Blog Finds of the Day: March 2011

As it turns out, I heard her wrong. She said crop party. I conjured up visions of horse women in jodhpurs perched on English riding saddles, and riding crops tucked under their arms. Oh, and chips and guacamole because it’s not a party without snacks Wrong again. For blood relatives, Jan and I have very different ideas on a good time.

Apparently it wasn’t even a party—it was just a crop, which is more like a soiree…with pinking shears. Women of all ages (and an occasional token male), drag boxes of photographs and scary looking tools to a crop where they spend time preparing photographs for scrapbooks. By spending time, I mean hours.

Jan assured me this was a short crop—only four hours. Wait. Four hours is short? If four hours is a short time, then what is a long crop? Turns out it’s 12 hours. I kid you not. There are people who can spend 12 straight hours decorating pictures for scrapbooks. Have these people never heard of shoeboxes? (Tossing pictures into shoeboxes is my idea of scrapbooking.) After 12 hours spent slicing and dicing pictures, I would be ready to put a hole in my head. And it wouldn’t be difficult since hole punches are essential crop tools.

I can see why they dropped the word party from this Saturday night event. It’s much easier to justify spending hours with a box cutter or razor blade if you drop the word party. Saying “I’m going to a crop” sounds more like, “I’m off to work an eight-hour shift,” than “I’m off to play with pictures of our summer vacation.”

A crop is a cross between a baby shower and a home demonstration party—the kind where you can buy jewelry, plastic storage containers, skin care, or high-end cheese graters. Croppers seem like people who would let you cut in front of them in line at the grocery if you had nothing but a bag of pre-cut lettuce and a Diet Coke and they had 82 items and a folder full of coupons. Crappers, on the other hand, might not be so nice. But I digress.

Jan supported the rubber stamp end of the crop and her friend Janet was in charge of the scrapbooking part. Together they are Scrampers--a powerful alliance between the rubber stamp confederation and the scrapbooking consortium. I sat between them and added no value whatsoever. Sort of like the peanut butter filling between Nabisco cheese crackers.

To say Jan is a rubber stamper is like saying the Pope is sort of religious. Along every wall in her finished basement is shelving stocked with ribbons, markers, card stock, ink pads, glue, and, of course, dozens and dozens of wood-mounted, rubber art stamps. I’m certain I also saw a few one-pound bags of M&Ms--no doubt for medicinal purposes. Jan whipped out a chef’s apron that identified her as a professional stamper who no longer competes on an amateur level. I kept waiting for her to put on special stamping shoes, but those don’t exist—yet.

Wheeling in luggage-sized carriers, half a dozen paper-crimping, bone-folding-addicted women lugged their gear to the crop. All I brought was a pair of nail clippers, but I was only there to audit the class.

I expected to hear a starting pistol signifying the beginning of the four-hour event. Or an incantation like: Romper, Bomper, Stamper Boo. The official launch amounted to nothing more than the “pffft” sound a Tupperware container full of brownies makes when you open the lid. It was good enough for me.

Neophytes to the world of the scramper will gasp at the tools required to do the job right. The most impressive (and frightening) tool of the evening was the crop-a-dile. With pink handles and the jaws of a reptile, it punched eyelets and grommets into the sturdiest of materials—even metal trash cans.

While I have no idea why anyone would need to adorn a metal trash can with eyelets, someone somewhere has convinced crafters that life without the crop-a-dile is meaningless.

I’ll bet it’s the same people who were behind pet rocks.