Last week, the South Bay Craft Group had its last monthly meeting at the Campbell Library. Amytha, the group founder, wanted to move away from teaching crafts to just being social and crafting, so another one of the librarians at Campbell took over and shifted the meetings to Saturdays starting next month.

Going forward, the group will still be meeting, but in more of a “freestyle” approach. There will be no set monthly meetings, and the plan is to drop the structured lessons we used to have. The new meetings will depend on who suggests a meeting, and the locations and times will vary. But the idea is that you just bring something to work on and come hang out with everyone.

Our first “freestyle” meeting will be this Thursday evening at the Mission College Starbucks in Santa Clara. If you’re in the area and want to join, just bring a craft project with you and stop by around 7:30pm. I’ve posted about the event on Craigslist and Yelp, and Chel (another SBCG member) has also posted to Facebook, so you can go to any of those sites for more info.

I stopped by the rubber stamp convention this weekend, though I didn’t stay too long. I usually just go to stop at the Hanko Designs booth, and to walk around and look for a bit. There were a few new vendors, including The Paper Palette, but the show is gradually getting smaller each time I go.

I ran into someone from the craft group while I was there. She explained that she’d missed the last several — as have I — but was going to try to go again. I mentioned that the meetings will be shifting to Saturdays, as per someone new getting involved in the planning, and she sounded somewhat disappointed. I have to admit that shifting from Wednesday evenings to Saturday mornings isn’t exactly a smooth change, and I don’t think I’ll be able to join in then for sure. It’s a shame, though I haven’t really been doing much crafting as of late.

I did sneak in one little card this afternoon, after poking around online a bit and looking at various Japanese things. I’m very interested in seasonal imagery from Japan, and one of those items are the flat fans (uchiwa) associated with summertime. I decided to try this shape with the “quilted” washi approach, and it turned out ok enough.

It looks quite simple, but it was probably the most involved of all the shapes I’ve done, due to the curves and tiny handle. It takes a lot to wrap around curved edges, so it turned out a bit more jagged than I would have liked it. I might try it again and see if I can do better with it next time, but I’m satisfied with my first attempt.

Sadly, there’s still not much crafting going on around these parts. At most, I’ve occasionally making up batches of little envelopes for my eBay auctions, and looking through the occasional craft magazine, but I haven’t been feeling much motivation to actually come up with a new project.

I’m ok with it, for the most part, though I’m aware that this blog is collecting quite a bit of dust in the process. I’ve had some occasional “pokes” for more posts, though in more indirect ways than that sounds. I get the occasional “tag” with some topic to post about, but it’s usually on personal stuff, like weird things about myself. I’ve never really wanted to post that sort of thing here, though I’m sorry to disappoint them.

I guess I’m more drawn to doing things in person now, whether it’s talking about myself (oh, the weirdness) or crafting (if I ever do that). Which is why I end up crafting only when I go to craft group meetings or am invited to a craft day at a friend’s apartment. I was actually talking to someone at work about arranging a crafting night for a few colleagues, though I still need to find out if anyone would mind us using a conference room for that.

Speaking of craft meetings, the September meeting of the South Bay Craft Group is coming up next Wednesday, and we’re going to make lip balm, as taught by one of our regular members. I remember wanting to try that at some point, but never did get around to it. That’s probably a good thing, just from the amount of supplies it involves, and I’ve spent plenty of money on other craft supplies as it is. Anyway, if you’re in or near the San Jose area, please stop by.

The workshop for this month’s South Bay Craft Group meeting was making shrines, and you could either use a wooden box or a paper one, including making your own matchboxes. I didn’t really know what to put inside of mine, so instead I focused on making and decorating a matchbox, similar to the ones I’ve done before.

I used a scrap of cardstock to create the box, and then covered it with some origami paper I happened to have with me (for making envelopes, of course). I made the lid from a cardstock tag, then wrapped a piece of a Japanese map, more cardstock, and a bit of sparkly fiber around it.

I couldn’t decide what should go inside it, so I just brought it home in that state. Unfortunately, the box is coming undone on one end, so it might need a bit of fixing before I use it. It would be perfect for a Japanese matchbox swap though. (Not that I’ve been participating in any swaps recently.)

Speaking of Japanese designs, I went to a Japanese/Asian-themed craft fair this morning. It’s a regular event to raise money for a local Japanese-American senior fund, and pretty much everything sold there is Japanese, Hawaiian, or Asian in theme. Hanko Designs was there again, and I ended up buying a few packs of yuzen washi paper, as if I need more of that. Most of the other items being sold were handmade purses and art and things like that, but nothing really stood out at me as something to have.

I did happen to see a colleague of mine at one of the tables, as she was helping her mother sell rubber stamps. She just moved here from Hawaii and illustrates some of the rubber stamp designs, which are in Hawaiian and Asian themes. You can check them out and buy them at the Mari & Me web site.

We just had our March meeting of the South Bay Craft Group this week, and the workshop I taught went pretty well. I showed how to make the “quilted washi” cards I mentioned in my last post, based on a kit by Hanko Designs.

I brought a few examples that I’d made beforehand (see below), including a kimono card which I suggested people follow along with. There were some variations, including simplified hearts and gifts and such, but all of the resulting cards turned out pretty well.

 

I made up a quick worksheet for the class, and when I get a chance, I’m going to fix it up and post a PDF online somewhere. I have a few other info sheets for past workshops, including one on envelope-making, and I thought it might be worth sharing online if they’ll get people to try out a new craft or technique.

Towards the end of the meeting, I also did a brief “rerun” of the February workshop, which was on how to carve your own stamps. A few of our members had missed the original class, but definitely were interested in learning, so we might do a repeat of it at some point. The original class was pretty fun, since everyone got to choose their own image and take something home with them that they could reuse for other projects.

Besides preparing for craft workshops, I’ve been doing a few swaps via Swap-Bot, mostly just to keep myself making stuff, especially while dealing with a bunch of work and health things lately. It seems like most of the swaps are for small items, like the matchboxes that seem to be so popular lately. I can definitely understand why, since it’s so easy to decorate a small box like that, and if you don’t like how it turns out, you can just decorate another. I think the hard part is finding things small enough to fit inside.

These are two of the purely matchbox swaps I did, for a “kawaii” (cute in Japanese) one and a black and white one:

I’ve also made a few more of my matchbox pin sets, for both swaps and for selling on my Etsy shop. Here are the latest ones:

The first one was for a swap (following the blue and green theme for the March Coloriffic Swap-O-Rama), and the second two were posted to Etsy. My favorite of the three was the bunny one, since it’s very in tune with spring, which I’m really looking forward to, especially after having some warmer days teasing us with the chance of spring. Not surprisingly though, the bunny set sold within only two days of going up on my Etsy shop! I want to put a few more together this weekend, mostly because it’s fun to play with different color combinations, and the spring colors are really so nice right now.