A CRAFTY VACATION: The Crafts We Did

I've been editing the photos from our crafty vacation, and finally have them ready to show off!

First, I'll show you a few views of the condo we stayed at:

You see the view from a few steps outside the front door, the kitchen and dining rooms, and the living room, with my bed folded down out of the wall, and the view out the living and dining room windows. It's such a pleasant place to stay!


Well known fact: I'd much rather be behind the camera than in front of it, so you see everyone but me in these photos! But the montage above shows Aunt Charlotte (in pink), my mom, and my daughter, working at various crafts.

We made gift tags, something none of us had ever done, using manila tags, magazine illustrations, stamps and ink, stickers, ribbon, and various other embellishments. We decorated and stamped the backs, too, but I'll just show you the fronts:

First three of December's tags

Second three of December's tags

Aunt Charlotte's tags

Mama's tags, with the back of the yellow one inset

My tags

We also made bird feeders from pretty cups and old light fixtures. December packed hers before I took the shots, and I didn't get to make one, but here you see

Mama's

Aunt Charlotte's

Another craft was to decoupage or decal pictures onto the glass in small frames, which we then glued to gold-painted plaques. We also embellished the pictures with glitter, dabs of gold paint, and in Mama's case, a glittery and fuzzy snowflake. A votive stands behind the pictures, and when you light the candle, it softly back lights and shines through the picture:

Aunt Charlotte's

Mama's

Mine

December's

We made hummingbird feeders from old bottles, glass tiles, and flat marbles:

And we made Cook Book Bookmarks and put together Mug Em's, which I didn't photograph, since we'd done them before. (You can see the Mug Em's from last year here, though.)

I have just one fuzzy photo of Mama's bookmarks, because I thought I'd done a blog entry on them before and was just going to point you to it. These panels are from a 1940's cook book I picked up. I copied the cartoon panels, printed some in B&W, and others with a bit of color, and we backed them with scraps of fabric we fringed at the top and bottom:


I think we got quite a lot accomplished, especially when you consider that we also spent two whole mornings thrifting. We arrived at the condo late Monday afternoon, so no crafting that day, went thrifting until 3pm on Tuesday, and until 11 am on Wednesday, crafted in the afternoons, put together lovely lunches and dinners (everyone fended for themselves at breakfast), and played cards until late every night. And December and I managed to squeeze in two swim/hot tubbing excursions, we rented and all watched The Time Traveler's Wife, and got all of the thirty aprons Mama wants to put in her Etsy shop ironed and photographed. And we still managed to check out at noon on Friday!

It was an awesome four-day week, and I can't wait until next year so we can do it again!