Category Archives: Crafts

To Pittsburgh with Love, From DC

Posted on January 31, 2012 by | Leave a comment

DC <3 Pittsburgh.  The panoply of said DC love will be on display 2.14.12.  DC is preparing some specially made valentines for Pittsburgh.  Besides showing our inter-city love, there is another implication for this showing of love.  It means I’m back at it…making 200 of something, for all of you, with the help of some great friends.  (For the back story to understand the scale of what a comment like this means, read this once you’ve read about DC’s Valentine to you.)

During Love of Friends this year, you will see strung around the party space these little origami hearts:

Take one. They’re for you.  New friends I’ve met in DC, and friends I’ve known in Pittsburgh now living in our nation’s capital got together (and will continue to get together probably up until the moment I drive up to Pittsburgh for the party)  at various events to learn how to make the hearts* and to stuff them with a little message just for you.  We just wanted to bring a little bit of DC to Pittsburgh on the best day of the year: 2.14.

Group love: the process of making hearts.

* So, I’m team lead on the origami heart project…someone that is not linear…someone that has problems with assembly lines (though, I love them, and Fordism)…Someone who’s house looks like this after a crafting session:

Love of Friends team members and friends make homemade calendars

 

 

 

 

 

 

In teaching others how to make origami hearts, and after a dear friend portentously said to me, “Regina, every year you say whatever you make for Love of Friends is going to be easy. It’s never easy.” (to which I replied, “no…I guess it’s not that easy…but there IS a lot of love involved!”)  the following conversation did occur:

Me: Okay, so you fold the paper this way (group does) then this way (group folds paper), and then you do this (group follows along) and then you…shoot…hmmm…I forgot…I thought I would remember…dang it…okay, let me look it up…[fast forward 5 minutes to finding the website with the directions] Okay!  RIGHT, so you do this, and THEN that (group, still with me, believe it or not, folds) and then you…oh, right…this part was kind of hard, I remember that…so you have to sort of do this thing…hmmm, let me find my prototype…where did I put that?…

As frustrating as that probably was for a lot of people, we made it work!  Now, a bunch of us know how to make origami hearts, and we now only need to make about 180 more! It’s going to be great.  So, when you unclip a heart at the party, know that heart was handmade with lots and lots of love.

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A brief history of the LoF goody

Posted on January 24, 2012 by | Leave a comment

By Regina.

This is a picture of the 200 tote bags made out of donated t-shirts.

The infamous LoF Craft

Have you ever tried to make 200 of something?  When asked a question like this, you don’t really need to ponder, I guess.  It’s not something you forget.  Have you ever tried to make 175 of something, or hell, 75 of something?

Each year, with the help of amazing friends, the Love of Friends team creates a goody for all of our friends to take home at the end of the LoF celebration. We’ve hand painted pins and hand-crafted magnets (many of which still adorn my refrigerator).  We’ve hand-painted wine glasses while drinking wine.

This is a photo of the billion intricate [read: time intensive] desk calendars we made for LoF5.

And then, a few years ago, things got real. We got serious about the goody and decided to make 200 LoF tote bags using tee-shirts all donated by our friends.  Getting the tee-shirts ended up being the easiest thing about this project.

Last year we made 200 custom-made desk calendars*.

A few things (but not 200 of those things):

a) Clearly we love our friends a lot and want to make something that represents how special we think you all are.

b) just like with the soundtrack, I’m not entirely sure why we’ve thought it was a good idea to let me handle any part of assembling 200 of something–oft with many little parts that all have to go together in a specific way. This is not easy for my non-linear brain. 2012, I’m not in charge of assembling the goody.

c) I highly recommend trying to assemble 200 of something. You’ll learn a lot about yourself, and why Fordism  is a great moment in our American history: the creation of the assembly line, and a wonderful product that everyone is proud of, and can afford to purchase.  You’ll also have lots of excuses to have some friends over to help–often (it can take awhile to create 200 of something).

d) The 2012 goody is going to be amazing. I can’t wait to see your faces when you take home your little treasure.

*Though I love America and I see the value in assembly line creation, I always was so surprised when friends would get together to cut out the materials to make the tote bags or make the calendars that everyone immediately began to set up the assembly line.  I also sort of was like, why? That’s too efficient, it’s too business-like for our fun, crafty gathering.  And then I was in charge of the 2011 goody…and I threw away the little templates for January 2012 (which is why everyone had to draw in that month) and we ended up with too many pages for one month and not enough for others, and though I still say I’m not a fan of the assembly line approach, I see the beauty in such organizing, and I’m no longer in charge of executing the goody…so, that’s helpful for everyone’s sanity.

