Celebrating the difference

What's not to like about a workshop or a crop? A couple of hours, half a day, or if you're lucky, a full day to try something, product, technique, style that you might not otherwise try.
Immerse yourself in a crafty community for a while, meet new people, paint, cut, stick, chat. And coffee, tea and biscuits sometimes. It's all good.
So recently and locally, I did this 'decorating the jumbo peg' workshop - if you visit here even vaguely regularly, you'll have seen a few of them. There was a point before Christmas when I couldn't stop doing them - and they made great stocking fillers!

These pegs were made by some of the workshopeers. And ultimately, this is what I love about an unstructured 'project' based workshop. Everyone has access to the same stuff, paper, products, blahdy blah, and yet everyone comes up with something different. I love that. And frequently I find it a further inspiration. The aqua coloured paint for example, really set alarms off for some retro ideas, not necessarily pegs, and it hadn't occurred to me to use black paint as a foil for those perfect epoxy stickers. Once the decision to keep or give away the peg was made, we all used different messages. I made another during the course of the morning that used small foam alpha stickers, and because it was finally destined for my workroom, it says 'do this'. I don't want to be too polite to myself, any excuse to procrastinate! There were several pegs that ended up saying 'do it'. And I encouraged those gals to put 'do' and it' on separate lines.....you don't want to squash it on and have some smart-arm asking what a 'doit' is, do you!

Lynn, in a timely message, was telling me about a gift catalogue that's selling regular wooden pegs covered with a strip of paper. Once again, craft life becomes real life. I love that.

Photos were taken with my phone..as if that's an excuse for them not even being up to my usual bad standard. Miss Dunnit tells me that my phone (I use it to text, make calls and take the odd photo in that order) is a better MP3 player than most on the market - apparently, the ability to text and phone from it is secondary to its other functions. They ought to come up with one that has a built in photographer if they're so damn clever then, huh!