Lakewood Etsy Craft Party 2011

The Etsy Craft Party in Lakewood, Ohio was a lot of fun tonight.  It was a nice combination of upcycled paper crafts, meditative drawing, and good company!

The Zentangle ladies were there explaining the meditative qualities behind Zentangle and how to do it. Below are some examples of Zentangle.  Unfortunately, I didn’t get any really good close ups of the intricate designs, which are truly stunning.  The idea is that you brake your piece of paper (or tile) into smaller sections and concentrate on filling that section with a pattern.  It’s more about the process than the finished product (though the finished product is really cool) and it’s supposed to be very relaxing.

In addition to Zentangle, I was teaching how to make several upcycled paper projects, which included the origami gift boxes with bows and tags shown above.  The box itself is made using card-stock weight junk mail, while the bow is made out of glossy adds, and the tag is a bit of card board packaging like from a cereal box.  To watch the Etsy video that taught me how to make the origami boxes above click here.

In contrast to the Zentangle table, serene and contemplative was exactly what my crafting table wasn’t tonight!  Their was glue, little scraps of paper, scissors, skewers and every other supply that I brought in a big mass of confusion, helped along by my first two students of the night; a set of brothers, one seven and one four.  Unfortunately, I didn’t get any pictures of these two little guys because, as you can imagine, my hands were full.  I did however, get some shots of most of the other people who made gift boxes with bows and tags, so here they are…

I was also prepared to teach paper bead making tonight, however, that pretty much went out the window after my first two pint sized students.  Note to self; paper bead making should be done by persons 10 and over.  I wasn’t really prepared to teach small children at this event, I didn’t have any crafts appropriate for children their ages.  I tried to make it work anyway with the paper beads but it didn’t go very smoothy.  Here are some beads I made earlier as examples.  For a really great video tutorial on how to make these click here.

Therese (left) is the owner of Keyhole Gallery, the location for this fabulous event!  Therese was teaching how to make origami pendents today, but unfortunately I didn’t get any pictures.  I really wasn’t on the ball today.

This was a really great get together and their is talk of us doing this again sometime in the near future, probably this summer!  I hope that we do and generate even more interest and have more people come.  It’s such good energy being around other creative people.

Just for fun: personalized cereal box

Yesterday was my brother-in-law Joe’s 17th birthday.  And what better birthday present is there than the gift of a personalized cereal box?!

It all started a couple of weeks ago. My husband Jon had just started working at Trader Joe’s and was buying all of our groceries from there. Their food is awesome by the way, in case you didn’t know.

Anyway, my other brother-in-law, Jake, was over at our house and noticed a box of Joe’s O’s on top of our fridge. He immediately came up with the idea of putting Joe’s picture on it and giving it to him for his upcoming birthday. Actually, his original idea was to put both a picture of Joe and a ferret on the box. The ferret didn’t make it.

So earlier last week I found a picture of Joe on Facebook, then Jon scanned the front of the cereal box and used Adobe Photoshop to superimpose Joe’s face on the front and place the Os on his tongue. We went to Staples to have them print out the image then Jon pasted it to the box. The print is just a bit smaller than the box, but it’s still pretty convincing because the colors match pretty well.

Joe LOVED his present!

Do you have a fun DIY birthday present that you’d like to share? Link to your picture/story in the comments below or post it on zween’s Facebook Page.  And as always, make sure you like zween on Facebook to receive updates on future posts!

Happy 17th birthday Joe!

Geek Craft + Birthday Extravaganza

Yesterday was Jon’s 30th birthday and I wanted to make it special even though our cash flow is quite low at this time.  Since Jon grew up with playing Nintendo and thinks of that time in his life so fondly, I decided to do an “old school” Nintendo theme for the occasion.

It all started last year when I made him a coin purse featuring a Mario star.  He liked the purse, but it wasn’t quite long enough to hold his credit card and ID, so he suggested that I make him a new one and even drew out the design he wanted; a ruby from Legend of Zelda.  So the first thing I did to prepare for his birthday this year was make the coin purse that he had requested so long ago.  I used some bamboo yarn and the tapestry crochet technique to execute the design.

Looking around my studio, I brainstormed about what else I could make for him using materials I already had on hand.  A couple of weeks ago I found someone’s stash of wool crewel yarn in awesome 7os colors at a thrift store.  I also had a bunch of plastic needle point canvas scraps given to me by my Grandma Virgie a few years ago.  So I put two and two together and came up with making….you guessed it; coasters! (Jon, however, has declared these babies too precious to set a coffee cup and wants to have them framed.)

While looking online for source images to use for the coasters I came across some images of Mario made out of Skittles.  That’s when I got the idea to put a design on Jon’s cake using M&M minis.  The design fit really well on the 8″ cake.  The side of the cake is a play on the phrase “1 up.”  In case you’re wondering, no, M&Ms do not come in packages of single colors, you have to sort them yourself.  It actually didn’t take that long to segregate the entire bag, then once I was done I played around with which image I wanted to use.

Along with the change purse and coasters, I gave Jon some Burt’s Bees Saving cream and deodorant.  The only thing left to do now was wrap it all up and make a card.  Again I looked around my studio and found an oatmeal canister we had recently emptied.  I removed the label and replaced it with some white paper, then used a glue stick to paste on more pixellated Nintendo images.

On the card I did a line drawing of an old school Nintendo controller. (Incidentally, when I used to work as a caricature artist and some kid wanted to be drawn playing a video game, I would always draw them with one of these controllers, as I never really liked video games but used to play the original Nintendo once in a while with my older brother.)  The inside of the card reads, “Jon, you always know how to push my buttons.”

Jon, I hope your birthday was a memorable one!

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