Pinky's Birthday celebration and cigar boxes

(Jan posting)  We were celebrating Pinky's birthday today, she will be 60 something on the 5th.  Happy Birthday Pinky!  We sure are glad you joined our group, you bring lots of laughter to our meetings as well as your unique creativity.  

Joan had picked up a Red Velvet cake for our dessert, it looks like Pink is enjoying it.  Joan also laid out a delicious lunch for us all even though she was feeling extremely poorly.  Thanks Joan, sorry you were feeling so bad.

Everyone was enjoying it!

We also were revealing our altered cigar boxes. Mary gave us all cigar boxes a few weeks ago and challenged us to alter them.  Today was the big reveal.  Above you can see Karen's.  She collaged lots of different papers on hers including pictures of her grandkids, pieces of wood and a rusty piece of metal for the handle to open it with. She didn't have screws so she used cup hooks to attach the handle, then just cut the hook part off. Very cool.  Below you can see that she also decorated the insides of the box.  Karen has the most unique papers and art work!

Next you can see April's.  She wasn't thrilled with her results, the glue she used to collage tissue paper and leaves left a very rough texture which was not what she wanted.  I think she is going to continue to work on her box, maybe sanding it down and adding more to it.  I really like the grape leaves she used on it.

Below you see Mary's.  She loves cowboy/girl images and chose to use them for her box. I love how she decorated between the images too.

She had a nice metal closure for her box, shown below. You can also see how she has decorated the sides with border paper with additional coloring by hand.

On the inside is Mary's secret heart throb.  Her boy Roy.  Karen almost stole Mary's box when she saw who was inside.  Those two!  You'd think they had never seen Johnny Depp! 

Don't they know he's the man?

Oh yeah! (these hunky photos of Roy and Johnny ought to bring us some new followers! heheh!)

Maybe I should put Johnny inside of my box, which is shown next.  I made several painted polymer clay mosaic tiles to glue onto mine, after collaging tissue paper and painting.

I didn't have a cool clasp like Mary did so improvised a wire and glass bead handle to open it with.

Pinky somehow forgot to bring her box so we won't get to see it until next week.  It was a busy meeting.  We also did our first trade on our round robin calendars. Below you see Pinky showing off a page from her calendar that Karen created.

Then you see Karen with the cover of hers that I believe Mary created. She looks pretty pleased with how hers is shaping up.  Everyone did a great job on the calenders, now we traded and have a couple of weeks to work on them before we trade again.

Finally here is a picture of our mascot, Rocky. Joan has a little Manchester Terrier and Rocky tried to fit his big bu...I mean his tush into her bed.  Not quite, Rocky boy!

It was a great celebration, marred only by poor Joan not doing well.   I'm glad everyone was able to make it and that so much fun art was shared.  There was also a lot of present unwrapping going on by our Pinky.  Maybe Mary has more photos she will be able to share.  Pinky received some very cool gifts!

Thanks for stopping by and I hope you enjoyed sharing a bit of our celebration!