My Crafty Christmas

I'm back!  My bloggy friend Jamie reminded me that it's been a month since I've last posted.  Oops!  Not really what I intended to happen, but you know how things kind of get away from you... Good thing I have people keeping up with me, or you'd all still be left without my wonderful internet presence ;)

I thought a good way to get back into the swing of blogging would be to let you in on what I've been up to in my time off.  It seems like things have been going non-stop since Thanksgiving.  We hosted this year's Thanksgiving dinner at our house this year, and it went off well, but as soon as it was over Christmas kind of took over and then before I knew it, Christmas was over, and then it was time for New Years, when we had our friends over for a couple of days. And then we had Stephen's birthday this weekend.  Whew!  Lots of activity - it was all a blast though.

Don't worry - I did manage to get some crafting done during my busy time!  Here's a quick rundown of what I did.

First of all, I promised my mother-in-law I'd take a picture of our Christmas tree for her so here it is (Sorry for the delay Suanne!)  I made sure to take the picture before I shipped off all the gifts.  It was pretty bare under there for most of the time we had the tree up.

And here are a few close ups of my handmade ornaments in action:

For my gift wrapping, I made a big roll of hand stamped kraft paper.  It came out so cute!  I love it!  I also used a bunch of hand made gift bows on my packages.  I think I'll post a tutorial for the bows one of these days.  They are pretty simple and cute! Here's a close up of the paper and bows:

Just curious, but did anyone else fall in love with this sweater wrapping paper in the dollar bins at Michael's as much as I did?

Oh my goodness!  It's so cute!  I had to keep myself from buying like 50 rolls of it.  I also decided to put yarn bows on all of my presents I was shipping this year, that way it wouldn't make a difference if my bows got squashed in the mail.  Great idea right?  Oh, and I don't think I took any photos of the gift tags, but they are all handmade too, you can see them a little in my present shots.

Here is my stack of gifts at it's most impressive looking point.  Beautiful!! Well, at least I think so.  Maybe next year I'll just wrap up a bunch of dummy boxes to put under my tree so I can look at a cheery pile of presents for more than a few hours.

Next, here are the Christmas cards I made for my co-workers this year.  It is important to me to give handmade Christmas cards, but my list is just too long.  So for the past couple years I've made up just enough for work people, and everyone else gets the pretty photo cards.  Here's this year's card:

A cute little forest of trees!  Here is a closer shot:

I sewed fabric scraps onto card stock using my sewing machine, then stitched around the edge and then sewed a few button ornaments on each one before sticking the card stock on to a blank card.  Then I put a hand stamped message on the inside:

Ahh!!  I'm totally in love with how they came out!  Sooooo cute!  (Sew cute?)

And, since I never posted it, here's the 2009 model:

Kinda the same idea but with a hand carved tree stamp instead (all the ornaments were mini hand-carved stamps too!)

Let's see... What next.  How about the crafty gifts I made.  I'll start with the nesting doll pillows I made for my mom and my sisters.  We've kind of got a running nesting doll gift thing going in our family, so it seemed appropriate.  I made these from a pattern I made up all by myself.  Go me!  I've still got a couple more to make, but I just couldn't get them done in time for Christmas.  Here are the ones I did get done.

Cute right?  Then this set of note cards went to my aunt.  These were kind of fun to make because it isn't 4 individual stamps, it is one stamp inked with 4 different colors.  That was kind of tricky!

My sisters-in-law each got one of these cute boxes:

Which held cute earrings!  I'm learning how to make jewelry now - Yay!

And my nephew got a stuffed "One Yard Wonders" dinosaur.

And my mother in law got a cute flower pillow (I love this pillow so much!  I have one of my own on my guest room bed! I've actually got the photos to post a walk through for this one - hopefully I'll get it up soon.)

Then, my niece turned 3 last week so I made her this cute card:

To accompany her new handmade fishing toy!

This was really fun to make!  This project was inspired by From An Igloo.  What a great idea right?  It's little stuffed fishies (I just sketched out a simple fish pattern).  Each fishy has a washer attached to it's nose, and there is a magnet inside the felt worm.  I kind of wanted to keep it to play with on my own.  Stephen demonstrated the proper fishing technique for me.

I also stitched up a quick drawstring bag for her fishies to live in.  I found the perfect fish fabric at Hobby Lobby too!

That's about all I've got!  And that's only the stuff I remembered to take pictures of! I'm exhausted just thinking about it... :)  And just for fun, and because Stephen took these photos, and I forgot about them, and I don't usually post photos like this here, here are a few pictures of me hard at work.

