A crafty thing

Some friends and I have been talking for a while now about starting up a craft group. We agreed it sounded like a great idea, but we could never settle on a date to actually meet. Hemming and hawing, and then the idea went dormant for months.

I finally decided the best way to make it happen was just to DO IT and put out invitations. 'First Friday' was what I went with in the end, since 'Third Thursday' is too artsy-fartsy, 'Wet Wednesday' occurs too frequently, Tuesdays are busy and Mondays are just terrible. You see what I'm up against.



I'm not actually a super crafty person. I hadn't picked up a knitting needle in about a year, which is how long Andy's poor single solitary sock has been waiting for a mate. The sewing machine has been in its case in the wardrobe for longer than that. I've got a newspaper scrapbook I've started, but I haven't got very far. As in, I glued something to a page.

The point of starting the group is to have more fun and meet more people, and incidentally to work on crafts. Kind of like a book club, I imagine, where the socialising outweighs the book discussion. Never been in one myself.

We had fun. I met new people. I made flat, lumpy, doughy muffin-blobs. I got out my knitting needles and reminded myself how it all works. (Casting on! Wooo! I thought I had forgotten how.)



Cross-stitch represented, as did crochet and knitting. Someone brought an unfinished hand-woven tapestry on a wooden frame, and another person brought a spinning wheel and spun wool while we all talked and laughed. Andy got out a needle and thread and sewed up the rips in his bike gloves -- so it wasn't all frivolous!

My take-home lesson from the evening: craft nights seem to be quite popular with the ladies. I'm planning on hosting this once a month, but if it gets too big we'll have to move somewhere else.

And I learned that yogurt muffins are really dense and don't rise. Or at least my batch didn't.