Last week I had the pleasure of finally ditching my day job before 6pm and heading over to my local West Elm in WeHo for one of their evening DIY workshops.  The night’s event was hosted by Chelsea of Lovely Indeed.  I recently discovered her blog prior to the workshop and am totally in love.  Commence girl crush.  And she’s just as lovely in person!

The workshop activity was just up my a-little-too-early-for-Christmas loving self: monogrammed stockings.  For the price of the West Elm stocking you purchased just prior to the event, you got all the crafting tools you needed and some delicious local treats.  Here’s the line up for the night:

As I’m already a frequent patron of Simple Things’ delicious pies, I opted for a gluten-free brownie.  Chocolate-y goodness!  Later on I powered through a LOT of complicated scissor work with the help of a delicious hot chocolate courtesy of Ticket Chocolate.

(Cup of hot milk + stick of chocolate awesome = HEAVEN!)

For those that know the WeHo West Elm, we were in the center section of the store surrounded by warehouse windows.  They cleared the pre-set holidays tables for all of us and set them with these great centerpieces:

(Don’t you love their mercury glass votive holders as pen cups for our supplies?!)

You’ll notice at each place setting above we had a cutting mat and two very different letter templates of card stock. I opted for the prettier (and obviously more complicated) option.

Hanging on the wall next to our table and conveniently right next to my spot, Chelsea had pre-made a few examples for us:

I opted for a slightly more traditional take on all of the above.  Needless to say, I was too busy crafting (with a dying iPhone) to remember to snap any “in-progress” photos.  I did have two stockings to get through; I knew I couldn’t come home with a masterpiece for myself without one for my Jefe.

So after meticulously cutting cardstock and felt for an hour with the tiniest, cutest scissors you’ve ever seen (similar here), I finally managed to crank out these two beauts:

And a little bit closer:

As I was leaving, everyone was showing off their finished work.  Chelsea referred to mine as “the professional ones”.  Swoon.

In addition to bringing home this awesomeness, they also gave us each a little gift bag:

And my favorite item in the bag were these pencils from Amanda Catherine Designs:

I’m 100% a blue pen kind of gal, but after checking out the Etsy shop, I may certainly need to consider converting.  She also has some adorable prints I’m dying to find a place for.  If only my Jefe didn’t loathe typography art…

All in all, it was a great night of crafting away from my Blackberry.  I definitely need to find more activities like these to keep my creative juices flowing and meeting other like-minded bloggers.  West Elm has a few others coming up including one from the ladies over at Bash, Please that I am dying to attend!

Thanks Chelsea for a great time!