I’ve been surrounded by my craft supplies for weeks now, trying to keep them all within reach when an epiphany strikes.
The other day, I was feeling overwhelmed, so I started tidying up my stash to soften the chaos. After looking around at what I had, it occurred to me that when I artfully arranged my supplies, they became great holiday décor, and not just elements to make things with. The added bonus is that they inspire more creativity from me.
Here are 2 examples….
I found these darling little square bottles at the thrift store, which look perfect with my German glass glitter in them. (Please, someone tell me what these bottles were originally used for, because I would sure like more.) I thought it would be fun to give them stoppers more creative than corks, and wouldn’t you know it, my smallest bottle brush trees fit perfectly!
I hot-glued some glittery ribbon around the necks, and now they’re perfection.
How could you not be inspired to create when looking at these?
I recently acquired a homemade wooden organizer tray. It's deeper than typical trays (which makes it more awesome), and leads me to believe it was made to hold hardware. After ebonizing it to look even more aged, I fully intended to sell it.
But right now, it’s here to hold my stash and make me happy. And it does!
Filled with all sorts of crafting supplies, vintage and new, it’s pretty as a picture, even when I’m not creating.
I think I’m going to see what other goodies I can display more artistically. Definitely feels more like an atelier now....:)Linking To:
After finishing up some glue gun creations on my last 2 posts, I thought I’d offer up an easy peasy monogram ornament/gift tag idea with less hot-glue precision.
White burlap will always be classic, and so is greenery.
Put them together, and you get this:
This craft project is almost too quick to even qualify as a project. Here’s all you need.
Burlap, elegant twine, wooden coffee stirrer or like item, and wired mini faux green garland.
Cut a piece of burlap any size you wish. I cut mine 3” x 4”, so I’d have enough width to fray the edges and bottom.
Fold the top over 1”. Cut the wooden stick a little shorter than the burlap width, then hot glue the underside of it, making sure the stick is up against the burlap fold. Now center your twine into the fold, then hot glue gun the burlap flap onto the stick.
Flip the burlap piece face up. Bend a piece of wired garland into the letter you desire, then hot glue it in a few spots to the burlap.
To keep the letter uniform in thickness, like an “A” for instance, cut 2 pieces. One to bend in half, and the other to form the center, then gluing each piece.
That’s it. All done. You could whip up a bunch of these for last-minute gifts, like tying to a bottle of wine, etc. An entire family of these would look stunning on a simplistically elegant Christmas tree.
After creating my recent glue gun and plastic ornaments, I said I would try to whip up a couple of gift tags with the same technique.
I created these 2 tags in the exact technique as the silver leaf egg, only this time I didn’t use plastic as a base, but die cut tags I found at the thrift store.
Before:
After:
Just for a little extra glam, I strung some vintage silver mercury beads onto elegant tinsel cording.
Now they’re ready to tie on a package as a personalized gift tag, and then be re-used as a tree ornament!
I love versatility, don’t you?.........:)Linking To:
So it’s less than 2 weeks till Christmas, and as usual, I still have a lot of ideas swimming in my head that I haven’t blogged about.
But of all the things I could create, you didn’t think I would let Christmas crafting slip by without taking the glue gun and plastic out for a spin again, did you?
After the silver Easter egg, and the Halloween Potion Bottles, I ruminated about all the cool and clever things I could transform for Christmas. But in the end, I decided that I should stick with the most classic, obvious shape and the easiest to find…….the ball ornament.
I was fortunate to find a bag of these plastic ball ornaments at Goodwill the other day. These were obviously made specifically for embellishing. Perfect! But of course, any plastic ball will do.
I created 2 designs. Here is the first.
Ta Da! Nothin’ more classic than snowflakes….
Snowflakes are perfect, but you don’t have to be!
This is about the dimensional effect, not perfection.
After I hot-glued the designs, I painted the whole ball with Tiffany blue chalk paint to represent a happy blue sky. I sealed it in matte medium so the snowflakes would stand out more.
I dry-brushed FolkArt Metallic Champagne on the snowflakes. I could’ve used straight white, but I wanted to dress them up a bit, since Tiffany blue is synonymus with luxury.
I painted the cap white, then glued mica flakes over it, because what’s more snowy than mica flakes….not to mention that I didn’t want to ruin my snowy sky effect with a gold metal cap. (I painted the cap white first because mica flakes are translucent, and the gold metal would show through if I didn’t.)
This ornament was pretty straight forward, with no aging techniques like the egg and potion bottles.
My second hot glue ornament….
If you’ve spent any time on Etsy, you’ve seen antler art everywhere, so I thought it would be a fun design for the glue gun treatment.
Again, this is not about perfection. So have fun with it.
This ornament was a combination of both the egg and potion bottle designs. Metal leaf over the hot glue design (in this case, it is copper leaf), and chalk paint over the rest of the ornament. I only gilded the pattern and a little overlap, since I knew I was painting the rest.
