Hillary's Crafternoon

Crafting and cake? Now that is a blogger event we can get excited about. Don't get us wrong- we love fashion events to fill our eyes but here's something to fill our bellies and keep our hands busy- an afternoon at The Butterfly and the Pig in Glasgow to put our blood (some), sweat (not so much), and tears (of laughter) into. We spent it crafting for Hillarys Crafternoon. The day was a great way to showcase the fabrics from Hillary's Blinds and we love anything tactile so it gave us a great excuse to manhandle all the different materials. The lovely ladies from The Crafty Hen were on hand to help us non-crafty out.

We headed through and met up with our Girl Gang faves, Miss West End Girl and Miss Vicky Viola. First up was a simple (they claimed)  notebook cover. We got to pick our favourite material and adorn with adorable ribbons and buttons. Playing with the patterns and prints was fun but, using our girlgang intuition, we all ended up with the same geometric fabric! The instructions were clear enough but we were like kids in a 3rd year high school art class- too busy giggling and gossiping to keep up.The promise of cake on finishing sped us up and we all pulled together our co-ordinating notebooks at the last second. The use of the glue gun to add our adornments was the final touch. We weren't the only ones excited to glue- everyone was waiting in the queue! It was another excuse to chat to fellow crafters, and speak to so many lovely people.

The next challenge was a little trickier for those of us who don't sew. Both of us do a bit, so it should have been a breeze. Should have. The instructions were basic- cut out a doubled up main body of a bird and attach the belly to create a 3D toy. The pieces didn't match in size (to create a rounded effect) so required some maneuvering. The whole thing needed neatly hand-sewed and the beak needed to be carefully poked out from inside. We all finished with varying degrees of success (to put it mildly- one was sewed too close to the edge so it had stuffing poking out everywhere and another one was described as a snake) but we were working under a time pressure and had to fit it around cake and chat (very important to us). There were a lot of Monty Python-esque Dead Parrot jokes but with a bit of help on hand we all completed the task and proudly took home our toy birds.

Despite our different levels of skill, everyone in the room seemed to have a great time crafting. We know our cheeks ached from laughing by the end. Having a tactile task to undertake was the perfect way to check out the materials and there was so much creativity. We wish every weekend could be spent getting our sew on. Thanks so much to Joe Blogs Network for hosting the event and to The Crafty Hen for having such patience!