Summer Snippet #3

This weekend I'll write my last thoughts and bits from the visit back to IL and the reunion:

First, some swank:

Ooooooh!  Ahhhhhh!

Of course there's a story.  The week before I go to Illinois (this is about two weeks before the event), I end up emailing back and forth with Wendy, the organizer of the reunion, about the Saturday night dinner.  So in one of those emails, I offer to help her out with whatever little reunion details she needs help with when I am in town the week before the reunion.  She emails and says she needs help with ideas for decorations for the dinner Saturday night.  I run over to etsy for inspiration, and email back saying, "What if you could make what look like little vintage decanter labels with our high school logo on them to hang off of wine bottles?  That would be fairly easy, inexpensive (the restaurant could save wine bottles for us to use), and classy, and either flowers or candles could be put inside the empty wine bottles.  And people could take them home if they wanted, as souveniers."  She thinks that's a great idea.

Oh, you savvy readers already know where this is going.

So late Tuesday night the week of the reunion she emails and tells me she is swamped with work stuff and asks if I could please "design" the labels.  There is something ominous about that wording, and so I emailed to ask if by "design" she does indeed mean "make."  Yes, she does.

Ok, folks, this is the moment when I need to stop and formally declare that I am NOT a crafty person.  Yes, I have a definite artistic side, and yes, I consider myself somewhat of a "Jill of all trades" and think I can do just about anything with even just a small degree of success.  But my true skill lies in generating ideas, not implementing them.  And certainly not on short notice, and certainly not when a certain degree of professionalism is going to be expected.  Ack! 

But it was me or nobody.  And I knew I could do it, I was just not sure how well I could do what I knew would look best.  So I went to the craft store to investigate materials Weds., then had to talk with Wendy Weds. night to confer about what she really was wanting.  Then Mina and Susan arrived Thursday and while we were out and about shopping and lunching we also stopped and they helped me finalize the materials.  Friday I started to work on the project, and while I was talking through the idea with Mina and Susan, Mina had the BRILLIANT idea of having a watermark of our Central High School "C" behind the words.  But this idea would involve computer skills, which I have NOT at all.  But Susan said, essentially, "Oh, that's easy, let me have a minute with it" and starting humming away on her Apple laptop.  And while it ended up taking several HOURS to work out various technical problems, like blurry fonts, centering issues, etc., and us running to Kinko's twice to get the final product printed out, the end result looked AMAZING, and did confirm my long-held suspicion that Susan has some mad computer skills. 

By this point, however, if was time for the Friday night event and so we had to put off the actual makings of the labels until the next day.  So Saturday after the school tour, when Susan M. and Susan and her husband Luke and Mina and DH and my parents and I were all hanging around the table casually chatting. . . I was also cutting and gluing and edging like mad.  (And none of that could have happened without my Mom's collection of scrapbooking stuff, which she was so awesome to loan me!)  So finally, it came down to the last part--the chain.  Only to find we did not have the right tools.  While Dad was off rummaging in his tool boxes, Susan watched me for a few minutes trying in vain to maneuver the tiny links with just my inadequate fingernails, and then took over.  Then Dad found his little pliers and snips and I would have been happy to take it back over, but Susan had worked out the method and was so fast that within 20 minutes she had attached the chains to all the labels. 

So, with the help of my wonderful, highly skilled and brilliant and patient friends, we managed to deliver about 15 of these labels to the restaurant about an hour and a half before the event was set to begin.

Not perfect, but all things considered, not bad. : )  Wendy thought they were great, and the owner of the trendy little restaurant where we had the event (who was also a classmate of ours) thought they were such a good idea she was going to use the idea in the future, and I saw some classmates taking them off the bottles at the end of the evening to take home.  So, all in all, I'd say it was a happy story, and a good memory of the reunion. And when Mina and Susan stop rolling their eyes, I am sure they will look back on it fondly as well. 



P.S. The labels looked great on the wine bottles at the tables--with a single flower in each bottle.  The label does not quite fit right on my green--vinegar?--bottle.  But you get the idea.  
P.P.S. About the horrible window painting job visible behind the vase in the first photo--this is not my work.  This is just an example of the imperfections lingering all around the house from the previous owners.  They apparently would get the urge to paint parts of the house without bothering to mask off the parts that they were not planning on painting.  They also stuck seemingly random nails and thumbtacks into the walls and floors everywhere around the house.  And used nails too long for the depth of the boards so that the bare points of nails protrude from cabinets and walls at child-danger height.  All things we are slowly fixing. . . ANYWAY, I just had the need to tell you that I was not the one responsible for the ugliness.