Snowflake Stars

These lovely winter decorations are often called Finnish Stars, or Finnish Snowflakes.
I think they'd be so beautiful as white trimmed in silver, but my very first ones I wanted to make in my holiday colors!  And--guess what!?  They're very, very easy!

(Note: the red one is made with two red pieces of paper, white on one side.  The green and red is made with one red and one green, both white on one side.)

You'll only need paper, glue, and scissors for this one.

As the same as the 8-Pointed Stars, we'll use 6x6" pieces of paper.  (Now isn't that handy?)

First cut your 6" into 6x3.  Then cut one of the sheets into strips, about 1/4 inch wide, 6 inches long.  Measure them if you want to--mine were cut freehand.  You can either cut the other half into strips as well, or cut a differently colored sheet of paper into strips.

Take two strips, and fold them in half.  This is only to mark the center of each of these two strips.

Straighten them out, lay one down, and put a dot of glue on it in the center,

and place the other over it, cross-wise.

Place dots of glue, like this, paying attention to the look of the weave (the middle is 'under', these next two will be 'over'),

and place two strips over these glue dots.

Now four dots of glue (I've turned it)...

and the last two strips over the glue dots.

There.  So easy, hmm?

Turn it over, and bring these two closest strips together, and glue one over the other.

Turn the paper, and do this to all four corners.

The first half is finished!

Now make the second half, following these same instructions.
When you have two,

Turn one over, and place the other on top of it,

 angled so that it fits snuggly with it, like this.

Now we need to glue them together.... Place a bit of glue inside the first point,

and pull the tab that lies under it inside this loop, and press it to the gluey loop.

Do this for all four loops, and then turn the star over, and do it for the other four as well.

You can leave these points long, and they have  lovely pointed "snowflake" appearance, or you can trim off these extra lengths, to give the weaving a more rounded, flowery look.

They're all ready for ribbon and hanging!

Felt Hearts

Here's today's project; standing felt hearts. 
I like them.

First we had to make something for the stand.  We opted for simple.... natural clay.

Took a bit of clay, flattened it out, cut it with a little ramekin, and then with the bottom of the ramekin, made a ring as a sort of border.

We grabbed a dowel from downstairs, cut off a bit of it with my magic gardening tool,

and plopped the stick into the soft clay.

Next we chose some felts from our rather large bag of felt sheets and scraps.

Had some pretties in there from a trip to Hobby Lobby last year.

Two were stitched with the sewing machine (Maddie was thrilled to make hers on the machine!)

and the last I blanket-stitched.

We stuffed them (before finishing the edges, of course) with a few stretched cotton balls, and then finished the stitching.

I had originally planned on leaving an opening at the bottom of the heart to put the stick through,

but I forgot, so I cut a small hole in the back of the heart,

and that worked fine, so we did that with the other two, too.

They'd be darling spelling words, family sentiments, or names...

think buttons, ribbons, rick rack, glitter... whatever makes you smile.

A little pink and red love for you and yours.

Happy Valentines, friends!

elfen whirling

there is holiday magic in the air today.

though i've been listening to christmas music for a few weeks (I love the old ones... Lou Rawls, Bing Crosby, Perry Como, Elvis, Nat King Cole), and though our tree is sparkling and tinkling as it should, and though we've had several days of advent surprises and chocolates... I hadn't felt that magical whoooosh in our house yet.
but this morning it arrived.

all of a sudden, I'm whirring and whirling, and ready to fly.

I'm smiling and eager, and want to do ten thousand things at once.

lotion bars!

peppermint wreaths!

gingerbread men!

bath bombs!  (I have a lovely recipe, I'll share it with you when I make them...)

peppermint pick-me-up baskets,

peppermint bark,

hand-made mints,

twine wreath with pretty birds,

reindeer food,
toasty warm things,
lavender somethings,
more bath somethings,

make, make, make, make!

now. 
where to begin?

Beaded Holiday Art

 Have you seen these $1 frames at Michael's?
I picked up a short stack of them a year or two ago, not having anything particular in mind for them.

This morning while I was thinking upon Thanksgiving tomorrow at Eric's mother's, I had an idea.

