learning all about book arts

we had a somewhat random outing with our girl scout troop last weekend, but other troop leaders on facebook really raved about it and so we booked it for our girls way back in october.  and like our last outing, it was a little far - out in carson, which was about a 45 minute drive for us.

the international printing museum is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the history of all things printed - books, posters, letterpress, etc. and houses a pretty extensive collection of antique printing and pressing equipment.  they do a "book arts day" a few times a year, where they set up stations for the girls to rotate around and learn about all kinds of things like making paper, screen printing, bookbinding.

after getting all of the girls checked in, we had them find seats together, picked one girl to be in charge of the lunch tickets and snack money, and then we bounced outta there to let them do their thing.

i took pictures of all the stuff we walked past as we headed back out of there.

it was a full day program - from 9-3 - which left us with all sorts of time to kill.  first on the agenda? breakfast, of course!  and i'd figured out that we were really close to somewhere super fun:

of course, being a saturday morning it was quite the hotspot between folks picking up baked goods for parties and others who were there for some grub, like us.  with a 25 minute wait for a table we wandered around the bakery section and checked out all the goodies.  i was super sad that there was not a single loaf of rainbow bread to be found:

but there were lots of other treats to buy.

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we were seated in a nice booth towards the rear of the restaurant, and it didn't take too long for me to decide on what i wanted to eat.

my big island breakfast included two eggs, a serving of grilled spam and some super delicious french toast made with their famous hawaiian bread.  i gobbled it all up quite happily.

we spent the next few hours wandering around the local fashion plaza, where we walked off that breakfast and browsed through all of the fun stores.  and then when we got back to the museum we found that the girls were finishing up with their very last station and wrapping up their day.  they'd gotten to make several little books and notebooks, learned how to use a letterpress, created their very own personalized die that they even got to take home to use as a stamp, and screen printed a design on a t-shirt.

we were happy to see that the other leaders hadn't overhyped this outing at all - it seemed really well organized and kept the girls interested and engaged.  they were full of stories about their day on the way home, and showed us all of the stuff they got to work on.  the bean was happy that it was a day that wasn't run by older girl scouts - we've taken them to a couple of workshops that they were really bored at, and so i think this one made up for the suckiness of those.

it's hard to believe that our first year of being juniors is already winding down, what with cookie season over and just a handful of meetings left for the year.  there are going to be some changes for next year, ones that we still need to discuss with the parents, and it'll be interesting to see how it all goes down.  either way, we're going to continue scouting even with the shitty politics we have to deal with.  but we're going to figure out a way to make it bearable for everyone, and hopefully the girls will be none the wiser about it all.

gotta love being a grownup.