Almost a month ago now, I had the pleasure of having five girls and four moms over to do some stamping! The girls are all friends in Girl Scouts and/or school and they were so wonderful to work with. I initially thought that being 11-year-olds and in our rather short time frame, we wouldn’t get that many projects done. The former teacher in me always overplans, regardless, even with adults, because you never really know how fast or slow people will work. And I like nothing better than thinking up projects on my own or browsing the internet (of course!) for ideas so I had PLENTY from which to choose.
My first thought was to decorate a gift bag for them to carry home their projects and teach them how they can recycle the bags they might get at a store by decorating with paper and maybe some stamping and embellishing. The one in the photo I made a while back in this post, but it was a good sample and I used this same retired paper for the girls because I had enough of it, in different colors. They stamped different flowers in matching colors. I also had die cut their first name initial with the Large Letters Dies to glue on the tag. I love decorating bags like this.
To teach them how to make a card, I thought a birthday card is always handy to have on hand. One girl made hers for her dad who had a birthday coming up. I found this design somewhere online. It was easy to make with the Balloon Bouquet Punch and the In Color 2018-2020 6″ x 6″ Designer Series Paper. My sample used all the same colors but some of the girls and moms traded balloons so they could have each balloon a different color. I love when people put their own twist on a project.
When I first became a Stampin’ Up! Demonstrator, at my first workshop we made a sticky note holder (whatever brand you like to use!). This one just takes a piece of cardstock folded to fit a pad of notes inside and then decorated on the front. For this one, we used a piece of the Garden Impressions 6″ x 6″ Designer Series Paper on the front and then stamped a daisy with the Daisy Delight Photopolymer Stamp Set and punched with the Daisy Punch. These stamps and punch were very popular last year when they came out in the catalog and still are this year. Some people punched two daisies to layer, which was cute also! For the daisy center we used a Clear Faceted Gem.
The thank you card used the Stampin’ Up! Note Cards & Envelopes and I die cut the butterfly ahead of time with the Springtime Impressions Thinlits Dies. I got this idea online from Mary Fish. We placed a colored piece of cardstock behind the die cut and popped the butterfly up on Mini Stampin’ Dimensionals. Some call this the Eclipse Technique. For a little bling, we added the Glitter Enamel Dots.
And what’s a stamping event without candy and chocolate?! We assembled the Clear Tiny Treat Boxes and decorated with some retired designer paper and ribbon. Of course one of my favorite things to do is to cover chocolate candies with a small strip of designer paper, so I showed them how to do that for some chocolates to put in their Tiny Treat Box.
Who would have thought we would get through this many projects with 9 people in about two hours or less?! But we did, and still had extra time, I hurriedly cut some more paper and grabbed some small chocolate candy bars and we made the small Halloween slider treat with the Cat Punch. This is a fun little project that is surprising that when you pull on the ribbon at the top, it pulls the candy bar up and out of the cardstock wrapper.
I always like to make a lot of projects, I wonder if these broke a record in how many we got done in two and a half hours with nine people! The girls said they should come back for “every occasion” and were amazed at all my stamp sets on the shelf. I’m just glad they enjoyed the stamping experience. I told them all to come back to me when they are 18 and I’ll sign them up to be Demonstrators!
