Remember sleepovers when you were a kid? Staying up late, laughing with your friends, eating junk food. Who says we can’t still have sleepovers now? In fact, I would argue that sleepovers as grown-ups are better because you can add wine to the equation.

Recently, my friend Stephanie and I hatched a plan to do just that. We decided we wanted to host a weekend full of crafting, good food, a little wine, and (most importantly) re-connecting with old friends. Early on in the planning stages, Stephanie used the phrase “Craft Camp” and it stuck.

So we contacted our friends from college for a little reunion of sorts. Not everyone could attend for the entire time naturally, and that was okay. The whole point of Craft Camp (aside from the aforementioned reasons) was to encourage our friends – these hardworking women who wear a never-ending array of hats (caregiver, spouse, daughter, sister, co-worker, etc.) – to take some much needed time for themselves. The same applied to Stephanie and me.

A loose schedule was developed, an easy menu was planned, and all of the supplies were gathered. We are both hoarders of craft supplies, so most of what we needed we already had. Lucky us!

Craft camp started Saturday at noon with an easy lunch of homemade tomato soup and garlic bread. (Full disclosure: I do not enjoy cooking but Stephanie does. She gets all the credit here. I just enjoyed eating it.) In the afternoon, we hunkered down in the craft room and created our own rustic wooden signs out of pallet wood.

I chose to make my own market sign. I used chalk paint for a matte finish and then stenciled in the words. You can see it was pretty straightforward and easy peasy. I’m really pleased with how it turned out. The best part of the afternoon was Skyping with one of our friends who could not attend in person because she just so happens to live a few states away in New Hampshire. One could say we were “tele-crafting.”

Later in the day we each made mason jar oil lamps. These came together in about ten minutes. It took us longer to explore the yard for specimens to put into our jars. These would make for quick and pretty centerpieces come the holidays. In fact, we used them later as centerpieces for dinner.

Here’s what we did:

We collected items to place inside our mason jars – pine cones, cranberries, cinnamon sticks, sprigs of evergreen. Some of those items we collected beforehand, others we collected on the day of.
We arranged those above-mentioned items however we wanted inside of the jars, using chopsticks to re-position or rearrange.
Once everything was where we wanted it to be, we carefully poured lamp oil into the jars.
Next we fed wicks through the pre-drilled holes in the mason jar lids and, using the chopstick again, pushed the end of the wick down into the jar in between all of our pinecones and cranberries.
Lastly, we screwed the jar lids into place and tied a little twine or ribbon around the neck of the jar for good measure.

See? Easy peasy.

Stay tuned for Craft Camp: Part Two on Wednesday. How will Craft Camp conclude? I’ll give you a hint: Homemade vanilla extract. See you Wednesday!