The Crafty Fingers have been out!

I’ve been on a particularly crafty bent at the moment. We were artistic(ish) at Brownies last night, I’ve been testing our some new card ideas, and been perfecting the embossing technique, as well as doing a bit of craft type research.

So last night we had the Brownies doing their foot, hand and finger prints on 1 huge piece of card (from a A0 roll courtesy of the craft bank, that was then cut up so they could take their prints home. Being the good guiders we are, we told them to turn up in scruffy clothes (although some people ideas of scruffy are different from others). We had lots of laughs as a group, particularly when we realised that the hall doesn’t have hot water (nope, not even in the loos) so the girls had to clean their painty feet/ hands with cold water! (at the time Kestrel, who was aware of this and so had brought some thermos flasks of hot water, was speaking with one of the YGs who is having some problems at the moment, out of the hall). So we were teasing the girls (they knew we were teasing them) saying that when you went on Pack Holiday (the replies & deposits for ours are due in next week), that you used only have a bowl and some water to wash yourself with, not nice hot showers (although nice is maybe bending it a bit) as we have for PH. It was a sort of manic but really enjoyable night with the girls as we were all there to have fun and the girls had lots of giggling at the paint oozing between toes/ cold water and multicoloured fingerprints courtesy of an ELC multicoloured paint pad. Next week, we are back to a rather calmer night.

Following Saturday’s visit to a card demo and the purchase of a goody bag to further my designs/ skills I’ve been testing out some the project ideas that use the contents of the goody bag. This goes along with a recent purchase, from ELC of a sticker maker. The sticker maker concerned is actually a Xyron 250, but with ELC branding on the box (but not the machine) and the cheapest place to buy them (beats the 'net), particularly with discount. So the sticker maker has made my ribbon from Fabricland (our fab cheap fabric shop in the city centre) into sticky ribbon (that retails at about £1.50 - £2 for about 1.5m worth of ribbon if you buy it ready sticky). Hence I’ve been combining all these skills (The tips I’ve got on the embossing front mean that its now up selling quality in quite a few cases) to come up with a couple of classy cards (both Thanks/ Volunteering ones) along with some contrasting/ complementing paper to finish off the card. I’m really pleased with them. I really love the thanks/ volunteer stamp set I got the other day … they seem really good for Guiding (so I guess Scouting too), I think they would be great to accompany long service awards. I shall do a couple more of those when I get back from Amsterdam.

So back to ELC and their fine 10% discount… I was aware that you could wangle the playgroup discount they do with a flash of the Apppointment Card (I know I’m not the only person who keep this in with all the loyalty/ discount cards in my purse; we’re not super blue its just we like to wave it for some discount!). So when I got the sticker maker I enquired, stood my ground (the bod phoned his manager to check), and completed the form, to find I got the card immediately :) so my sticker maker came down in price! Admittedly the main thing we’ll use it on is the craft stuff (which has really improved of late) as the rest of it is really too young for Brownies. But remember wave those warrants/ appointment cards and get your discount! Even better for us ELC and The Works sit next to each other for comparison on Brownie craft supplies.

Getting onto Brownie craft supplies, I’ve been investigating Scrapstores local to us and membership costs. Scrapstores are fab places to provide cheap craft/ materials in units, as well as surprising gems if you’re lucky. Alas our local one want to charge us £80 for a year’s membership (they work more on the Scout Group system with their S/G membership than a unit basis), but Southampton looks as if it could be coming up trumps as their membership is half the price, and they have late night opening on Wednesdays so we don’t have to a lunchtime/ 4pm leave work dash (Wed only) to get to the store. Even better they are about 2mins drive from Tom’s mum! We had a recent raid on the local one, by providing a car for our YG who has the YMCA card (she does their after school club so lots of Brownie meetings get reproduced/ amended there into activities) when she was doing a visit for some stuff (hence the large roll of card for last night), its not an ideal situation but £80 a year for membership is not economically viable for us as a unit. We shall see what they have on offer to see whether its worth the money & drive over to Soton (which personally isn’t an issue as we’d combine it with seeing Tom’s mum, but more for the others) next week. Scrapstores are one of those places you have to know about to look out for, in Hampshire there a quite a few, but Kent has 1 for the entire county (and rubbish hours with it)! We plan to use a lot of this type of stuff on Pack Holiday so the Soton would be very convenient for that (the scrapstore is just up the road from the 24hr tesco where we’d do the pre-arrival milk & missed out bits on the food run so a combined trip!). Roll on Open Activity Time! (ie structured free time, idea courtesy of Gascit and new introduction to our part of the world (my PH assessor was impressed last time) the girls loved being able to choose what to do!).