A crafty gathering

This past Saturday my friend Gretchen held a crafting get-together at her place in Fredericksburg; on the to-do list were pom-pom acorns (inspired by these), a squirrel garland, and modern 3-D wreaths.  As an added bonus my friend Phil volunteered to watch Sammy for a large chunk of the afternoon so I could get my craft on without worrying about Sammy gluing pom-poms to his face.  I helped Phil load Sammy into the bjorn and they headed off to do some male bonding.

I'm not much of a wreath person, so I didn't bring any materials to make my own 3-D wreath (and let's be honest--I took one look at the supplies needed and instructions and was promptly overwhelmed), so I spent most of the wreath-making portion of the afternoon eating the awesome butternut squash soup that Gretchen had made and helping to cut out circles and applying Mod Podge for the other ladies' wreaths.

Of course, after seeing how awesome their wreaths turned out (and how much fun they were to put together), I was sort of kicking myself for not making one myself.  Oh well.  While waiting for all of the glue and Mod Podge to dry, we moved on to making the pom-pom acorns, which was more of my speed as it was pretty simple.  Pick an acorn cap, select a pom-pom, add glue, and voila!  You're done.

 

While the ladies were putting the finishing touches on their wreaths, Meghan and I tried our hands at making the squirrel garland.  It seemed simple enough--just trace the squirrel pattern onto accordion-folded paper and cut.  Except for some reason Meghan and I seemed incapable of making neat accordion folds, and when I traced the pattern onto my paper, I was left with a deformed mutant of a squirrel; I tried again and yielded much better results the second time around.

We all had such a good time that we're going to try and get together to do this every month or so.  Now I need to find something that's Christmas-appropriate for next month; anyone have any ideas or recommendations?