This is me making cards at my crafting table crafting table - it is usually about this jam packed full of stuff.

And here I am sewing buttons at the sewing table.  Wine is always a good accompaniment for crafting!  And this is my standard crafting attire.  Gotta love the pj pants!

Here's to a new year of blogging!  Hope it's a good one!

Ornament Month! Flower pot bells

My last ornaments for the month are these cute little flower pot bells!  My mom loves bells so we always have bells on our tree.  When I saw these little flower pots at Michael's, I immediately thought of bells!

They were pretty easy to put together, but I admit I had to think a little bit about how to rig up the clapper for the inside.  I started off by painting the flower puts in cute bright colors, just because that's what paint I had on hand.  These guys aren't going to end up matching anything I have on my tree...

 After that I had to figure out how to make the clapper for the inside.  I wanted it to tied together with the hanger, but the hole in the bottom (well now the top...) of the flower pot was too big to just tie a knot on either side of the hole.  Instead, I put a button on either side of the hole and strung my cording through that.  I used a 2-hole button on the top, but a 4 hole on the bottom.

 Let's see if I can say this clearly... I tied a knot on top of my outside button strung the cord through the 2 holes of the top button, and then I strung them through two opposite holes in the inside button.  I another piece of cord through the other two holes of the inner button, and attached a bead and then tied a knot under the bead.  THEN I tied the two ends of the hanger cord into a knot, and trimmed all the edges.  You can kinda see what I'm talking about in this photo.  Maybe...

So, that brings us to the end of ornament month!  I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.  I still have a few more ornaments that I haven't posted about yet, so I might be putting some of those up in December.  Or I could just save them for next year :)

Ornament Month! Button Wreath

 Today's ornament turns this:

 And this:

 Into this!

 When I started this ornament I wasn't sure it was going to work out, so I didn't take many "in process" photos, but I'll try to describe how I put it together as best I can.  I started out by "sewing" together a bunch of large green buttons in a circular shape using dark green wire.  I didn't really have a method for this, just up through one hole in the button, down in the opposite button, and then up through one hole of the next button and down through the opposite and on and on and on.  I twisted on more wire whenever I needed it, and twisted together the two wire ends to connect the circle ends.  My circle was pretty flimsy at this point.

Then I added a layer of smaller buttons on top of that, sewing them on to the previous layer using the holes in the bigger buttons.  The more buttons I added the more solid my shape became. I kept adding buttons where they were needed to fill out my wreath and where I needed to add stability, always twisting together my wire ends when I got to them  I kept going until I had a pretty stable wreath.  Here's a photo of the finished wreath before I added my red "berries" on.  You can also see the circle guide I drew for myself before I started.

 After I got all my greens "sewn" together I cut off all the excess wire sticking out - there was a LOT - this thing was a mess...  To help you picture this, here is how scraggly it looked after I attached the five red holly berry buttons.

 And here's a close up of some of my twisted wire,  maybe this will give you an idea of how I put this together.

 Then I attached a red ribbon onto my wreath for a hanger.

 I made sure to hide it under the buttons on the front, like so:

 Then, although it was pretty stable at this point, I figured it could still get bent up pretty easily when it was packed up for the year, so I hot glued a felt ring on the back of the wreath.

 Now all that was left was to glue my ribbon bow on the front.  It was a lot of work, but I'm so so happy with how this turned out - it is pretty much exactly how I pictured it.  It's my favorite ornament creation so far.  Is it dorky to say that I'm really proud of myself?

Ornament Month! Cute Crocheted Baubles

If you know how to crochet this is a super simple, super fun, super cute ornament you can make.  In fact, I made mine while I was lying on the couch, sick with some sort of horrible cold, and I made it in like twenty minutes.  While I was on my sick day I came across this great tutorial on Craft blog.  I thought "Hey, I have everything I need to make this right now!"  So I did.  And it came out great - better than I thought it would. For mine I used purple sugar n' cream yarn and a size G hook. I think I'm going to try it again with some thinner yarn, I think it will look a little more delicate that way.  The directions were really easy to understand,  I think anyone with a little crochet experience could pull it off, so go ahead and give it a whirl! I think you'll be happy with the results.

Ornament Month! Pom Pom Ornaments

If you've been following me for a while, you may remember that a long time ago I made a whole bunch of pom-poms for no apparent reason.  Well, I put those pom-poms in a box, and they have been there ever since.  Until NOW!  I finally came up with something to do with them! (Apologies in advance for the photos - it was really hard to focus on these little suckers!)

