Sound Bites & Snap Shots

Meet the ladies the first Craft Swap.  From left to right—Jenni, Cynthia, Nannette, Ashley, Liz and Susan. Tiki was unable to come the the night of the swap.  Each of them was brave enough to join me when I pitched this plan at our moms’ group.  I wanted to create a crafting community and I know myself well enough to know I am pretty happy when I am doing creative things.  I posed that we would each make eight of whatever our craft was and I let craft be a term open to broad interpretation.  We would have six to eight weeks to create our items and then we would swap.  Each person would go home with seven new treasures and her own.

I was eager to see what others would bring and delighted with what I received.  Susan went first.  She has a degree in graphic design but had not done watercolor in over ten years.  She painted these irises from pictures she took of flowers in her garden. 

Tiki made each of us eight unique greeting cards.  They are multi-dimensional, embossed and beaded.  There is so much texture and detail that they might be too good to use.

Here are Cynthia’s watercolors.  She is an artist in the truest sense and usually does pieces that are much, much larger. I have seen the paintings in her house and they are gorgeous. 

Liz made pairs of embroidered dish cloths.  They are fun and cheery.  Again, here is something that is almost too cute to use.

One of Nannette’s talents is bow making.  She made these with grosgrain ribbon and they have a barrette on the back. My nieces have dibs on these already.

Ashley made us all sets of the memory game.  The tiles are made of wood that her husband cut down and her kids sanded.  She applied the scrapbooking squares with mod podge. 

Lastly, Jenni made these chainmail pendants.  Chainmail is essentially interlinked jump rings.  The last picture shows a quarter for perspective. 

I made bags which you can read all about here and here.

Here is the group photo again this time with project captions.

Jenni {chainmail}, Cynthia {watercolor}, Nannette {hair bows}, Ashley {memory game}, Liz {embroidered dish cloths} and Susan {watercolor}

There is talk of another swap and I’m already brainstorming my projects.  If you were in this group, what would you hope I would share with you?