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.