 I selected a couple of ornament sized pom poms from my stash, then added on some holiday embellishments.  I just put a little glue on the ends of the embellishments and stuck the ends into the the center of the pom-pom.  Then I added a tied a hanger onto each one using some cording I had on hand.  I did this by cutting a fairly long piece of cording, folding it in half and tying a loop towards the folded end.  Then I strung the loose ends through the pom-pom and tied a knot on the opposite side of the pom-pom.  I secured each side with a little glue.  I wish I had remembered to take photos of this part - it would probably make a lot more sense if I had...  Anyways, here's a close up of the multi-colored ornament.

 I'm very happy to have finally come up with a use for my pom-poms!  They came out so cute too!  Hooray!  They came together so easily too - I know anyone could do it :)

Ornament Month! Button Snowman Ornament

Here's another quick stacked button ornament I pulled together.  Today it's a little snowman!  (This is one of the shapes that Martha highlighted in her tutorial)

He was slightly more complicated than the little tree, but not much.  He just required a little more button matching.  Once I had all my buttons sorted out, I strung them on double ply black wire, and twisted in a few strands of brown for the arms.  I opted not to put a nose on mine like Martha suggested, but I'm thinking I might tie a little red ribbon on the neck for a scarf.  Totally cute right? 

Ornament Month! Sequined Ornament

Today's ornament caused me a lot of physical and emotional stress. No - for real!  It is one of those ones that starts out as a really simple idea and then kind of becomes bigger than you expected it to (due to poor planning on my part...)  Anyways, as Monk would say, here's what happened.

I had some styrofoam balls left over from last Christmas so I decided I was going to make an ornament of sequins and pins.  At one point I told my husband this and he said something along the lines of "What does secrets and pins mean?"  I guess I need to work on my enunciation.  Here's the initial supplies I gathered for this project.

1 box of pretty pearl head pins
1 styrofoam ball
2 packets of white sequins
1 spool of ribbon

My ball had a seam around the middle so that seemed (no pun intended until I realized it was "punny") like a good place to start.  I stuck one pin and one sequin into the ball and continued that all the way around.

Like this:

I found it was easier to "stick" my sequins with the pins before I stuck them into the ball, but that is a personal preferance.

It became clear very early on that I was going to have sore fingers from sticking all these pins into the ball.  It was a pretty solid one!  This brings me to "things I would do differently next time #1": Buy a less dense styrofoam ball. 

And Things I would do differently #2 - Buy shorter pins.



Moving on...


Once I finished the first row I added a second row on top of that.  Everything was looking good!

This is where the pictures stop.  This is because this is also where the frustrations start.  That is because about 4 rows in I ran out of pins.  Ummm... oops?

Things I would do differently #3 - buy more than one box of pins.

So I went to Jo-Ann and bought another box of pins.  Yes, only one more.  I don't know why I thought that one more box of pins would be enough, even though I clearly hadn't covered half of my ball yet.

Things I would do differently #4 - buy cheaper pins.

Those multicolored pearlized quilting pins sure are pretty but they aren't exactly cheap!  I was looking for a quick, easy and cheap project to use up these styrofoam balls and this one was not it!  So of course I ran out of pins again and went back to Jo-Ann's and bought 2 more boxes.  Surely this would be then end of my troubles.  Then, about 5 rows from finishing, I ran out of sequins. I mean, this was like maybe a little circle about an inch and a half in diameter left uncovered AHHHHH!!!!

Things I would do differently #5 - buy 2 packets of sequins OR buy bigger sequins.

I happened to be at Hobby Lobby one day so I thought I would buy another packet of sequins there, but it turns out their white sequins are yellow tinted and Jo-Ann's white sequins are pink tinted, so I had yet another trip to Jo-Ann's for sequins.  That makes this 4 trips to Jo-Ann's to finish this ornament.  Do you think I'm a doofus yet?

Here's my final supply list:

1 styrofoam ball
4 boxes pretty pearl head pins
3 packets white pink-tinted sequins
1 spool of ribbon

My original list?  Way off.  I didn't even use the same ribbon.  If you're interested I just attached the hanging ribbon by sticking it under one of my sequins.  This ball is so solid I was not worried at all about it pulling out.  Anyways, I think in the end I ended up with a pretty cool ornament, but I definitely will not be making another - this one came with way too many "I'm such an idiot!" moments. So much for quick easy and cheap!!  It does feel pretty cool to run your hands over all those pins though. Maybe one day I will be able to look at it without any feeling of resentment.  Some day...