Being pregnant means This Girl has been forced to slow down. She has pretty much stopped training completely with Brunei Princess and The Pud taking over all the training duties, meetings and everything else in between. She manages everything by proxy, via email and pretty much has been relegated to paperwork duty. The company’s schedule has been toned down with only two and a half trainers and they have become more selective as to the projects they take on.

All this supposed slowing down also means that This Girl has a little more time to indulge herself in “less stressful” things like getting back to crafting. Since entering the third trimester, she’s completed:

1 Kisslock purse- handsewn with beading
3 Baby record books/albums
4 glass fusion accessory pieces
2 mini albums
1 scrapbook kisslock bag
1 complicated lace layout that became a baby name plate
1 copper accessory piece (butterfly)
1 stacked frame
40 over cards (to tide her through the next few months)
8 layouts (4 from class + 4 following)

She’s also had the luxury to steal away to attend random craft classes, usually when The Boy is packed off to bowling or golf. She’s had the chance to go check out these three craft/art places: Creative Escape, Made With Love and Laine’s Papeterie.

Creative Escape @ Kim Yam Road

This little hole in the wall gem of a studio is run by one Arden William from Canada who moved to Singapore some six years ago and is a trained glass jeweler/artist and self taught all-other-craftist. This girl has known of this place a while back chancing upon it when she sent her sheets to the laundry; the studio (used to be) in the upper floor of the then River Valley locale. They’ve since moved to the Mohamed Sultan area; mighty convenient for This Girl, really, since she lives 5 mins away.

This Girl took two classes there: Copper work and Glass fusion. Both classes went rather well- and quickly- the former mainly working through a design sawing through copper sheets. The latter was a little more fun as she got to design her own set of glass jewellery (she made The Boy a pair of cufflinks amongst the lot), scour through the studio’s trove of glass, and learn about working with glass at the same time.

Made With Love @ Plaza Singapura

The self touted largest scrapbooking store in Singapore and Southeast Asia is conveniently located across the street from where This Girl lives! To the exasperation of The Boy, This Girl has always found the need to wander into the bowels of the black-walled store to browse through their (indeed) rather large collection of paper, tools and other scrapbooking/craft paraphernalia. Truth is, given she’s got a generally large stash of stuff, she rarely buys anything from there (she said rarely, not never) but the browsing and prodding at goods always makes her happy.

At the recommendation of Scrapbook Queen and Golden Skull, both of whom are big fans of the store, This Girl took a layout class there recently. Truth is, she wasn’t THAT impressed at the class seeing as she’d rather do more technic based learning rather than plough through layout after layout. Up side: she came away from the class with loads of goodies that she’s used in her own craft pieces. Also, its good to know that the designer of the class/project usually takes the class; which is a huge plus.

Laine’s Papeterie @ Wheelock

Most familiar to This Girl is Laine’s Papeterie, mainly because she’s bought stuff from them before; like when she made The Parents three shadowboxes of stuff for their 25th wedding anniversary years back. Like when she comes across most craft stores, This Girl loves browsing the aisles of this store, in particular, their bargain bin though she rarely picks anything up. Seeing as she’s got most of the tools and instruments (buying from different places and even overseas), This Girl has stayed off the “classic” scrapbooking bandwagon as she prefers “projects” to “picture frames.” As a result, her craft stash has been more than enough for her.

Anyway, whilst at Wheelock a while back, This Girl decided to sign up for classes there seeing as they offer mainly project classes: scrapbooking kisslock bag class, mini album class… While their “lesson take home stash” is not as robust as Made With Love, they do more technique work (at least from the classes This Girl has attended) and she’s had fun playing with glimmer mists, stamps, glossy accents, embossing inks and heating tools. She doesn’t use such techniques or mediums at home simply cos they create a huge mess with stuff flying and spritzing all over the place.

One big downside to this place though, the project designers don’t usually take the class. In This Girl’s last class, which she took with The Princess, the teacher (a part-timer) wasn’t that good, really, so they ended up goofing off and doing their own thing. Not that they didn’t have fun, but they both felt that they didn’t really learn anything new. In fact, This Girl was so unimpressed with the mini album concept, she ripped the whole thing apart to retrofit into other totally-different craft projects.

This Girl will probably start a new category for her craft work seeing as how she’s headed to half a year of maternity leave. At least. No less, she’s got some glass tile supplies on the way and a spanking new letterpress set that The Boy bought her for Christmas beckoning to be broken into. She’s also received requests for her to run classes; a throwback to her uni days when she used to teach parchment lace craft part time. We’ll see.