Ah, July in Bellingham, Washington. It was warm and sunny, a perfect evening for Bunco. The Babes gathered on Jodi’s deck before the game to make gift wallets out of half-gallon beverage cartons. The gift wallets entail a few simple steps and result in colorful and interesting gifts, just perfect for holding hundred dollar bills, loose diamonds or gold coins.
The Bunco Babes’ April meeting was at my house. We started the evening with wine and crafts, this time making simple piano hinge books. I wanted to demonstrate to myself that I could get twelve adults each to construct a handmade book within an hour, using craft punches to create decorate edges for the pages. Essentially, I was teaching two skills at the same time: craft punch handling and book making.
This project was an incredible success. Not only did each of the Babes produce a book, but everyone agreed to bring her book to subsequent Bunco Parties, having decorated one page in a manner expressive of herself. The idea is to exhange books at every Bunco Party for the next twelve months, so that each of us will end up with a keepsake volume co-produced by all the Babes in the group.
If you think about how piano keyboards are covered with the hinged piece of wood and how those pieces of wood are attached to the body of the piano, you’ll get the picture. Click here to learn more about piano hinge books.
Measuring for the folds
We gathered together at my house this month for the neighborhood Bunco Party/ Wine Splash. Before we got down to rolling the dice, we tried our hand at reproducing antique valentines, charming and intricately folded affairs, for which Martha Stewart (who else?) provided the instruction. (Go to Marthastewart.com and click on the crafts tab, then look through the crafts listed for February.)
The Valentines are a delightful challenge to create, but anyone who has succesfully created an origami crane will be able to master them. The trick is to make a prototype first before hauling out the fancy decorative paper, so you know what you’re doing. We all started with plane white paper and then moved on to duplex sheets with contrasting designs on each side.
Anne, Sally and Lisa have fun with the mysterious folding process
The three stages of Valentine: flat sheet of paper, star shaped packet and finished envelope/wallet. The Valentines were made on double sided paper, so each has a contrasting interior and an exterior design.
Martha Steward suggests writing poetry on each of the folds in such a way that the recipeint reads each line as he or she unfolds the gift. I think that means you have to write the poem line-by-line in reverse order. I say stick a fifty dollar bill in the deepest level of the Valentine and be done with it.
Lisa told a couple of days later that she and Anne had included some candy in their Valentines for their husbands, but then decided, since Valentine’s day is more than three weeks off, to eat it themselve. I like the way these women think!
The finished product
Wednesday, December 18, 2oo9. Three years ago the women in my neighborhood constituted themselves as The Bunco Babes. Bunco, for those of you unfamiliar with the term, is a dice game requiring neither skill nor strategy. It’s based purely on luck. The point of The Bunco Babes is not so much to play Bunco (which is actually a fairly stupid game) but to get together once a month and socialize. Our Bunco group is about community and neighborliness.
At our last Bunco party, I brought along the materials and invited The Babes to make holiday cards, featuring the origami Christmas tree included in the Tutorial Section. In approximately 40 minutes the Babes constructed ten of the most exuberant and colorful holiday cards I’d ever seen…each one unique and completely expressive of its creator.
What a riot! The Babes were really in their element, comparing their cards and commenting hilariously on each other’s artistic techniques.
Okay, there was wine involved, but we would have had fun doing this project if we’d been at a WCTU meeting. There is something about mutually celebrating our originality that strengthens our friendship and deepens our attachment to each other.