Easter eggs

I love decorating eggs. I don't have a kystka and beeswax, so I can't really do Pysanka like I'd like to. Still, they aren't completely terrible... are they?

Asian inspired jewelry

My sister gave me a really wonderful bracelet for Christmas. I love it so much and was thrilled that she sent along the left over parts with it. So I thought, and thought, and then ordered some Song Dynasty copper coins off of eBay.





The coins arrived promptly, but I was wrapped up writing, so they sat for ages. I put it all together the other day.





Here's the necklace:




Here's an earring:






Here's the whole collection including the brilliant bracelet my sister made:



Thanks Sis!

Christmas Ornaments

(Apologies in advance for the bad quality of the pictures, I took them in my car as I waited in line to pick up the kids, after all the work I was out of time.)

This year, after a successful RS activity where I orchestrated re-making ornaments, I decided to make an ornament for each employee at work. There's only about 150 of us.

So I took several chunks of time and crunched out several options for them to choose from. Some were simple:

Some were very complex, like painting the continents on these globes:

And others were not so hard because I know a few tricks:

This last one was very popular, even though none of the people I spoke to who picked it guessed that it was supposed to be the North Pole. Ah well.

S&ST #9

I was wrapping my friend's gift and wanted to do something special for the card.
I remembered that my mom used to emboss stationary for my grandmother. So I grabbed the roll of funny paper I have that has paper on one side and foil on the other. I used a crochet hook and the groove in my paper cutter to put in the lines of a square. Then using the 60 degree angle marker I made the lines of a snowflake. Then I put the card on a Styrofoam plate and embellished it. I found the Styrofoam made a great surface for freehand embossing.


Then I remembered that we have an event at work that we need snowflakes for, so I got on the phone with a friend and did these, two at a time:

I used a printed out hexagon to get the placement right, but the rest I just free-handed on the Styrofoam plate.

Out of curiosity I did a set with foil from the kitchen.

It worked fine, but the metal on metal thing was a little uncomfortable in a mild nails-on-the-chalkboard kind of way. It was fine when the paper hexagon was on top though, so keep that in mind. I also thought, well if anyone reading this isn't the freehand type, if you print out pictures of snowflakes you can lay it over the foil and trace the whole thing for a foil replica.

You have to be a bit careful to not press too hard and tear the paper/foil, but it was a lot of fun and it sure looks pretty.

Spindly snowflakes

I have a bunch of snowflakes on my tree. Some of them my sister made, some of them I got from the thrift store. I wanted more, but as I looked at them and compared them to my recent research on snowflakes I decided I wanted a more spindly effect. I thought for a while and then realized that I wasn't thinking about it right. All I had to do was chain out for each arm and spindly lobe and then single stitch back.
So, I made several. When each was done I would pin it to a Styrofoam plate and use a dosing syringe to apply starch to it.

When they were done they looked great on the tree.

Crochet and Bead Snowflake earrings

It's my friend's birthday tomorrow. I've been making snowflakes for my tree, so once I had made enough to know what I wanted to do I made these:

For those that speak crochet:
I put the beads on the thread before starting. I took the last bead that I put on and re-threaded it, then tied the ends so that the bead was in the middle of a figure eight of thread with just a little room on either side so I could stitch into each loop. Then I put six singles, three on each loop making a circle around the bead. I built four stitch chains between each single then half stitch climbed up the first loop to the center. * I chained out six, then turned and single stitched into the second chain. One more single stitch and then I brought up a bead and went around it to tack it in with a half stitch. then I chained out three, turned and single stitched into the second chain again. I single stitched my way down the side of the lobe and arm then used half stitches to move to the top of the next loop. I repeated from * until I had completed all six arms of the snowflake and tied off. I pinned the complete work to a Styrofoam plate and used a dosing syringe to apply starch to it. In the morning it was dry and I added the ear hooks.

Vamp it up

At the beginning of the school year Tali picked out several shirts that were marketed to teens that love Vampires and the new Alice in Wonderland movie. I bought a few for me too and then we picked out stuff to make necklace and earring sets for all three of us girls to match (well okay, so Jordi doesn't have earrings). I was wearing mine (which I would show a picture of, but it's in the room with a sleeping husband right now) to work one day early this month and my friend Eric saw it. He asked where I had gotten it, because he would like to get one for his daughter. I explained that I had made it, and would happily make one for his daughter and he could just pay me back for the supplies.
So I made her this set:

And he insisted on paying me nearly twice what I spent on supplies, wasn't that sweet?
Most of the supplies I got from Wal-mart, as it is now the only store in town that sells craft supplies. I did use a few things that I had salvaged from other necklaces from the thrift store.