Paper Party at West Elm ({Blogtacular Part II}

It’s time for me to finally sit down and write my second post about Blogtacular and the opening night Paper Party at West Elm. Last year I didn’t go to the Paper Party as I was just too tired from being up at 5 to go on the Photowalk before the conference. I was so envious of all the pictures being posted that I knew I wanted to go this year. The venue was West Elm, an interiors shop on Tottenham Court Road.

Paper Makers took over West Elm to bring you hand lettering, paper flower making, colouring, origami, weaving and live illustration. I was a little late arriving as I had gone from the pub to check into my hotel – the super cool Hub Spitalfields.

I forgot how long it takes to get anywhere so by the time I arrived the party was in full swing. I thought the Paper Party was a great idea to get chatting to people before the conference. As well as the different crafts there was some food, drinks and a fun photo wall.

I don’t got to West Elm very often and I didn’t think it was a great venue for this kind of thing. The location was fab but the shop itself is on two levels so, on the one hand there is plenty of space, but that also made it difficult to find people.

The party only lasted 2 hours and I wanted to try as many things as I could. Some of the queues for the crafts were awfully long which meant I had to give the live illustration a miss even though it looked fab.

Instead I tried my hand at some adult colouring which I love. Zeena Shah was promoting her new adult colouring book and there were sample pages to colour. I couldn’t resist the dala horse page.

I loved the pretty paper flowers people were wearing so went off to find how to make one. Sue Beech had pre-made all the hard bits so I simply had to glue the different parts together to make a pretty primrose. This was probably my favourite craft and I would love to make more.

There was some paper weaving too with quilling paper. There were no instructions but it seemed simple enough and I made a pretty bookmark.

My final craft was trying calligraphy. I’ve always admired beautiful handwriting but haven’t touched a fountain pen since I left school. This was a really fun craft and the lady who took it was lovely. I quite liked the results of my work so would definitely be tempted to try this again.

Mollie Makes had a table too, making the paper gems kit which were the free cover gift from the beginning of the year. They were really fiddly so not something I wanted to be making whilst drinking wine and trying to chat to people.

Time went far too quickly and before I knew it it was time to leave and head back to my lovely hotel room for the night.

You’ll find Part I of my Blogtacular experience here.