Potatoez n' Pineconez: November 2010

Monday, November 15, 2010

Rag Fabric Flower Ornament - copied from Under the Table and Dreaming

Here is my first handmade ornament for 2010 - I copied this Rag Fabric Flower Ornament from Stephanie-Lynn at Under the Table and Dreaming. If you need some inspiration for Christmas ornaments that are simple to make Check out this link here: Under the Table and Dreaming Christmas = She added quite a few easy and simple Christmas ornaments to her blog recently. I plan on making two more from her 4 days of Christmas Ornaments series.

also; I finally figured out what I am supposed to do with these link party things;

OOPS! this link seems to be sending me to an April 2010 post so HERE is the real one:

and Make it for Monday

The only difference between my method and hers is I used hot glue gun glue, not regular white craft glue. I thought I could whip up 8 of these in an hour, but these actually took a long time, and I only made 5. The fist one took almost 25 minutes! { I did stop to take photos but I did not anticipate it taking this long }

I cut my foam balls in half, and inserted a BBQ Skewer into the foam ball for easier handling. I ut ALOT of 2" by 2" pieces of a watery teal fabric and scrunched them up; adding a small blob of hot glue to hold the folded shape, I the applied a dot of hot glue gun glue and pressed the the scrunched fabric to the foam ball, holding in place until the hot glue gun glue was cool. I think I am immune to hot glue gun glue burns, but using a pencil or other blunt thin object to hold the fabric to the foam ball is a good idea.

Side profile

When the half foam ball was covered in fabric, I inserted a small piece of wire into the foam ball and used a piece of ribbon to make the ornament hanger. It's probably smarter to work out your however you plan to hang this before adding the fabric - but everything worked out just fine. I love how this looks, and I loooooove the little bits of frayed fabric peeking out.

Foam balls that I cut in half & fabric squares measuring approximately 2"by 2"

I cut out circles to glue to the back of these rag fabric flower ornaments from shiny silver scrap-booking paper.

I started gluing around the perimeter, then worked my way towards the center.

1st one!

♥

Monday, November 1, 2010

Haunted Halloween Mansion

My Spooky Halloween haunted mansion

here is a video of the lights flickering.....

= So basically I made this using cardboard that was destined for the recycle bin, I used some kashi bar boxes, a microwave popcorn box and a freeze-zee box. I made this very crudely using glue sticks as this was an experiment for the future of what I hope to be a lightweight spooky Halloween village.

I used some cocktail forks for the embellishments and found some wedding cake decorations for the swirly 'iron-work' on the porch. The windows were made using clear plastic from an old container that had X-mas ballz in it.

The siding was just a piece of white poster board that I dry brushed with brown craft paint, then cut in strips hap-haphazardly to resemble old crappy siding. The roof shingles was black construction paper that I cut out and layered on top of each other - some areas, I just applied tissue paper over the cardboard and painted it to look old and worn.

Even though this is just an experiment, I still found myself putting alot of love into it, and worrying about details, when I should have been focusing on the engineering, and the ability to dis-assemble this for easy storage.

I LOVE making stuff, and it is actually hard to get rid of this, I thought I would just toss it in the garbage and focus on my real Halloween village, but it's sill around......

Anyhoo- I promise myself that when I get started on my real Halloween village I will take a tonne of photos and post them as soon as I can. I hope to make several half to 1/3 this size, including some 'shops' and other dwelling besides houses.

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