Phew! I made it through the heat ok for the most part. I think my brain may have melted a bit, but I’m starting to get back to normal so far, and fortunately the weather should be a lot nicer for awhile.
I’ve knocked out a few of the swaps that I had due, though I realize I didn’t take any photos of them before packaging them up. Two were varieties of paper, and since they weren’t handmade by me, I didn’t feel as compelled to photograph them. A third swap was for items that correspond to the five senses, and I did include a print of some digital artwork and a wrapped postcard, but nothing handmade otherwise.
Now, my focus is on my package for the August round of Coloriffic Swap-O-Rama, and it’s been fun to work on so far. Usually, there are one or two theme colors, but this month, it’s been bumped up to six to make a rainbow effect: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple. It’s nice to expand a bit, but then it makes me want to include more items, just to cover all of the colors.
For my handmade items, I decided to stick with paper, mostly because I didn’t feel like sewing, and I made an envelope/card set (the envelopes are primary to me, what can I say?) and more “square” postcards.
I’m really pleased with how the postcards turned out, and I’ve received a lot of nice comments from people who viewed the scans on Flickr. They’re really pretty easy to make, only requiring paper scraps large enough to cut 1-inch squares from, a bit of glue, and a postcard (4×6 inches) to paste the squares onto. I have a thing about squares, I guess, or so you’d think looking through some of my previous work. Maybe too easy, but they’re simple enough to work with.
Speaking of squares, I attended a scrapbooking workshop at the library last night, where we created the 6×6-inch accordion books. It wasn’t too difficult to follow, especially with all the components provided, but it did feel a bit too specific for me. There’s a follow-up session next week, when we’ll start decorating the books, and it seems that there is an exact order of different layouts in mind for us to create. Not that I don’t mind the occasional kit or guided instruction, but I like to have a bit more openness for projects like this. I’m more interested in learning techniques from others than in replicating the exact project they already made many times before. At the very least, now I know how to make a book like this, even if I don’t use the one I made for anything in particular.
Along the lines of teaching classes, I still need to prepare for giving a cross-stitch demo at next week’s South Bay Craft Group meeting. I have the basic supplies, but I have to figure out how to demonstrate it all, especially with something so small. Maybe everyone will have to gather around and look over me as I work, though I’m going to see if I can find some diagrams that I can use. It should be interesting at least. 
