Many people at my work at working 4/10s for the summer break (10 hours a day for four days, then off on Friday’s). I thought it might be fun to break up the long days with some lunch crafting workshops, so I came up with the following schedule for this Summer:
I used this free template from Canva to create it (I’m LOVING Canva). Important information to include:
- Activity, dates and times
- Price and supplies that are “bring your own.” I priced things out my sourcing materials and dividing by a random number of people, to get a per person count.
- RSVP instructions and deadline (I didn’t include a deadline and regret it) – I used a Google Form for sign ups. bit.ly and QR code both led to the Google Form which included this info:
- Payment instructions
Here are some things I kept in mind when creating the schedule:
- Most people will be off on Friday’s, Monday’s are rough, so I scheduled all lunch sessions for Wednesday’s
- I scheduled the watercolor session a bit farther out because it will require the most supplies and I wanted extra time to make sure I could get all the supplies in time
- I’m out of town one week in July, there’s the 4th of July weekend, and Summer hours start on June 5th and end on July 21st – this helped me determine how many workshops and what weeks to schedule them
Selecting crafts:
I’m not a professional crafter, so I wanted to select things that would be easy to do, or easy to follow along from someone else’s instructions.
- Succulent potting is easy enough, you just need the right materials (listed below). A quick Google search gives you some basic information on how to pot them (start with a bottom layer of rocks, cactus soil, moss in the middle, more soil, add succulents, top with decorative rocks or sand
- Cross stitch is more like needlepoint. I found this template on Etsy. I wanted something that fell into the “summer” theme and will hopefully be easy to do, since I have very little needlepoint experience (aside from my home ec classes in Guatemala in elementary school). The template comes with a complete list of supplies and instructions. I traced the templates ahead of the workshop to save some time – we only have our lunch hour and I can already tell this will be a tad more complicated and time consuming that planting succulents.
3. Watercolor. This is the most popular workshop, the most expensive one, and the one I’m most nervous about, since I’ve never done any sort of watercolor project before (aside from preschool volunteer stuff with my kids). I found this tutorial on YouTube after searching through quite a few. I was looking for a lesson that was fairly basic, but not elementary, and using just a few paint colors so the investment wasn’t too steep. This lesson will be projected on screens in the room while everyone (hopefully) follows along.
4. The windchime project is a bit of a stab in the dark. Again, I was looking for summer projects, and making something for your garden seemed pretty fitting. But I’m having a hard time pinning down the right materials to use that aren’t super difficult to use (making sure they can be strung without having to use any fancy tools to drill a hole, etc.). Fingers crossed on this one!
Organizing RSVPs
Once responses were received, I viewed the responses in a Google Sheet and added some columns for additional tracking information:
Columns A through C were pre-populated by the Google Form with the timestamp, name, and sessions signed up for. I added a column to add up how much each person owed depending on what they signed up for (column D), a column to track when payments were received and what type of payment (column E), and then next four columns (columns F through I) allowed to keep an easy count of how many people signed up for each workshop. These columns were super helpful when trying to figure out how many supplies to purchase for each workshop.
I added a separate tab on my RSVP Google Sheet to track how much I spent on supplies for each workshop, to make sure I stayed within budget (or at least didn’t pay too much out of pocket). I linked the total number of attendees for each workshop to the second sheet so it would automatically calculate.
Supplies
Needle point:
- Embroidery hoops
- Cross stitch needles
- Etsy template
- Fabric (looked for a light cotton at JoAnnes – in retrospect, I would go with a solid color. I didn’t realize the one I purchased has some natural dots woven into it, which interfere with the pattern a little bit)
- Thread – I was going to purchase on Amazon, but it was $6 to ship an item that cost $.030, so I trekked to JoAnnes, where it was super easy to find all the colors that are listed in the Etsy template
- Scissors
Watercolor
- Bright rose watercolor paint
- Cad yellow watercolor paint
- Prussian blue watercolor paint
- Princeton round size 10 watercolor brush
- Alternate Princeton round size 10 watercolor brush
- Princeton Neptune round size 8 watercolor brush
- Watercolor palette
- Watercolor paper
- Plastic cups
- Scrap paper for practice
Winchchime
- Amazon pack
- Beads and other decor from Hobby Lobby
- Going to try to scavenge some thick wood branches for horizontal wood chimes
- Since I’m not sure what people will want to use, I have fishing wire, think metal wire, and floral wire
Only the succulent workshop has taken place already, and I really loved the opportunity to interact with employees that are not in my direct department. It got us away from our desk, enjoying the 30 minutes of sunshine we got for the day, and getting some fresh air, while getting our hands dirty. Hoping the other workshops will provide similar benefits.
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