It's in the bottle

I sat around last night with a few of my girl friends here in So Cal talking about everything from pregnancy (2 of the girls are due in a few months), to how much our husbands game (Xbox is all the rage), to knitting, to work stress in general, as well as playing the "Who Got The Worst Wedding Present" game (T won that one with a foosball table... in a small, one bedroom apartment). Oh, yeah, we also did some crafting.

Last night was our first Craft Night.

Craft Nite is the essential girls' hang out time that is usually code for "Let's get together and rant about life, men, and laundry!" It was a roaring success when I was living in Seattle, so in honor of those nights I had to carry on the tradition down here. Hubby carried on his tradition for these nights by being absent for the majority of it. When I first told him that I was starting the whole Craft Nite thing up again he called me and in a very sweet voice said, "Sweetie, I have to work late that night." I hadn't even told him what night it was. Raise the estrogen level anything above normal and he flees like a jack rabbit.

In the midst of our discussions I made an Indian dish with beans, rice, and a ton of spices, which turned out great, if I do say so myself (hey, I can follow a receipe pretty well!). Also, knowing me and my second stomach for ice cream, I just couldn't resist making a delicious cinnamon and cardamom ice cream concoction to finish it all off. Meanwhile, N showed T how to knit and L brought out some of her tote-narnar crocheted scarves! The first night and already we have projects for future meetings!

In between dinner, dessert and non-stop chatter we amazingly enough found time to craft, so I brought out all of the supplies and showed the girls how to decoupage. There's really not much to it, so it was more like "Take this, slap it on, slop on some glue and you're set!"

The girls couldn't believe all of the scraps of paper I have lying around, waiting for such an oportune moment to be used. There are so many little scraps that are not quite right for cards, but are perfect for this sort of project. They did some great boxes, which of course I forgot to get pictures of, even with my camera sitting 2 feet away on the bookshelf. I've done a few boxes, so thought I'd try a bottle/vase and I think it turned out alright. You can just barely see the dried flowers on there and there are also some rhinestones. Thoughts?

We're planning on crafting every Tuesday night, so I'll try to post more pictures of the event, especially when we are successful (meaning, we actually craft and get beyond just opening a bottle of wine/juice and chatting about life).

And yes, I really do work on my real job during the day, too. All of the supplies for one of my big client jobs are coming in. The company I ordered envelopes from had to re-ship them because apparently UPS doesn't believe that I actually live here. (Funny, I could have sworn there were walls and windows enough to be a dwelling...) They have arrived, though, safe at last, so now it is mass assembly time for those. Let's just pray that I've had all of the headaches required for this project so that the rest can be smooth sailing.