Crafting High, Part 1

I woke up last Saturday feeling very excited about that afternoon’s craft soiree. I’ve been hyped about it since last week and finished making my giveaways 2 weeks before to focus on new quilling projects. All that was left was stringing them and attaching tags. Near mid-morning, I was agonizing over my tag design and when I said, “screw it!” and headed to our printer, the electricity went off in our house.

I decided to wait it out, since we sometimes have flukes with brownouts. Past 10 AM, there was still no electricity and I was filled with remorseful mental anguish: “why did I not print it as soon as I made the design???” Our househelp told me that it will only last til “alas-dose” so I decided to wait it out since I went through all the effort of making it pretty.

Turns out, it wasn’t “alas-dose” I heard but “alas-dos”. I honestly have a problem with the Spanish language. When I try to count from one to ten I switch to Chinese instead: uno dos tres cuatro singko liu chi pa chio shi. I hurriedly packed my crafting tools plus some origami paper and paper punchers. I commuted from Valenzuela to Makati silently cursing Meralco, jeepney drivers who wait in the middle of nowhere for nonexistent passengers, buses who swerve from one lane to the other and slow pedestrians who text while walking.

I made it to Pipino Restobar with minutes to spare so I hand-wrote the tags myself.

Whew!

I managed to socialize while writing, punching and stringing my giveaways in record time. Oh, there was food too.

The Buffalo Chicken skin is something to look out for in Pipino

Yummy, yummy food. I honestly couldn’t stop eating and it was only the strongest form of restraint that kept me from grabbing the plate of oysters.

I met Patricia, who was into paper-cutting. In the world of modern die-cut machines, paper cutting is pretty much like hiring a ninja instead of a trained gun. It has all the finesse, intricacy and old world charm. That didn’t stop my mind being blown with a sample she brought:

Squees all around

Giveaways were passed all around, and my loot bag was very full and happy that day.

New stash of crafty stuff!

I won another notebook from Lorra during the raffle! Shameless push: I found her notebooks amazingly durable. I got one soaked with water yesterday when I was careless and bumped the table that had a cup of water. But I didn’t notice that until an hour later and found the front wet with the design ink saturated to the table. Ugh. I left it to dry, resigned it to its fate to being ugly because of my clumsiness. But lo and behold! Except for a little curling, it still looked as good as new!

One last round of squee: I also met Imana, who spent 4 hours knitting each one of her tomato giveaways. Sadly, I wasn’t in her group so I didn’t get a tomato, but we both agreed that kids, especially nieces and nephews, can be the only biggest fans of our craft during family gatherings. She showed me her latest project which she plans to give to her niece:

I wish I was her niece!