Painting around the hot glue image is pretty easy, because the raised pattern gives your brush a place to stop. I painted the base coat a dark turquoise teal shade, then added watered down washes of lighter turquoise and rusty brown for a verdigris effect that naturally accompanies copper. Although I would normally use a matte finish over verdigris, I opted for gloss to deepen the colors.
I added copper leaf to the cap to coordinate with the antlers, then aged all the copper leaf with caramel and black alcohol inks.
Although you’ve probably already decorated your own Christmas tree, perhaps these can be one-of-a-kind display pieces in little vignettes around your home.
I toyed with another obvious holiday hot-glue creation, the gift tag, which would also serve as a personalized tree ornament. I will try to whip up an example or two, in between the myriad of other projects I have going on right now…..:)
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It’s time for another ornament design!
As I’ve mentioned before, this time of year brings out every creative whim in my brain. Since I started earlier this year, maybe I’ll stop creating more ornaments a week before Christmas, rather than Christmas Eve……..
As silly as it sounds, I’ve been wanting ½” hex chicken wire for years. It’s hard to find locally, but I finally got a hold of some this Summer. Most of the big box stores only stock 1” and 2” hex, which isn’t nearly as fun to craft with. Anyway, I was staring at my new roll of chicken wire, dreaming of all the possibilities, and a diamond shape emerged.
Chicken wire, Spanish moss, mini pinecone, and German silver glass glitter.
Simple, rustic elegance……
What could be better than not needing to measure anything. Just follow the shape and start cutting. Tin snips or wire cutters work just fine. Once I cut the diamond shape, I used little wire cutters to snip off the excess wire, so there’s no jagged edges to hurt the fingers or cause snags. If I felt anything sharp, I used a metal file to soften it. I left the top and bottom points twists long, because they’re keeping the end hexes together. (Now or later, you then bend those twists backwards into a tight loop. This will be the back side of the ornament.)
I didn’t want the chicken wire to be shiny silver, so I gave it a light sanding, then chalk- painted it in grey tones, to look more like aged zinc. I sealed the paint with matte medium, because although chalk paint does technically stick to metal, wire isn’t exactly a massive amount of surface to bond to. (I used what I had on hand, but of course you could just spray paint if you prefer.)
Once the paint was dry, I took a little clump of Spanish moss, and centering it on the back side of the diamond, I pushed the edges of the clump up to the top side, leaving the middle of the clump on the back side. I did this for two reasons…A) To make the moss more attached to the wire than just hot-gluing to the diamond’s front, and B) to give the back side a nice rustic and finished appearance, rather than looking at hot glue. Now that you have a little nest made, you can hot-glue the mini pinecone into it.
Using sharp pruning shears, wire cutter, or utility scissors, cut off the bottom half of the mini pinecone. This is so you don’t have a lot of pinecone sticking out from the ornament. (It’s best if you cut the pinecones before you add the glass glitter, so you’re not handling the glued-on glitter excessively.)
Once the glitter’s dry, add a good dose of hot-glue around the entire bottom of the pinecone. Quickly center the pinecone over the center wire, and at the same time, squishing the moss into the pinecone. If the pinecone doesn’t feel stable enough, add more hot-glue into the bottom edge of the pinecone, then tuck in more moss.
Now it’s time to add some more elegance. Brush a thin line of white glue or Diamond Glaze around the perimeter of the chicken wire shape, then sprinkle on the silver glass glitter, making sure to also cover the top and bottom end loops too.
Finally, I added some very thin sisal to the top wire loop, and it’s ready for hanging!
This is one of those designs that just happened on a whim, without any prior planning, and as I’ve said before, those tend to be my favorite designs.
Gotta go. More ornaments are screaming to get out of my head…..
Today I’m sharing my 3rd ornament design for 2013.
I’ve already shown my affinity for creating ornaments with vintage ephemera, as evidenced by my designs from this year, the Bingo stars and Kodachrome slide ornaments.
I so love the nostalgia it evokes, and can think of nothing better than the marriage of nostalgia and Christmas.
Gone are the days of the milkman delivering farm fresh milk to your kitchen Dutch door. Since milk delivery is before my time, I never really gave it any thought that there could be ephemera, from that era, to use in my Christmas designs.
Oh my, have I discovered the plethora of choices for ornaments.
Vintage, unused old stock of milk bottle caps. Gorgeous little works of graphic art, printed on perfect little cardboard circles, just waiting to be immortalized into fun and rustic ornaments. The idea entered my mind when I stumbled onto some vivid red caps on Etsy, and the rest is history.
Though many milk bottle caps are highly collectible, I purchased batches of several designs and colors I most wanted to create with, so I could craft sets of matching ornaments.
I swear, shopping for cap designs started to feel a lot like eating a bag of potato chips. You can never eat just one. Way too many color and picture combinations to choose from, I really had to stop myself from ordering more.
So without further ado, here are the designs I created with milk bottle caps, with various materials to accentuate the positive…..
This is the cap that started it all!
I still have many caps to play with, so maybe I’ll make a long garland out of them…..:)
