft session took place in late September at my friend Jenna's apartment, where we had some fun with foil and nommed on homemade pumpkin, white bean, and turkey chili.

On Saturday night, Craft Club #2 was hosted by our friend Lauren at her home in Quincy, where she gave us a fabulous introductory lesson to crocheting.

First of all, Craft Club grew this month! In addition to me and Lauren, our friends Stephanie, Kara, and Jenna were in attendance. New "members" (we're so elite) this month were our friends Abby (whose wedding I recently wrote all about here) and Kimmy! We should have hazed them somehow. I wish I'd thought of that earlier.

After lounging around Lauren's cozy living room for awhile, chatting and nibbling on stuffed mushrooms, popcorn, crackers and hummus appetizers, we moved into the dining room to dive into the crocheting. 

.  left to right:  kara, lauren, jenna, stephanie, abby, kim  .

Lauren was a fantastic teacher - patiently taking the time to teach us how to do a chain stitch to begin our projects, and then a basic single stitch to actually get our projects underway.

She also taught the more ambitious amongst us a more complicated double stitch, but I shied away from attempting that one and instead poured my focus into trying to perfect the hand movements for the single stitch. While it's not tricky to learn how to crochet, the hard part is certainly the mastery of the technique and the ability to make each stitch uniform in size and shape.  

For my first foray into crocheting, I'd chosen this sage green yarn from the bundles of yarn that Lauren provided for us. You can see in the picture below the start of what I was working on...

 

Perhaps one day it will be large enough to be a scarf? I assume that will be in about 3 years' time. 

We paused our crocheting briefly to chow down on the homemade chicken pot pie that Lauren had prepared for us. I'd also brought along some store-bought cornbread that actually tasted pretty darn good. A delicious dinner, for sure. 

While it may sound like a bit of an "older woman" thing to do, it was surprisingly fun and relaxing to sit around in a circle of crocheting women for several hours. Even with our heads down and our focus directed on our yarn and crochet hooks, we still enjoyed pretty steady conversation and laughs the entire night. It also didn't hurt that The Notebook and Hocus Pocus were playing back-to-back on the TV in the background. And time flew - before I knew it, it was after 10pm. Even then, most of us didn't leave till after 11!

Lauren had plenty of crochet hooks to not only share with us that evening at her home, but to actually let us each take home our own so we can continue what we began. So generous!

Another successful Craft Club! My "scarf" is about three inches wide now, so things are really shaping up. Next month, Stephanie is going to host and teach us how to make holiday cards, which is the perfect double-whammy of useful and self-indulgent, when it comes to crafting.

Anyone else crafting with their friends? Do you want to now??

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Craft Club #1: Fun with Foil

What do you get when you combine friends + crafts + good food + wine? You get a Craft Club. And ours just launched on Sunday night. 

My friend Steph is a huuuuge fan of crafting whenever possible (hence the coloring book session the two of us had together a few weeks ago), and she had the fabulous idea of starting a monthly Craft Club with some of our friends. Each month we'll rotate who hosts the club, and the host will choose the craft of the day.

So on Sunday evening, we met at Jenna's house for the inaugural craft sesh. Armed with 5 canvases, 1 jar of Mod Podge, an array of foam paintbrushes, 1 roll of aluminum foil, some scissors, and 2 cans of metallic spray paint, the 5 of us (me, Kara, Steph, Jenna and Lauren) went to town doing pretty much whatever we wanted.

The general idea was to cut/tear pieces of aluminum foil into shapes or strips and arrange them on our canvases, spray paint the canvases or foil pieces with metallic gold and silver, and then Mod Podge them into place on our canvases. Everyone's came out so different!

.  hard at work!  .

While we crafted, we also took breaks to enjoy the delicious white bean, pumpkin and turkey chili that Jenna had prepared for us that day in her crockpot. There were also crackers and cheese, as well as some incredible cupcakes that Steph brought from Cupcake City for dessert. Kara, who had come to the Craft Club straight from a baby shower for one of her cousins, brought with her some leftover sangria and chicken salad from the party to share with us.  I wasn't able to partake in any of the sangria or wine because of the muscle relaxers I've been taking, but I had plenty of iced tea to make up for it.

But back to the crafting.

Using different household objects as guides, I traced several circles of different sizes onto my foil before carefully cutting them out. Not fully sure what I was going to do with them, I started arranging the circles randomly around my canvas...

And here's what I ended up with, though there may be some pink acrylic accents added to this before I put it into its frame:

Steph kept hers delightfully minimal with 3 adorably perfect hearts in one corner, and the "negative space" hearts in another part of the canvas. She sprayed her canvas gold before covering half of it with foil on a diagonal angle:

Kara made a cool cave-like design with hers, reminiscent of stalagmites and stalactites:

Lauren went to town on hers, turning it into a real picture of a sunset over an ocean of waves. I love the way the texture of the canvas comes through the gold paint:

And when we last left her, Jenna had made some progress towards the look you see below... though I know she was questioning whether or not she was going to keep it that way. Who knows how hers ended up!!

This was really a perfect way to kick off our Craft Club. It was structured, yet completely laid back, the food was delicious and wonderfully comfort-foody, and we all left with a new piece of artwork.

For our next Craft Club, the plan is to meet at Lauren's for a crochet lesson, probably sometime in early November.

Who else has gotten their creative juices flowing with a random craft project recently?
Would you ever get a Craft Club going with your friends?
Got any suggestions for an upcoming Craft Club project? Share with me!

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