A cold, blustery day in Melbourne, and quite a big bunch of us met for SERS.Margaret brought in an interesting problem (and once again, that's just what craft clubs are for). She had bought a Fiskars Tool Taxi, a handy little gadget that is a bunch of small tools in a pen-sized package. One of the tools is a container of glue with a small applicator. Handy, eh? But she (and Mr Margaret at home) had been quite unable to get it open! The instructions were no help, and of course there were concerned about using brute force.
So Cathy and I had a look. Here's the culprit - the glue reservoir end. The opening instructions consist of a double ended arrow. Much debate. What does the that mean - do you twist the lid off, and if so, in what direction? Cathy says that Aquash pens unscrew the opposite way from what you'd expect, so that really could go either way. Or do you slide it to the side, and if so, which way? The container is a flattened oval in cross section, so the sliding method seemed plausible.
Tool designers, take note. If you put an arrow on something, you also have to have something that shows what the arrow means!
We fiddled with it for some time.
Then Liz arrived, and had a go with it too. Not surprisingly, the scout leader succeeded where the computer programmer and the artist failed. Click, and it opened, just like a little nail polish bottle. Probably a little dab of glue had jammed it up. So we all opened and shut it lots of times to make sure it would behave for Margaret.
She was pleased!So that was the first big event of the day!
Anne was working on a nice idea - loosely copied from a design in a magazine. But of course she was changing the paper, the ink, the stamps and the design. That's my kind of copying!
Maria (a newbie to the club) brought a book of pop-up card ideas, and was making a super-cute one. We noted that the book gave matching ideas for the FRONTS of the cards too. That's so important!
Other Maria had brought a travel book she'd made, adapted from a simple fold she'd found in a scrapbook magazine. She'd added extra bits to it, and concealed little magnets inside to hold it closed. All decorated with her trademark mosaic style.
Chris was showing Sharon some stuff - Sharon was claiming not to have any ideas today ... the end result was a smart choo-choo train. She was using the stamp positioner to get the carriages to link up.
And Margaret was pleased with her owl card (painted withTwinkling H2Os).
And there were chocolates too! I got a whole lot of these for a project (which has to stay secret for a few more days).They are square, flat, wrapped chocolates, that fit nicely inside a 1 3/8 inch square punch. Now, plenty of stampers will understand the significance of that - you can build a chocolate into a card. The nice thing about these is, they are $10 a kilo from Wallie's Lollies (works out to about 6 cents a choc). You might have to get them to order them in - I did.
