CRAFT WEEK!!!
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| The invitation, courtesy of my sister-in-law Heidi, using the app abeautifulmess! |
Recently the women in my extended family did a craft week, and it was so much fun!! Several things go into planning such a big event and so we started planning about 4 months in advance.
In pulling off such a large undertaking, there are several areas that have to be discussed and agreed upon in order to pull it off, and I thought it would be fun to list it all, so you can benefit from our trials and successes!
- Teacher vs. Student - its important to first establish if you will be having an expert come in to teach a craft/skill or if someone in your group of attendees will be the teacher.
- We decided that each one of us (there were 4 ladies) would be a teacher for one day and a student for the other days.
- What will be taught? - next would be to decide what you want to learn about or in our case what we wanted to teach. Here is an example of how we broke it out.
- Day 1 - Screen Printing
- Day 2 - Card Making
- Day 3 - Gingerbread (Christmas in July) Project
- Day 4 - Metal Stamping
- Each one of us decided that we wanted to do something that we have never done before on the day we were teaching, so this also required us to learn the skill prior to our class (that was fun!!)
- Gather your supplies - in our case, each one of us took responsibility for the day that we were teaching, including all supplies that went into the craft. If that doesn't work for you, you could provide a "class list" for each day, of items that each person would need to bring with them. But be forewarned, if you choose to have people bring items, you run the risk of either having your attendance low because its a hassle, or the wrong item is brought to class. Either way you do it, just make sure you get the buy in from the group so that all goes well. If money is an issue, you could also get your list of costs of supplies and then collect a craft fee from everyone.
- Plan the dates - its important for a good turnout for your craft week to make sure that the dates and times work for everyone! And trust me, this was the one and only challenging thing that we came across when planning ours! In our case, because we have some out of towners and ladies with children, we planned our dates first, so that travel and childcare and such could be considered.
- We ended up making our event an entire week, starting with Monday and ending on Friday, but we took Wednesday off.
- Location, location, location - this is an important one! If you are a crafter, you know that crafting requires space, so when planning your craft week, figuring out where you will host it and set it up is crucial! For us, we decided that if it was our day to teach, then we would also have it at our house, except for the out of towners of course, but we worked that out by letting the out-of-towner use our house to teach when necessary.
- Snacks and Drinks - very important!! Crafting takes energy and snacks are always welcome, and all that talking and laughing makes a girl quite parched! Its important to establish the who, what and when on the snacks and drinks. For us, whoever was hosting was also providing drinks and snacks and that worked out great! But you could also have people bring them!
- Be Flexible - with every good plan, there is always something that happens that throws a wrench in things, and you need to relax and be flexible and remember that this is for fun and to learn new skills.
- Get Busy and have FUN!! - get to learning and crafting!!
And finally, here are some pictures from our craft week..........
Day 1 - Heidi taught screen printing
Day 2 - Lindsay taught us Card Making using scrapbooking materials
Day 3 - Mom taught us to design/decorate wall art Gingerbread houses
Day 4 - I taught Metal Stamping and Epoxy
Bottom line................GO FOR IT! Planning and doing a craft week was work, I'm not going to lie, but we shared the responsibilities and shared in the fun!!!
till next time.............Penny :)
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