Last night I attended Grace Bonney’s Design*Sponge at Home crafting and book event at Anthropologie in downtown Seattle. Grace taught us how to use a woodburning tool to create our own personalized wooden wax seal. I suck at this.
The first time I remember sucking at crafts was in ninth grade. That year, even though I had been first chair clarinet out of three at least a couple of times, I decided to drop out of band and enroll in a home ec class with my BFF Shelly. We could sew things and make muffins. And eat them. It would be almost as awesome as our beloved Lionel Richie albums.
Something about the whole sewing thing never clicked for me. When my mom attended back-to-school night, my ever patient home ec teacher showed her my pattern test. We were instructed to cut out our “pattern” (actually paper) and paste it onto another sheet of paper as if we were laying it out on fabric to cut.
For you non-sewers out there, my pattern layout should have looked something like this.
Photograph by Kathy Woodrell, The Library of Congress
Instead, I ended up pasting all of my pattern pictures together to form the shape of a leaping girl, which looked something like this.
When we actually got around to making real clothes, a dapper khaki vest for me, I screwed up my garment so much that my teacher had to fix it. I didn’t realize that you weren’t supposed to cut along the pesky fold/seam. No Project Runway for me. Whatever. The seam going up the back of my vest added a little extra pizazz that the other students missed out on.
Fast forward a million years later to last night. The wooden wax seal.
Here is my attempt at wood burning. I couldn’t trace the lovely M that I haphazardly cut out with the X-ACTO knife, so I had to improvise.
My version of the curly M sucked, so I decided to use the do-over end of my wooden tool and go with something more plain. Except I forgot the part when Grace told us to be sure that we burn our letters in so they look backwards to us. Otherwise, they will be backwards on the wax seal. Already my sealing tool is dysfunctional. Yay!
On the other hand, my new friend Megan is very good at crafts and wood burning. This is an example of a well-manicured person creating a lovely wax sealing tool.
Even Grace’s help and instructions can’t save me.
Here’s the love note that will be placed inside my wonderfully crafted envelope.
This is Megan’s beautiful wax seal. You can see her take on the event here.
Here is my wax seal. My table mates agreed that it was very “Sweeney Todd.” Which is what every crafter is going for, right?
You can barely tell the difference.
After the crafting session, we got to have a little bit of chatting time with Grace while she signed our books.
I showed her my Sweeney Todd seal and, of course, she wanted to be best friends.
After my book was signed and my crafty envelope was safely tucked away from thieves, Megan and I had a chance to have a champagne cocktail and talk about blogging for a while, which was super fun. Then I met Keli, one of my Twitter friends and blog readers, which was really cool.
I also took photographs of cupcakes.
Matthew Parker provided a cool installation which served as a photography background for guests.
The Anthropologie employees seemed to be having a lot of fun.
Everybody loves Grace.
And even though I officially suck at crafts, I had so much fun. Thank you so much, Grace! If you ever want to make a horror movie, feel free to use this as your print ad.
Addendum: Two things that I left out that should be mentioned.
1. When I gave my husband his “love note,” he told me that I’d coined a new word. “Crapft.”
2. See all the black dots in the wax? That’s from FIRE, people. My freaking wax drippings were on FIRE! I had to blow out my envelope several times! I’m glad I didn’t burn down the store.
xo