Crafting it up on a cruise ship…

A lot of you have asked me what the Crafty Chica Cruise is like, so I thought I’d try to give you a more complete picture in this post.

(I should say up front, my little snap camera is aging rapidly, so these photos are a bit rougher than I’d like. Ah well.)

The ship departs from San Diego and spends about 40 hours sailing down to Cabo San Lucas. Then it docks there for two days, turns around, and sails back. (I know, nerdy much?)

So, while all that was going on, our group (54 crafters in total) took over one of the ship’s conference rooms. We had it 24 hours a day, and it was a hub of activity most of the time – even well into the wee hours.

In this room, we had a fairly mind-blowing array of products to play with. Paints, glitters, glues, appliques, buttons, stencils – wowee!

Our days were semi-structured into specific classes, but overall, it’s a very freeform crafting experience. People are working on all kinds of things at once – in fact, some folks just bring their own supplies and make whatever they want instead of doing the cruise crafts.

Let me share a few of the specific crafts we did. Here’s one of my favorites: a silk scarf that we drew and colored on with Crafty Chica Fabric Markers.

Here’s mine in progress – I added a lot more color, and sprayed on some paint later. (I’ll show you the finished project in another post.)

People also stenciled on them with markers…

…And with fabric paints. We had so much fun with Tulip fabric spray paints! They’re awesome for stenciling, or you can use them to spray a fine mist of color onto fabric. (Look at all those colors!)

We also had some reverse stencils on hand – stick them to fabric and then spray some paint over the top. When the paint dried…

…You could peel it away, and then embellish from there.

Here’s Amy, outlining her entire stencil in glitter glue.

(An idea I promptly borrowed to make my T-shirt pillow. I’ll show you the finished product later.)

Those were some well-loved stencils!

We also had divine cruise aprons, made by Kathy. (There’s a really funny story behind these, but I’ll save that for the upcoming cruise podcast.)

Anyway, we had a ball stenciling, applique-ing, glittering, and otherwise embellishing them.

The floor was our ironing board. We probably shouldn’t mention this to the cruise director.

Here’s another fun craft we did – lino block carving (thanks, Speedball, for the stuff)! We got to carve several blocks, and then make prints on cards, fabric, etc.

There’s Kathy’s husband Patrick, the Mantastic Crafter, watching over a group of lino-cutters. I’m happy to report, in our whole group, there were no lino-cutting injuries at all.

What a glorious creative whirl! It seemed that every surface had someone’s project drying on it. You could walk around the room and see so many interesting works-in-progress.

This is one of my favorite shots. Each morning, the ship’s staff would re-stock our water pitchers and glasses, and by nightfall, they were all full of paint!

By the last day, we had a really grand mess going.

I should really say that most of these pictures represent only the first day of crafting on the cruise. Sadly, some bad-food illness and a little bout of seasick kept me from shooting much of the other craft sessions. There is, however, a Flickr group where everyone is pooling images, if you want to see more.

Incidentally, this was our view from the craft room – looking out at the back of the ship and the ocean speeding away behind us.

I tell ya, there are worse ways to live.