We used the frames, hot glue, cross-stich cloth (any material will do), a paint pen (not necessary, if you have a small paint brush and paints), embroidery floss, a piece of felt, and beads.

The first thing I did was to hammer back the tabs for holding the backing so they wouldn't poke into our cloth.  (You could try pulling them out with pliers, too, but this worked for me.)

For the first one (the tree) I remembered to paint the frame first.  :)  oof.

Then I hot-glued the fabric to the top of the frame, pulling it taut, making sure it was straight.

The sides, then bottom were next.

The child could draw something directly onto the cloth, or you could have them draw a template, and they or you could cut it out and trace it onto the fabric.  (That was me, in our house.)

I tested our paint pens first, for bleeding.  They passed.

note: You could do this in a different order, but I had limited cloth, and 'tis easier for Maddie to just work with it taut in the frame than any other way, so that's what I opted for.

Maddie colored in the cloth with paint.

Then she chose her trim color....

and I back-stitched the edges for her to make it pretty and tidy.

Maddie took over the rest of the way.

Once we made this one, I started thinking that a brown felt gingerbread man girl would be darling.
I thought the stitching should be untidy and free-form, so that's how we did it.
Maddie could have done a fine job of the stitching, but she was in puppy form and playing outside during this bit, so I stitched him her on.

She chose eyes and buttons, and just to set the record straight, a flower for her hair.

note: I was really nervous about ruining her when painting the frame, so we folded a piece of paper and tucked it between the frame and cloth, and hoped for the best.  I'm happy to say we didn't ruin it!

I think she's scrumptious.

We're taking the Tree to Grandma tomorrow, a gift for her for decking her hall.

I'm thinking a collection of them would be lovely... a snowman, a snowflake, a star with sparkly beads, holly and berries....  we'll see how many more frames I can find! 

*  *  *

This post goes to Friday's Nature Table at The Magic Onions on December 2, 2011.

Jute and Raffia Pumpkins

 
I saw a picture a couple of weeks ago of a jute (at least, I think it was jute, it was a quick glance) pumpkin. 
I gasped.  :)  We've created like this with yarn at different times, but I hadn't considered pumpkins!
And while we're at it, let's see if raffia will work!

(Note: I have no idea where I first saw it, I am sorry to say. Can't find it.  If you see one, I'd be happy to go see if it's the photo I saw, and give proper credit.)

I'm happy to say that raffia works.

We, Maddie and I, blew up balloons to the size we thought we wanted.

I wanted a stem, and I opted to  make a tube out of paper, then covered it in wax paper so it wouldn't stick when it dried.

I watered down some Elmer's regular white glue (about half and half), and then I cut a long piece of jute, and pushed the whole thing in my bowl of glue.

I wrapped it around the balloon, willy-nilly, cutting more jute when I needed it.

We used bowls to keep them standing upright for us as we worked.

I didn't really strain the excess glue off my strand, and it showed up later on my dried pumpkin.  So if you don't want to clean up clear glue off your jute, maybe be more careful to pull your jute between your fingers to wring out the excess glue before you wrap it around your balloon. 

For Maddie's raffia, we just put a handful of raffia in the glue bowl, then pulled it out a bit at a time, wrapping and winding it around the balloon.

We left them to dry overnight.

You may want to check them at 12 or 18 hours to see how dry they are, so you can pop your balloon and shape them the way you'd like.  Just squish them down to flatten (and reshape the yarn if some spots are still wet, and folded in when the balloon was deflated).
Note:  Ours were still pretty soft the next morning, so I put them in front of a heat vent... the next time I thought of them, a couple of hours later, they were very, very dry!  (Woops.)  I popped the balloons, peeled them out of there, then wet the bottoms of my pumpkins in saucers of water for a few minutes to soften them for shaping.  It worked.

Let them finish drying.

Though I like them very well as they are (and would be especially lovely with lots of really small ones surrounding them) I wanted to add some pretties.

I just cut a piece of wire (any kind of wire will work), bent it in a circle to the size or my pumpkin's crown, and hot glued dried flowers, pods, rosehips, corn, acorns, dock, and preserved leaves to the wire.

Then I set the crown on the pumpkin.

Very pretty for a Thanksgiving table, hmm?