Pinspiring Friday!

     This week, my crafts were all about getting ready for Christmas. I chose two ornament ideas and one Christmas card wreath idea to make. 
     The first idea was a Christmas ornament where the original crafter cut up a wedding invitation, curled the pieces and placed them inside a clear ball-shaped ornament.

    I made one using my wedding invitation and one using my friend Jodi's wedding invitation that I found stored in my old bedroom when I was visiting my parent's house in October. The craft was really easy, but since I'm a perfectionist, it took much longer than it probably should have. Tim says that it took me four hours to make them. This may be true, but I was also making dinner and taking care of a seven-month-old at the same time. I cut the invitations into quarter-inch strips (for each line of text) and then added a few more strips of either the design on the invitation or color to make sure the ball was full. I found that between 15 and 20 strips is best. Then I curled each strip around a wooden skewer that we use to grill shish-ka-bobs. The original crafter used a pen to do this, but I found it to be too thick to get a good curl, especially for a long, thin invitation. Then I placed them in the ornament, trying to make sure that key phrases and words could be seen. 
   I really love these ornaments because you catch glimpses of little bits about the wedding day, for instance a name here, a date there, etc. 

My wedding invitation ornament. The trees behind our house look like Christmas trees so I used them to display my finished product.

   This is my friend Jodi's wedding invitation ornament. I really liked how her ornament turned out, especially because her invitation had a ribbon tied to it and I just retied it on the ornament. I'll try to mail this to you soon, Jodi!

Jodi and Marcus's wedding invitation ornament.

    Then, because I enjoyed making them so much and because I had several of Owen's birth announcements leftover, I decided to make another ornament with those inside. I used about three of them because they had a lot fewer lines than a wedding invitation. 

Owen's birth announcement ornament.

You might be able to see it a little better in this picture. I kept getting a glare on the ornament outside.

     The other ornament idea that inspired me to make my own version was a "Baby's First Christmas" ornament that a woman made using clear embossing ink and glitter. 

     This project was considerably harder and more frustrating, but the end product looked pretty good. The problem that we had with it (and by we, I mean Tim and I, because doing crafts with a baby is a two-person job) was that it is nearly impossible to keep a baby from clenching his hands into fists and even harder to get him to grab an ornament and not have it smudge or slip, spreading the glue-like ink all over and make it look like he has extra fingers or not enough fingers. I think we had to do it three times before we got what looked like an almost complete handprint. Then I sprinkled it with blue glitter, which then sticks to the "glue" handprint. The second challenge to the project was that this particular type of ink, which is used in scrapbooking, has to be set by heat. There is a specific tool to do this, but I was not about to shell out $25 for something I wasn't sure I would ever use again. So I tried setting the glitter with my hairdryer, but that didn't work. In the end, I discovered that I could hold it over a stove eye until it heated enough to set. It turned out okay, but I'm still a little worried about the glitter coming off.

Owen has huge hands. And feet. His feet didn't even come close to fitting on a Christmas ornament.

   The third project that I am working on this week is a Christmas card holder wreath made with a wire clothes hanger and clothes pins. Isn't it cute? In the past I have displayed our Christmas cards by clothes-pinning them to a strip of red ribbon that I hung down the wall next to our kitchen, but I think this idea is much cuter.

     I started the project by spraypainting the clothespins. Because Krylon discontinued the Emerald Green color that the original crafter used, I bought the closest color I could find made by them- Forest Green. Unfortunately, when I was stringing them onto the wire hanger this morning, I decided that the color was way too dark (almost black) so I'm going to postpone this project until I can buy some brighter green spraypaint and redo all my clothespins. I will post a picture of the finished project whenever I get it finished. Stay tuned!