Craft-All-I-Can

That’s what I’ve been up to these days. Writing has taken a backseat. Not that it has ever been on the driver’s seat these days… or riding shotgun. Whatevs.

I’ve had so much fun that I joined a couple of other craft workshops after the Resin Tile Making at Craft Manila. What’s up with the D-I-Ys and the crafting lately? Let’s just say I’m building my capabilities and a safety net, too, for when my life as a corporate worker bee ends. We’ll never know when it is going to end.  Also, I’ve been hit with the crafting bug and has been going on since June, when I started with the bottle caps. I usually just trudge through life indifferently like a zombie but now, I am excited  to make more stuff and learn techniques. My outputs are often crude and I’m an impatient, messy and sloppy crafter but I’m having so much fun. Crafting is costing me some moolah and moolah is important but it is still a small price to pay for being high with motivation and excitement.

Anyway, here are the workshops I’ve joined last August:

Leather cuff making. The workshop was taught by two young ladies from Soul Flower. I learned to make the magic braid and to mount the buttons.

 

Additions to my fast growing tool set: puncher, setters, and another hammer:

 

We went overtime so we didn’t get to finish practising. We did get to bring home as much leather we wanted to practice on.  So far, here are the rest of what I did:

Pattern courtesy of Soul Flower:

Ah, so proud of mama’s work!

 

Wire Jewelry Making by Wire Guru Ana Gonzales.

 

 

Here are some of what I did.

A cross bracelet…

 

…a swirly swirly ring…

 

…a distorted star bookmark/paperclip. The silver one was done by Ana herself. I tried to copy it but my gold star turned out weird. I just pretended that I was actually going for an abstract star/magic wand.

 

Did several others, too. These wire works won me gift certificates from Tokyo Tokyo!

There were just four of us in the class, but still, I’m so flattered! Thanks to blogger Arnie Villanueva for choosing my stuff.

I’d love to join more arts and craft workshops but for now, I am focusing on my new-found craft: decoupage and altered dominoes and bottlecaps. So far, I have not encountered anyone who does the domino thingies yet.   I’ve been splurging on inks and rubber stamps to create backgrounds for the dominoes and bottlecaps rather than printing them or snipping them from magazines. I’ve been stamping here and there and here and there… not as easy as I thought. And now, the whole process of making an altered domino tile takes much longer because of the stamps. One of these days, I need to write down the steps before I forget them.