Audlem WI Christmas Card Making Session

Physically my body is 60 something years old but I will always mentally be a kid at heart and when the opportunity arose to learn how to hand make a Christmas Card, I, and six other Audlem WI ladies leapt at the opportunity of a morning spent cutting and gluing, all in the name of art!

Now when I die, one of my biggest fears is that my husband will sell my craft supplies for what I told him they cost, working on the principle why buy it for a £1 when you can make it yourself for £50 worth of crafting supplies.

So, armed with a list of card making requirements – kindly supplied by our tutor Anne Watson – consisting of a dinner place mat, tweezers, a pair of sharp scissors, a couple of cocktail sticks, a glass headed pin, a rubbish bag and a couple of pieces of kitchen paper, we merry band of WI ladies gathered together around the freshly polished table of Pat Winfield, bright eyed and bushy tailed, ready to create our masterpieces!

After all in crafting, there are no mistakes, just unique creations.

Disaster strikes

Disaster struck almost immediately, as we were instructed to open envelope one 'carefully' as it contained, amongst other things, five small gold stars. Now given that we ladies have reached that age when our train of thoughts often leave the station without us, this rapidly became a herculean challenge!

Out of six ladies, only two discovered they had five stars and looked mystified as the rest of us scrabbled around examining the corner of our envelopes, our table mats, the insides of our folded cards until, eventually, the rest of us found our stars in unmentionable places and wiped our sweated brows in relief!

Well, I say the rest of us, however suddenly we noticed that one of our number was missing! I shall call this lady Helen- as this is her name- a lady of indomitable spirit and determination, who having exhausted her search around the table, was now flexibly crawling around the floor, under the table, in a continued search for her stars!

We were all mightily impressed as she emerged triumphantly from the floor- those aerobics exercises are certainly paying off- waving her stars aloft. Now I don't exercise as I believe that if God had wanted me to touch my toes he would have put them on my knees and I have a strong belief that the word 'aerobics' came about when the gym instructors got together and said, "If we're going to charge £10 an hour we can't call it jumping up and down!"

Helen's performance may mean I have to have a re-think?

Carry on serenely

Anne, our tutor, breathed a sigh of relief, stopped hyperventilating and carried on serenely – she had had bigger challenges than us to contend with in life- just- and she was going to lead us through this course no matter what!

Anne is, by nature, one of life's fiddlers- her words- and hand cutting out Christmas trees, embossing cards, punching out stars is all in a days work for her. She is one of the world's 'Procrastinators.' She works on craft projects when she should have been doing her laundry, dishes etc. Crafting does, after all, come before Housework in the dictionary'.as it should.

At this point we hung onto her every instruction, we were asked to place five Christmas trees in the centre of this beautifully hand embossed card- not too difficult you would have thought?

With hands shaking, we delicately held our trees in position on the end of our tweezers, whilst surreptitiously watching our neighbours every move as we delicately placed our cut outs into the correct positions. Given enough glue sticks, I could probably rule the world, but sticking these trees onto card entailed using long pins to hold and cocktail sticks to apply delicate amounts of glue- this was not going to be my finest hour.

No let up

There was to be no let up, as we all sat back to admire the results of our labours, we discovered we had to cut out the 'Seasons Greetings' before placing it at a jaunty angle on the corner!

I am glad to report that that the WI craft session was a complete success and our thanks go out to Anne Watson, an expert in the crafting world, who guided us so skilfully through each of the processes.

She is lying in a darkened room at the moment, but should be out in time for the WI Christmas Party!

Also our thanks go out to Pat Winfield for allowing us to use her home for our session, and how thoughtfully she had provided a table of just the right height for Helen's aerobics!

Here is a crafting confession- all crafters save their 'good' stuff for the important people in their lives, so if your next card is a bit floppy, sorry, but you didn't make the cut''''

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