Thread Spool and Flower Swaps

Jackie, Pat, Elena, Sally and Georgia on the far right

Well, today was the day for our Thread Spool swap. We are missing Mariam and Deborah. We have been meeting at Milton's Deli in Del Mar for our lunch and swaps. Good food and good friends - what could be better?

I found this a particularly difficult swap. I think I became discouraged when after creating a Petite Doll face on a tag and scanning and printing it on shrink paper and shrinking, the colors got so much more dark and orange. This threw me off. I finally started decorating all the different size and shape thread spools I had gathered. Each one was different. Then, what to do with the little girl faces? I tried to deal with the color by using colored pencils to change the hair color.

The one thing that has remained true in my life - that which I struggle the most with and have the most difficulty with - the one I like the least - happens to be the one that everyone else likes the best, and since that particular girl ended up with black hair - Elena snatched it right.

I had tried to work with hot glue and ended up with a big mess and deciding that hot glue is not MY friend. To cover everything that I hated, I ended up sprinkling the German antique silver glitter all over the sides, of the thread and paper that was below. That is probably what attracted Elena to this spool. Elena is the Glitter Queen for sure.

The others were just finished using scraps of everything in my art room - since the spools are so small. In the end, amazingly, they all came out with their own little personalities and once I gathered them all up, I ended up loving all my little girls!

Sally's spools in the bushes. . .

I took theses photos in front of my car when I parked at Milton. I thought the ice plant would make a great background. Obviously I was wrong. You can't really see the spools very well, unless you click on the photo and it enlarges. Live and learn. That is why I am so looking forward to the photo class I am taking in Utah at Sparks in November. Composition is everything - obviously. . .

Spools on Display

Here is a photo of all the other exchanges. The most fun about all theses swaps is how everyone has a different idea as to what they are going to do with their project. There are so many different directions to go, even though on a personal level, each one of us might only see one path to completion.

Sally's flowers that didn't make the cut

While I am on the subject of swaps, there was a Flower Swap at Pink Pineapple's Scrapbook Club. We had to make 27 flowers for the exchange. I some how got short changed and sure didn't get 27 flowers back. This 1st photo shows the kind of flowers I made from fabric by cutting circles and heating the edges over a candle for them to curl. I learned this technique from Deborah who saw it online somewhere. These are not all finished, but you get the idea as to what I made.

Flowers I received in exchange

These are what I got back in exchange. It was really a fun exchange and once again you got so many different flowers created so many different ways. Check out the little fairy flower. So very cute. I wonder what the ones I didn't get looked like. . .