Midnight Quilt Mania

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Happy Holidays!

Well, I don't know about you but I have been crazy busy and I am EXHAUSTED already! The house has been a whirlwind of activity, including crafts, candy making, gift wrapping, chasing a toddler and all sorts of other things. Boy am I glad that I took some time off after the holidays so I can start to recover.

I wanted to share with you some photos of ornaments I made for the kids on my Mom's side of the family. These were made from cork stars I found at JoAnns 4/$1. That was such a deal I tell you I was thrilled with a capital 'T'!



So, here are the details of how I made these ornaments in case you're interested. First, since these star shapes had magnets on the back I peeled them off. Then I traced the stars onto some Basic Grey paper and cut out 2 for each ornament (front and back). I glued the paper to the star using Perfect Paper Adhesive (Matte finish). I seriously LOVE this stuff! It is way easier to work with IMHO than Mod Podge and it's not as sticky, I don't get bubbles and it dries very fast. I found mine at Hobby Lobby a while ago. I hope they still carry it because I used a lot of it on these ornaments.

I let the ornaments dry over night because the cork soaked up a lot of the glue and I wanted to be sure the paper was completely dry before I went on to the rest. When it was dry I sanded the paper along the edges of each point to make sure it was flush with the edge. I added some distress inks in Antique Linen to give it a vintage feel. For the girls' ornaments I used Elzybells Christmas images because they were just the right size and I had a lot of them sitting around that I received as Wish RAKs. Perfect time saver which was just what I needed since i had to make no less than 20 of these babies! I colored the images using Copic Markers and used a Spica glitter pen in some places for more sparkle.

I cut out the images using my Nestabilities and then also cut out small circles for the back and stamped a border using my small round Just Rite harmony stamper. Using the Paper Trey Ink Simple Alphabet I stamped each girl's name and the year. After I adhered the images and the name pieces to the star I gave each side a top coat of Perfect Paper Adhesive and let it dry.

To finish I used my Crop-a-dile Big Bite to punch a hole through the ornament and threaded in some pretty ribbon, outlined the star with Stickles and added some glass beads to the points of the star. I have to tell you about these glass beads I found too. I was so super excited! Dew Drops are all the rage and they are cute but $4.99 for a little bottle is pretty steep. One day I was shopping at a floral design store that I love and found these enormous bags of glass beads. Stopped me dead in my tracks. They look just like dew drops but they are called Diamond Drops. They have to be the same thing. They're the same size and they're flat on the back. I snapped up a bag of clear and red for $15.99 each. It seems expensive but believe me there's more than 3 bottles worth of dew drops in each bag. I also found coppery brown ones recently. I haven't tried searching for an on-line source but surely there's one somewhere.

Here are a couple more samples of the girls' ornaments.






For the boys I used a reindeer image from AMuse but since I did't finish these until 3 a.m. on Friday night and we went to my family get-together and I gave them out on Saturday, there are no pictures of the boys' ornaments. :( I may go ahead and make one more that I can post as a sample. For the boys I used hemp instead of ribbon and added some buttons over the hole where the hemp is threaded through. And no glitter for the boys. ;)

I hope you enjoyed my samples, I'd love to hear your comments and to know if anyone is reading my blog. :) I'm not a prolific blogger but I wanted someplace to start sharing more in addition to my Splitcoast gallery.

Happy Holidays!