An Evening of Christmas Crafts

Once a month, myself with a group of school mums get together for wine and chat, cunningly disguised as a book group. We have been meeting for about nine months now and have discussed books once or twice just so that the Mr can quiz me and I can honestly say that books were involved. However we vary the theme every month to keep it interesting and having discussed film, fantasy dinner guests, food and meditation amongst other topics, and this months theme was Christmas Crafts.

I love craft:, cutting, painting, glueing, paper and fabric, but I rarely get enough time to even attempt a quarter of the lovely craft projects I find. Browsing through a couple of our hostess's craft books (of which she has an impressive collection) I was inspired to have a crack at crochet to make some cute Amigurumi like these from Amigurumipatterns.blogspot.com.

They are so cute and I know a couple of small children who would love these for Christmas, either in their stocking or hanging on the Christmas tree. Perhaps not your typical Christmas decoration but definitely a humourous touch to add to the tinsel. Hmm, what about crocheted tinsel? 

The highlight of the evening was to make rag pompoms for the Christmas tree. Many of us hadn't attempted pompoms since primary school but with a little guidance we had a ripping time, quite literally, shredding old clothes, pillow cases and scarves to create our own unique decorations. I was very glad that it wasn't my job to hoover up all the threads afterwards.

I think we were all a bit gobsmacked that we all actually managed to produce pompoms! They have proved to be a big hit and have so far made it to a daughters 'show and tell' at school and onto a couple of rear view mirrors. I'm not sure that they will survive to make it onto the Christmas Tree so we may have to reconvene to produce a few more.

As well as pompoms we had a couple more ideas brought along for inspiration, like these gorgeous fabric star decorations, these polystyrene balls that can be decorated by the kids and what tree wouldn't be complete without a biscuit or two? Our hostess had also been handy with the wool and knitted and crocheted some fabulous dolls.

We really had a great evening! I'm going to have to borrow a few of those craft books soon.

Until next time ladies x

Five... around the table

You know that game, when you have to invite 4 people to a fantasy dinner party. I played it last night with a group of school Mums and I was actually a little bit shocked.

Not, you know, OMG. Just more, well I never!

We are all intelligent women in our 30's or *whispers* 40's in the medical profession, business professionals, full time working or stay at home Mums. Each month our group (The Alternative Book Club) get together austensibly to learn or share something for fun but this must not (repeat MUST NOT) get in the way of a good sauvignon blanc or gossip obviously.

So there we are, fully informed of all the staff room comings and goings, wine glasses charged and a fantasy seating plan ready to be commended or outrightly ridiculed.

Given there were 10 of us and we each had to invite 4 guests, how many women would you say were invited? No this isn't a trick question on "Do you think you are smarter than a 10 year old". I'll take an "Age 6 Maths, please Dom".

The answer was precisely 2. And of those one was someone I thought I should throw in just so I didn't look like a hussy who had invited all men. I needn't have worried!

In trying to justify our choices, I think we just struggled in our busy lives to spend more than an hour to think about it so we were influenced by who we had seen most recently on TV. And as the majority of presenters, actors, comedians and musicians are men, we should not be surprised by our significant male bias.

Or are we just a feast of feisty females who had had a bit of fantasy fun?

Over analysing probably :-)

For the record mine were:

Rob Brydon - for humour not totty
Kevin McCloud - for intellect and *ahem* totty although that was loudly ridiculled
Chris Evans - Sauvignon blanc was almost spilt over who was going have him at their table
and Adele - my token women although she is clearly awesome.

And also for the record, The Big One would have the White Power Ranger, Garfield and Ode, Steven Gerrard and Flappy (supposedly a Moshi Monster).