We Gather Together

I spent the morning (and part of the afternoon) at a "shoebox swap" at my friend Ruth's house. A shoebox swap is a rubber stamping event - everybody designs a card, but instead of making copies for everyone, they prepare all of the materials, and bring all of the supplies. At the swap, we each set up a station with our card. Everybody picks a station to start with, then we make the card at that station. When everyone is done, we all rotate one seat over, and make that card.





There's a more "formal" version referred to as a 10-10-10. That's 10 cards, 10 minutes each (and a $10 charge to reimburse whoever is running the swap). We've done that, too. When I was a demonstrator for Stampin' Up, I did one where I designed 10 cards by myself, and charged everyone the $10. It was fun, but, boy, was it a lot of work!



This is fun because we get to actually make the cards. This means that no matter how carefully you've designed your card, and provided only the materials needed to make THAT card, someone will make a variation of it. They'll change the position of something, or swap ink colors, or SOMETHING that makes it different from your sample.




I love that.

Even if you can't imagine how somebody could change your card, it will happen. And often, I like the variation better than the original.


I do know other demonstrators that found that to be the most annoying thing, but, hey, that's their problem.




So here are the ten cards that we made for the swap.

There are two pictures of the pirate card because you can't see the insert when it's inserted.














We embellished with brads and ribbon, and even had a tri-fold card (thanks for pre-scoring it, Janet!). We didn't even come close to having them be 10 minutes cards. Shona figured out our average time per card was 42 minutes. Ouch. But, then again, we weren't trying that hard to move fast. There was socializing. Just a bit.

Or maybe a lot.

We had a variety of techniques. Resist, mirror image, burnishing, altered photos, for example.

These are in no particular order. I think they're all great. Each one was fun to make. But I'm not going to tell you which is whose. You have to guess - at least guess which one I designed.

The ladies involved were Ruth (our wonderful hostess), Susan, Linda, Janet, Jamie, Dale, Grace, Sue, Shona, and myself. We had a wonderful morning of stamping and talking and eating. What more could you want?

We've been stamping together for years. It's been tough lately, as our kids get older, and more of us have gone back to work. It's hard to find the time to actually gather together - we used to have "bring your own project" events on a monthly basis. But this was fun, and easier in some ways than bringing several projects to work on.

There are already plans to meet again in 2 months. I can't wait. Maybe I'll put down the knitting for a bit and actually do some stamping in the meantime.