Advent

Every year we do advent calendars with the kids to count down the days to Christmas. Our callendars have ranged from the purchased chocolate packs to Playmobile gifts to our make-your-own-advent-out-of-Lego-pieces creation. This year I remembered that when I was a kid my mom had found an earring advent calendar that was filled with holiday themed earrings. I thought that might be a fun calendar for my daughter who had her ears pierced just a couple of months ago. I mentioned the idea to her and we went out shopping to find 24 pairs of earrings on the cheap. We didn’t succeed. But we did come up with the crazy idea to make them ourselves!

With great sales at JoAnn we went shopping and came away with tons of beads and wire and enough findings to make all 24 pairs with plenty of supplies left over for other projects. All for $20! We decided to throw in materials that we already have on hand such as craft wire, polymer clay, buttons and some other goodies. So that increases the cost (sort of) but I think it is well worth it.

My daughter did most of the design work and I did the manual labor while adjusting her designs to the real world. In the first night we made 7 pairs of earrings in about 2 hours. That is awesome considering neither of us have ever really made earrings before! I have to admit that I was feeling overwhelmed when I first sat down to start working on these. I was wondering how many hours I would be sitting in the basement chasing beads that fell all over the floor. After a small learning curve using crimp beads to secure the beading wire, I felt pretty confident in my jewelry making skills! I think we did a great job. I’ll post more pictures as we complete more items.

Hair Clips

I got my hair cut (finally) back at the end of May. I love having the new shorter do. The only problem is that I used to keep my long, long hair up in a big clip to keep it out of my face. I hate having hair tickle me in the face. The old clips wouldn’t fit my new short hair. I just had to have something new. So I made some sweet little clips!

The clip there in the foreground I made in about 5 minutes. I used a flower punch (Stampin’ Up) to punch 2 thin chipboard shapes. I then punched 4 of the same flowers out of pattern paper (Basic Grey leftovers). Glue one piece of pattern paper to each side of each chipboard flower. Glue one flower on top of the other. Bend top petals up slightly. Add a puddle of glue to center, place pearls (Stampin’ Up) in center and sprinkle the whole thing with a bit of glitter to fill in the excess glue. I glued the finished flower to a small hair clip I already had on hand. Lovely!

The second clip was a recycled flower. I made the flower for a bookmark a couple of years ago. I never really liked it as a bookmark because it was just too bulky. But as a clip I love it!

I’ve got a few more flower clips in my future. I’ll share them with you when they are done.

Need a pocket?

I don’t do many crafty things outside of paper making. But I have tried my hand at knitting (very bad at it) and crochet (fell right into a groove with that one). I crocheted a bunch of flowers just because it was so much fun. I didn’t really have a plan for them at the time. But when I found myself with a problem, the flowers came in handy.

The problem I was having was with my laptop. I wanted a place to store my headphones, reading glasses and Wacom tablet pen all in a place easily accessible to my laptop. I came up with the idea that I needed a pocket to stuff that stuff in. And what better thing to use than an actual pocket!

I cut a back pocket out of a pair of jeans that had holes in them. I left enough extra fabric at the top of the pocket to create a flap to close over the top of the pocket. Then, I figured out how to close the pocket. Those crochet flowers! I sewed a flower onto the lower part of the pocket and sewed a crocheted chain onto the flap of the pocket. Close flap, wrap chain around flower and voila, closing pocket! I used 3M Command strips (I LOVE those things) in the hook-and-loop style to attach my pocket to my laptop. I added a bit of decoration from my scrap stash with a clear button backed by pattern paper. Sweet!