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Signs of an amazing party

Posted on May 2, 2011 by | Leave a comment

About two months before any Love of Friends party the team and LoF friends begin to put together the goody for that year.  2011 was hand-made desk calendars, 2010 was tote bags made from recycled tee-shirts that lots of friends dropped off to us, one year we made pins out of wooden hearts and magnets…and all of these years have a few things in common

* We drink a lot  of wine “to survive the night.”  The LoF team loves one another, that has to be the case to meet so often to put together a party with a budget of ne’r zero dollars.  But, sometimes things get a bit hectic, like last year when we had still over 30 bags to make just days before LoF4…luckily snowmageddon struck and that freed up some time.

* We enlist the help of a ton of friends to hang with us, drink wine, tea, seltzer and eat lots of snacks to help us put together the goody whatever that might be–this party is all about love, and making the day special for each person and ensuring NO ONE STRESSES OUT that it’s Vday, so of course we need to have the ideas and unique touches only our friends can provide to put together our items.  For our calendars this year, Maya and Ryder decorated the month of June with stamps from Japan, Alma’s mom was visiting from Mexico City and decorated May for us, and Verity decorated many pages of many months seeing her work go from detailed to more abstract and big as the hours slipped away.

* No matter what the craft is in which we put our minds to accomplishing so that our friends have something special to take home at the end of the night to remember LoF always, it hasn’t failed us yet that whoever’s home it happens to be that we set up shop to make our craft, the house always always always looks like this:

Love of Friends team members and friends make homemade calendars

The madness before the best party of the year.

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Kristina Elias will provide cookies for LoF5!

Posted on January 21, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Love of Friends is about friends pitching in to put together a great celebration. There are so many moving parts to put together a party for 300+ people with a budget of zero.

This year, those attending the Fifth Annual Love of Friends at SPACE Gallery will be in for a treat…good friend Kristina will ensure there are plenty of awesome cookies to go around during the celebration.

Kristina Ellias, baker for LoF5Here is a message from Kristina:

I am so excited that Regina asked me to bake cookies for the 5th Annual Love of Friends! It is an honor to help with such a great event!! I love to bake and for right now I am trying to gain more experience to hopefully some day open my own bakery!

I am thinking, but open to suggestions, about naming my future bakery/baking endeavors “Dotted Delights” Thus, everything I bake will have a little something extra in them – chocolate chips, raisins, cranberries, etc. – so when you are eating one of my treats you know it will be dotted!

If you need any baked good for one of your events, please give me a call at 724-493-7213 or email me at kelias1988@gmail.com. I would love to help out in any way possible!

Since I am not an official in home baker yet, I only ask for donations for my Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Pittsburgh Bowl for Kids’ Sake team (Follow This Link) in exchange for cookies or treats that I make.

Thanks for eating my baked goods and spreading the word!

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Project one: Volunteering is sexy

Posted on October 22, 2010 by | Leave a comment

The term is so good, we had to put it on a tee-shirt.

Why put this on a tee-shirt? Well, the slogan is pretty catchy, and true. Just recently I was at an event where I ran into a friend. We chatted about an upcoming fundraising event we were both attending, and she asked me, “what time is your volunteering shift?” She didn’t ask me, “what time are you getting there,” or, “who are you going with.” This friend is among a large group of friends that think in terms of volunteering…it’s amazing…and you know I will count the ways as to the many reasons this is amazing…and sexy.

 

Kelsey and Regina talk about the value of volunteering

Kelsey and Regina talk about the value of volunteering

Love of Friends team member Kelsey remarked to me one day while we were obsessing about this party we love so much, probably at a volunteering event, “I’m living Love of Friends,” to which I wholeheartedly agreed, we probably said “oh my god” a bunch of times, clinked glasses and, well, here we are now.

 

Love of Friends team members Kelsey and Kelly screen print

Love of Friends team members Kelsey (left) and Kelly (right)

Volunteering is Sexy screen

Volunteering is sexy screen

We decided to live Love of Friends and make tee-shirts…but of course they had to be handmade, in this instance, screen printed, and they had to be made with love, and in this instance that meant of course great friends, but also good food, and although I took on my role of not participating at the craft at hand directly (hey, someone has to take photos), I did bring my customary corny jokes.

