International Women's Day 2011 Craftivity

This past Saturday afternoon, I found myself alone and with a few hours to kill between errands. Rather than pester my fella with endless babble or torment the mascot with endless chores, I decided to leave the boys alone and take some quiet, crafty time for myself. As coincidence would have it, MAWA was holding their annual International Women’s Day event from 12-4pm. Since I had such a great time last year, I decided to head down there and see what was up.

As always, the event was well attended and there was plenty to see, do and nibble on! I passed on beading (too intricate), paper-cutting (too dangerous) and needlepoint (to needlepointy), and decided to go with the familiar – crochet. The project that they had set out for us, however, was a little different than I am used to. Instead of crocheting with yarn, we used plastic grocery bags.

Using bags as a medium for crochet is something that I have wanted to try for a while, as part of my fascination with reinventing stuff; specifically, taking something and going though several steps to make essentially the same thing. Like grinding up paper to make paper. Anyway, the project itself was pretty straightforward. The bags are first cut into strips and then crocheted with a big hook. As you get the the end of a strip, you just tie-on another one and keep going.



It took me a couple of hours to crochet this little pouch (pictured above), but that included time for eating snacks (from Baraka Pita Bakery) and chit-chatting with the MAWA peeps. (Can you spot the Dollarama and Sugar Mountain bags?) I don’t know if it was the most relaxing afternoon ever*, but it was a nice way to spend some time alone (but not alone), and I came out of it with a cute little case for my sunglasses. Win, win!



*OMG…EPK! EPK! (Other People’s Kids)