For me and my group of friends, as for many women, Girls' Night is a tradition that we all cherish. We aim for once a week, although life’s daily duties like family, work, band practice, campaign work, travel and illness have interfered too often. We need each other’s wisdom and humor, and nothing seems to bring it out like an all-female environment with snacks and laughter. We’ve been meeting on Wednesday nights for about 5 years now, but we noticed an insidious invader was slowly taking over our evening – the TV.
It all began with America’s Next Top Model, then we extended the fashion hour to two and watched Project Runway. After that we were sucked into the shows that followed – first Top Chef, then Shear Genius. All these shows are fun, but we realized that we were reserving our conversations for ad breaks, and “shhh”-ing when anyone talked during the show – eliminating the entire point of having a girls' night!
So we changed the night we meet to Mondays, and decided that the TV will now remain off - we will bring music, potluck food, and sometimes plan an activity. To kick this off right, I proposed that we all make Memory Frame necklaces.
If you are not familiar, Memory Frames are these little frames that come in packs of 3 for $4.99. They have loops for hanging on chains as jewelery, and you purchase little glass slides that fit inside. Between two layers of glass, you can put pictures, photos, pressed flowers, bits of cards, leather, fabric, glitter - whatever is flat enough to fit. I saw a really cool one a co-worker made with a square of Amy Butler fabric and a ribbon - it took less than 2 minutes to put it together, and she said she got compliments on it wherever she went.
I asked the girls to bring images or ideas that were special to them, as well as any beads or even old jewelery they were ready to recycle. I brought my ridiculously large bead collection, tools, and a few packs of 1.5" frames and glass, as well as a copper foil tape that you can use on your frame if you want it to be copper (and lately, I want EVERYTHING to be copper.) Only Elise and I have jewelry-making experience, so we helped everyone else with using crimp tubes and measuring their necklaces.
Everyone's project came out so unique and expressive of them! I hope you like pictures, because I have a lot! Get ready!
This is my beautiful and wonderful friend Elise (please note her Lacy Beanie hat - she joined our Knitalong with me, and that's her first project.) She recently completed a "Ride Green, Build Green" bike ride from San Francisco to Seattle, raising funds and awareness of eco-friendly building materials for Habitat For Humanity.Her necklace, featuring a map, symbolizes her trip.
Kathryn, Elise's awesome roommate and a PhD student in Bio-Molecular Structure and Design at the UW, thought she would be studying instead of jewelry making, but the easy creativity of the Memory Frames sucked her in, and she went on a pendant making spree! She took images from an old Alexander Henry fabric I brought, as well as postcards from my trip to England, and made this pretty quartet.
Liz, who is planning to be a Devil in a Blue Dress for Halloween, made herself a costume piece - a little devil sits in her pendant - but since they have glass on both sides, they are totally reversible, so she also put a little image of a mermaid on the other side. Both images are from Lotteria cards, a game she fondly remembers playing in her Mexican-American childhood. Liz is a mother and a nursing student, and was glad to have a break from her hectic life to do something creative and rejuvenating.
Angie, our hostess with the mostest, put a lot of forethought into her image - she took a heart from a friend's wedding invitation, along with of tiny sketch of a girl, and combined them to symbolize "a girl following her heart." Angie is an incredibly sensitive and compassionate person, who has followed her heart out of the Midwest and into a career of helping the homeless and the developmentally disabled. Her necklace came out just gorgeous - it's artistic and expressive, and looked beautiful on her.
My BFF Lissa, who is a talented painter and henna artist, was surprisingly anxious about her jewelry making abilities. She agonized over her design, and asked us all for advice and guidance. I don't know what on earth could have prompted this nervousness - her project was amazingly creative and came out really cool. She is a bass player (She and Liz are in a great band called Farro's Sparrows) and brought years of bass ball ends that she had collected to use as beads. 
Her pendant was really creative - she brought a ceramic mask she owned and, after using a fabric image of the sun to act as a background, glued the mask on top of the glassed frame. She made a three-strand necklace, with two strands of ball ends, and one strand of red and iridescent black glass beads. Despite her initial nervousness, she was deservedly proud of her necklace, and marveled at how fun this project was.
And me? I made a necklace that symbolizes for me a most memorable day in my trip to England with my mother last year. If you've read my other blog posts, you will know that I love William Morris. Last summer, my mother and I were in England, and spent a day in the tiny town of Kelmscott, where William Morris, along with his family and sometimes Morris's friend, sometimes Mrs. Morris's lover, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, lived till Morris died, and where he and his family are buried. After enjoying a gorgeous moring there, we walked along a footpath, through several farms, and along a country road, till we arrived at the massive grand estate of Buscot Park, where Lord Farringdon, collector of Pre-Raphaelite art, lived. Morris's friend Edward Burne-Jones completed a quartet of gorgeous paintings that tell the story of the Briar Rose (known to us as Sleeping Beauty) and Lord Farringdon built a room to house them - when Burne-Jones came to see how his paintings were displayed, he painted small panels of rose briars to fit between them - the room is so beautiful, I got weepy. 
I featured a tiny portion of the Briar Rose paintings on one side of my pendant, and a tiny snip of William Morris's Honeysuckle fabric on the other. For me this necklace is about the memory of that wonderful day with my mother in England, plus it connects in a larger way to my love for my mom - she grows honeysuckle on her fence, and all summer long, the smell of honeysuckle sweetens the air around my mother's house. My boyfriend and I had our first kiss in the heady clouds of it, and I associate it with all things sweet, inviting and comforting.
If anyone is still reading (sorry to go on so long - there's just so much to say!) this Girls' Night was declared by all to be one of our best ever. 
Everyone left with jewelry they were glowing with pride over, and we had a great time - with no TV! If you have a girl's night, think about making crafts a part of it. Sharing a skill that you have with a friend is a wonderful gift - for you and for them. And be sure to check out those memory frames - they make fabulous presents, and you can get so creative with them - at a recent friend's wedding, a memory frame holding a picture of her hospitalized grandfather was tied to the bride's bouquet - so he went down the aisle with her. Thery're super easy to use - I can't recommend them enough. Get creative, have fun!
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