Halloween Craft-a-thon

I am glad my day off moved to today as I am exhausted. We had a great time on Saturday and most of the ladies joined in and dressed up. Witches seemed to be the order of the day as we had lots of those. Probably because the hit musical 'Wicked' has only recently finished performing here. We also had an evil nurse, a dead school girl, a new mum complete with devil baby, and a crazy wig.

My wings were too uncomfortable so I took them off and ended up looking a little gothic :-)  I didn't have any purple eye shadow so I used some purple Smooch instead.  It worked fine but took quite a while to dry.  Thankfully it washed off easily!  I have attached a few photos below for you.  Lunch was a huge hit with the ladies as always, and so were the homemade cookies.

Now to clear my desk and party with my pretty paper!

Chipper

ME!

Our wall at the end of the evening.  I have more photos to add.

Do you take photos with an iPhone or iPad?

Well if you do you might like to take a look at this blog HERE.  I found this blog by chance a while ago and I have been following it.  The part I like most is the FREE photo apps.  In the past few weeks I have downloaded five photo apps for free that normally cost a nominal fee.  The current free app for this weekend is called 'IncrediBooth' and takes photos like an old photo booth.  I wouldn't buy most of these apps, but they are GREAT for free.

So if you like taking fun photos with an Apple device you might want to go have a look.  In case you were wondering, I don't know the people running the site, and I am not getting any benefits by telling you this.  Only sharing it so you can have a bit of fun like me.

Chipper

Sneak peak ...

I thought I would share with you all a few sneak peaks of our classroom decorated for our Halloween party. A customer who is coming to the craft-a-thon kindly lent us her decorations. My only contributions were the streamers, balloons and everything on the table.  Two of our DT along with a customer came along and helped decorate.  It looks great!

Enter if you dare!

Our DT wall.  The decorations were all cut on the Eclips.

The hallway to the toilets.  The classroom is the door on the right.

The entry.  The food table will be on the wall to the left.  The classroom is through the double doors.

The left side of the classroom

The table packs.  I printed off everyones names.

We dressed up our dummy in The Thinkers old ghost costume.  The Princess made the sign.

The right side of the classroom

They even decorated the ladies!

I took the photos with my new iPhone 4s!  Pretty good for the default camera.  We have a holiday here tomorrow so we are all looking forward to the day off and baking cookies!  Then the 12hr Craft-a-thon on Saturday.  

Enjoy your weekend,

Chipper

Pretty Paper Party

I was so inspired by the bonus video that Shimelle gave all the 'Pretty Paper Party' participants.  I LOVED the principle of collecting up a bunch of papers and running from there.  However I ran into a snag when I couldn't find any tone on tone papers and was finding that I was spending AGES trying just to find paper!  My old early paper collection was still stored by colour and everything that had been released since Basic Grey 'Black Tie' was stored by collection.  Once I ran out of my thin plastic paper containers they were stored in their collection packs in a few vertical paper holders.  Trying to match papers across collections was a nightmare as it took me forever to look for them.  So the solution ... spend my day off re-organising my papers!!!!!

I thought to myself that it would probably take me 2-3 hours to organise my papers and then I could start the prompt.  HAH!  I should have known better ... try 10 hours!!!!!!!  But is was worth it.  I took EVERY paper out of packs, pads, containers and places that I never knew I had papers in and sorted them by colour.  Those that were heavily themed and multi coloured also had their own pile.  I found papers I had forgotten but thankfully still loved, papers that I hated, old nostalgic papers that were flood damaged that I had saved to remind me not to hoard paper again, AND paper I didn't even know I had!!!  One collection pack really brought that home to me.  It was a pack which had a collaged paper on the front with a forrest and a deer.  It was hugely popular in its time and for some reason I bought it.  I have never even used ONE paper from it as every time I picked it up I was put off by the cover.  But open it and I found some of the most beautiful paper I have ever seen!  I was missing out on pretty paper!!!!