 

Volunteering is Sexy tee-shirt

Volunteering is Sexy tee-shirt hot off the press

Volunteering is Sexy tee-shirts finished

Cluster of Volunteering is Sexy tee-shirts ready to go to a good home.

 

The Volunteering is Sexy tee-shirts are available for purchase, too! Click HERE to order online.

You can also email us at loveoffriendspgh@gmail.com to order yours today!

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Volunteering is Sexy by Love of Friends: Project one

Posted on October 17, 2010 by | 2 Comments

Volunteering is Sexy.

Love of Friends Team members Kelsey and ReginaLoF Team member Kelsey and I work together at Coro Pittsburgh, and we collaborate all the time on events…we know how to throw a GREAT event. We both share a commitment to volunteering, and when you have friends like ours that are equally involved in various do-gooder type projects, well, you often spend much of your free time volunteering.

I identify as a Hybrid Socialist.

Stay with me here, things will all come together. My identification as a Hybrid Socialist, my desire to increase the number of people that identify as such, and my penchant for helping connect people to other people led me to develop what I call “Perfect Hybrid Socialist first dates”. What’s this you say? My definition of Hybrid Socialism (though the manifestation of Hybrid Socialism is different for each person), and more about Hybrid Socialist first dates is outlined in this blog post Kelsey wrote for SponsorChange.org, another fabulous organization that we love.

Kelsey soon developed the slogan: Volunteering is Sexy, and boy is it ever.

This is how we feel: you volunteer at an event probably hosted by one of your friends. Your friend(s) love you for helping out, you get out of the house for a bit, you give back to the community, AND you get to attend whatever event you’re volunteering at for FREE..but it gets better: your chances of meeting people you haven’t met before is very high.

Meeting new people is important.

For me, I LOVE people. I just recently described this love for people as bordering on the neurotic. (Don’t be afraid though, I’m fairly harmless.) For some, they might want to mix up their group of friends, jazz things up a bit. For others, hell, they’re single and want to meet other people that are COOL…and someone that hasn’t dated all of your friends already, and they don’t want to have to go to a bar or church…or yoga* to do so…again…Well, that probably won’t stop happening.

It is this colliding of so many great things, sprinkled with the opportunity to meet, flirt with and get to know someone new that makes volunteering sexy.

Volunteering is fun…and sexy, and with the numerous groups around that need your talent, muscle power and brains (not in a zombie way) you can volunteer in a manner that suits your personality best. If you are looking for something to try out, get in touch with us at loveoffriendspgh@gmail.com and we can offer you a whole host of ideas, or keep reading the blog for Perfect Hybrid Socialist first dates. Kelsey even tried to go on a Hybrid Socialist first date.

*The Love of Friends Team loves yoga. I highly encourage people to practice yoga. I personally don’t recommend going to yoga to meet people.

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Love of Friends is handmade crafts.

Posted on October 17, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Not too long ago on facebook I mentioned that the Love of Friends Team was making something for all of our friends.

Kelly and Kelsey of the Love of Friends team

What is the Love of Friends Team making for our friends?

Since 2007 Love of Friends (LoF) has offered handmade crafts for everyone attending the event: magnets, heart-shaped pins bedazzled with glitter glue and paint…At LoF 4 the Team really outdid itself: we made handmade tote bags from t-shirts donated by our friends. Like the other crafts, our friends helped us sew the tote bags. The whole tote-bag sewing process has been documented on facebook. I mean, when you sew 170 tote bags, plan evening upon evening of sewing and ask your friends to drop off tee-shirts and sew with us, you kinda have to talk about it.

Through crafting, we get to the heart (pun intended) of Love of Friends: spending time with one another, drinking wine, catching up, and planning a big party for our larger group of friends–all 350 of you.

2.14.11 brings the fifth annual Love of Friends celebration and we’ve already begun the process of making things for all of our friends that attend the event. We have two significant projects to keep us busy this fall into the winter that we are super jazzed about…and we are a little intimidated. So, whether we see you on the dance floor on Valentine’s Day, or chat with you while sipping some wine, know that we love you and we are glad that you are sharing your night with us.

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Cute Craft Idea

Posted on February 5, 2010 by | Leave a comment

For all of you out there looking for a cute handmade Valentine idea, I give you the Paper n’ Stitch blog.  Among many fun crafting ideas, this fabric Valentine is a particularly adorable project.  In case you’re somehow unaware of the impending snowpacolypse happening this weekend in Pittsburgh, this will be a delightful way to spend your time while trapped inside.  Cheers!

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