I am so glad a had a chance to start things early this year, putting up the tree, buying all of the gifts & getting them wrapped & ready. At first I worried that having things done so early would make the wait for Christmas that much harder, but with the mad dash to get all of the orders finished & in the mail on time, I haven't even had a chance to think about the approaching day.

As I mentioned before, my posts are running a bit late right now, but I've made a list & will work harder to get caught up on all the things I've been wanting to post about. But, I might not divulge just how old some of the photos are!


I've been watching lost of cheesy Christmas movies, and when one of them mentioned stringing up popcorn garland I suddenly was hit with the desire to string up some pom-poms instead. I'm not entirely sure where this idea came from, if I had seen it done before, but I knew it would be wonderful.

Justin was not so excited about the idea & was very worried the whole thing would end up looking too tacky. After I strung it up he gave his permission for it to decorate the tree ~ I'm not sure if he decided it looked good after all, or if he just gave in because I was so excited, but I think it's extremely cute! I bought red & white pom-poms in 1/4" & 3/4" sizes & alternated colors, 2 small, one large, repeat.



The poor little tree was also in desparate need of a nice tree-topper, so I decided that an origami star would work nicely. I had a lot of trouble coming up with any good search results until I thought to try 'modular origami star', which just means that it is made up of lots of the same pieces, all hooked together (and is what I had in mind in the first place).

My first trial involved these curler units, which can be used in a variety of numbers to make different spheres (or 'stars'). I planned on making a 12-piece sphere, but it was so awkward to try to stretch it out far enough, so I opted for the 24-piece. Here you can see one unit at the bottom, and two sets of 'triangles', with three units curled together.



The bad thing about modular origami is, while they will often tell you what size paper to start out with, they don't tell you what size the finished piece is. For this ball I divided a normal sheet of paper long-ways into fourths and then made three squares (2.75") out of each strip. Two sheets of paper will give you enough squares for the 24-piece sphere, which ended up being about 2.75" and just lovely.



But not nearly large enough to top the tree (and with no real way to place it there!). It is currently serving as a lovely snowball right now, and will probably end up as an ornament.

The next star I made was this 30-piece 'Arabesque', but without curling the edges at the end. While the directions were pretty easy to follow, there are a lot of steps, and I was sad to see that a lot of the steps were unecessary or overly complex. I could easily elimiate about half (After #20, at the bottom corners, just pop in the middle layer, so now you just have the front & back layer. That one move will take you all the way to step #30. #30-39 are unecessary, you are just making creases for a fold later, which is easier to make without the creases.).



I used some of our silver striped wrapping paper to make the squares. The three rolls of red & silver prints I have this year are very pretty, but so abnormally thick, they actually make wrapping difficult, and the tape barely keeps the package closed (they often pop open). My star pieces would not stay together on their own, so I actually stitched the pieces together with silver thread as I added them.

The squares were 3" & the finished star is 3.75". Still a little smaller than I would have liked, but it will have to do!



And here is our tiny tree in all of it's glory, haha.



I really do like having the small tree though, it's just perfect for us right now & fits all of the ornaments we've accumulated. And underneath the tree (on a lower table) sits the first set of presents, most of which were opened for birthdays. (This is only a small sampling of them)

My first experiment with piecing fabric & paper for a collage ~


Prints available in the shop.

I used a lot of fabrics in this one, which is not great for the tiny triangle shapes (because the fabric will stretch and fray along that small tip). In this case, the black lines cover that up. In the future I would like to use mostly paper pieces, but for now I have a much larger selection of fabric colors.

The green spiraling shapes in the background were from a piece of paper that had a white background. I wanted something a little more earthy, so I cut out all of the white sections and laid it on a green fabric background. The flowers were from another paper design, backed with a dark green fabric to help them stand out. The butterfly is almost all fabric, except for the inside diamond print on the wings, which you have seen here before.

Then, lots & lots of paint accents were added. There are black lines and white dots on the butterfly wings. The background needed a little something extra so I added some white bits here and there. I also added white accents on the flowers to brighten them a little and help unify everything. Once I started I just kept adding more & more!

I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday!

On Christmas Eve Justin's mom makes a lot of wonderful foods, but since we were not visiting them this year we decided to have our own feast. Poor Justin had to work until 6:30 (and 10 hours the day before!) so I got everything ready for when he came home.

I even cut out some snowflakes to help decorate the table. I love making these things, but only have an excuse once a year. Here are two of the three ~ the right one is my favorite.



One of the foods I made were slice-and-bake sugar cookies that Justin had left over from his Beta Club Christmas party. He had frosting and sprinkles to decorate them with, but I wanted to try using a stencil, like I had seen someone do with the top of a cake on craftgrrl. Since I was already in a snowflake-cutting mood, we have these ~



I tried sprinkling one with powdered sugar, but since I have no sifter it did not turn out well. (Later when I tried to eat the cookie I kept inhaling the sugar and falling into coughing fits. I ended up throwing it away after it tried to kill me 3 times.)

Next I tried cinnamon, which worked wonderfully. And it was not an over-powering flavor, it made the cookies taste a lot like Justin's delicious Snickerdoodles. Cinnamon has a lot of sticking power, so it will stay on the cookie even if it's dried a little.


For Nana's side we decided to bring a Chocolate Peppermint pie. I made some mini-pies for Christmas Eve to make sure it was a good recipe. I had tried to make peppermint pie a year or two ago and it was such a disater. But I thought it would make a lovely Christmas tradition, so we tried again. It was delicios, and very easy to make.



( Chocolate Peppermint Pie recipe & mini-pies )

I got lots of lovely crafting supplies for Christmas ~
I'll share them with you on my next entry ;)

My husband was out of town (camping field-trip with his students) at the start of last week, so I used the time to make myself a new wallet. I'd gotten tired of my old one ~ I had made it square originally so that I could fit cards both ways, but it made it a pain to get in & out of my back pocket because it was wide both ways. And only one cards was going opposite the others, so there was really no need!

( So this is my new wallet... )

Last night I finally got around to making some more recycled paper for labels. I was completely out of labels, and putting up a batch tonight so I couldn't put it off any longer. I had planned on making another batch today, but I woke up with the cold my husband just got over so I was not too productive. The paper was made with strips of teal packing paper & white scrap paper. I left some of the teal as longer strips & you can see it mixed in there. I also added strips of scrap fabric in other shades of blue. When we were driving home today, the post office appeared to be on fire, with two fire trucks in the parking lot. I hope this will not interfere with me mailing out a package or two tomorrow! (My husband thinks it was a car on fire & not the building)

A few weeks ago I made two batches of recycled handmade paper. I was trying out a new way to dry the pages, which took about a week & a half, so that is why I am just posting them now!

To make these, I used pages from some old diaries of mine from middle school. The were full of unpleasant memories, and I'd been wanting to get rid of them for a while. So, this was somewhat theraputic. ;)

I tried out a lot of things in these two batches... here is how everything went ~

Experiment
( #1 - Food Coloring )

( #2 - Shredding fabric into threads )

( #3 - Foil Wrapper )

( #4 - Pressing Dry )


So, I know this is all a little wordy, but hopefully some other papermakers can learn something from all of this!

June 10 '05 ~ Peyote River Rock & Handmade Paper



This was a really big project for me, mostly because it took a long time to learn how to do the peyote well. The main problem is that I was working on a much larger tube than most people use, but I wanted to be able to include images in the stitching (my first peyote project was a necklace fully covered in vines like this It ended up being too wide and would not curve well at all, so I had to break the stitching up into "beads". This was my first complete peyote necklace, as well as first beaded rock and handmade clasp.