My patterned paper!

This is my patterned paper collection.  In it you will find papers from very old to very new, popular brands to non branded.  The containers under the table stored the 'organised' papers and now hold organised embellishments.  I then put them all into Artbin Super Satchels (like the purple one in the picture) in colour themes.  While sorting I discovered something new.  I actually have lots of tone-on-tone papers, they were all still in collection packs and books of papers.  I also learned that I really, really like the colour blue-green and I may just have to take the blue pile and the green pile and spilt it three ways.  At the moment the bluer ones are with the blues and the greener ones are with the greens.  And here they are once I put them all away in their new homes ...

The big one at the bottom holds all of my multi coloured papers.  There are no plain or themed papers in this stack.  :-)  But my real challenge is in the pink container at the top.  That one hold my MME Lost and Found papers.  I just couldn't bring myself to sort them, nor it seems can I find a way to use them that doesn't involve mini books!!!  I am looking forward to the day this class covers those difficult papers.  They are so beautiful that I could just put one photo on each page and put it in an album, or of course photo-less just so they can be admired :-)

So now that my patterned paper was sorted I decided to put my cardstock into the vertical paper holders (I think I need three more!).  Ohhhhhhhhh ... so organised now!

And then I had to sort all of the other stuff that came out of those Artbins and all of the die-cuts, rubons, alphas and accessories that had come out of each collection pack!  Those are in the old thin paper containers.  WOW, such a lot of organising!!!!  But now I feel that I may just be able to find things and USE them!  I will be quite busy between now and the craft-a-thon so it may just have to wait until Tuesday, but I am looking forward to trying out my new system.  It may seem crazy, but I feel inspired now that I am organised.  I will let you know how I get along with it.

On another note, I died my hair tonight for our craft-a-thon.  It is now a black/purple.  I actually love it, even if it is only an 8 wash rinse.  But now I have to alter my costume.  I was going to be just purple but I couldn't find any in a rinse.  My costume was purple, silver and white.  Now it needs to be purple, silver and black.  I should have time change all of the white to black as I am only recycling an old costume.  I will be a fairy with lots of home made bits and a pair of my daughters wings.  I will share pictures after the event.

Chipper

Halloween Craft-a-thon

At the shop we are having a 12hr Halloweek Craft-a-thon!  I really want everyone to have lots of fun and it isn't really just about dressing up as only about half of the 24 people attending will dress up.  We are planning on using the dummy from my previous post as a scarecrow that will hold this sign that I made today at the entry.  I have made a few more things for the attendees that I thought I would share.

When each person arrives they will find a welcome pack at their place at the table.  It includes info for the day and some competitions.  There will also be a small pumpkin 'pick-me-up-pack' for those sugar lows during the day.  They are just pumpkin boxes with a few sweets in them.

We have both cardmakers and scrapbookers (and a few that do both!) coming to our craft-a-thon.  In their welcome pack they will find a BINGO card for each craft.  The idea is that they can cross off each box as they do them, but they can only use ONE box per project.  The first person to complete any 5 in a row wins! So there will be a winner for each craft.  Here are the BINGO cards that I made (I hope you can see them as they did not like being turned into a photo).

We have all sorts of other mini competitions planned and a few of us are decorating the room on Wednesday.  It is going to look so good!  One of the other games is a guessing game.  I got the idea of the net somewhere but it is great to help people new to crafting learn the names of some of the tools of the trade.  We are putting 12 random craft items into paper bags.  Each bag is then labeled 1 thru 12.  Everyone can feel the bags and try to work out what is in each without peeking.  I wonder if anyone will work out all 12?  I still haven't even decided what 12 items to use!

So lots to get done around here by Saturday morning.  The LOML even cooks them all a hot lunch!  We cheat for dinner though and get in pizza.  And I have promised them all that I will bake them Black Eyed Susans for morning tea.  There are some wonderful ladies coming and I am sure we will all have a great time.

Chipper