Friday, April 29, 2016

Arts and Crafts Part 3

It was a fun morning in the Community Room, with the new Activity Director showing us how to personalize coffee mugs.

The Activity Director informed us that she showed up last Friday with all her supplies, not knowing the office and Community Room were inaccessible that day because staff had taken the day off.

She’d better get accustomed to it, I thought to myself, because it wasn’t the first time and won’t be the last. Others said out loud, “We didn’t know either.” I then mentioned that we usually just set up in the outside patio area and go on with our planned activity.

Activity Director said she’d thought about that, but it was too hot that day for seniors to be out in the sun, and she was right … it would have been miserable; plus, we would have had no access to the Community Room kitchen, and the cups require baking. I suppose we could have baked the cups in our own ovens, and hoped to have done it correctly and not exploded them, but she made the right choice to pack up and call it a day.

The process for this morning’s Sharpie Mugs -- which is what they’re called, was quite easy and involved black or clear coffee cups, various colored sharpies, and stickers – mostly letters for initials, but other decorative embellishments.



After selecting and applying self-adhesive stickers to the mug, we were instructed to pick a sharpie color or colors, use that sharpies to tap dots around the sticker to create a stencil, then remove the sticker. From there, we could dot colors inside the stencil or outside and around the stencil.

I quickly snagged a clear, because it looked like that’s the direction everyone was going and there weren’t enough clear for all of us. I then decided to free-hand dots, rather than use stickers. Deciding on lips and hearts for my cup, I first drafted smiling lips on paper as a go-by for one side of the cup, open lips with teeth for the other side of the cup.






You can see the designs better with background paper in the cup, so here you go.





And here’s what some of the others came up with.











After we were done, the Activity Director placed our mugs on a cookie sheet, heated the oven to 350°F, and set the timer for 30 minutes bake, telling us to allow another 30 minutes to cool … come back at 1:00.






The Arts and Crafts portion of this morning’s program over, it was now noon and someone was setting up a lunch of sliders which, of course the price for a free lunch was sitting in on a presentation – this one on burial insurance.

One might think such a presentation as morbid, especially as a topic for lunch. We don’t see it that way but, nevertheless, these things bore me, so I opted instead to head back to my unit for a lunch of ramen noodles.

And, yes, I know ramen noodles are not clean eating, furthermore are bad for you, but they’re quick, easy, cheap and I like ‘em.

At any rate, I went back down at 1:00 sharp, to pick up my cup before some dishonest individual walked through the Community Room and disappeared it.




The only downside to Sharpie Mugs is they can’t be soaked in water without the color running or coming off completely.

I’ll be using my cup for decorative purposes only.

I’ve liked all the Activity Directors we’ve had in the past, but I really really really like this girl and hope Nurse Ratched doesn’t run her off.

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