Loosely inspired by this much cooler gift wrap.  If I had been more industrious, I would have added more holidays.

.

I manage to make my holiday cards about every other year or so.  This year, I used the Gocco to print shiny gold bows.  The bow drawing is by Krusty.  I love how they turned out!

.

Given how much I like the letterpress ornaments I got at the craft fair yesterday, I decided to try my hand at making some for the ornament swap.

Made on the L Letterpress using the zigzag plate from the Spooked Printing Plates set, cut out with a circle die, and strung with waxed linen.

I made a few others with solid color panels behind to provide a little extra something, but I think I like the plain ones the best.

.

Went to the annual winter craft fair today.  Mark made a deer ornament at the screenprinting demo from Handmade SimpleKraft:

The letterpress ornaments are from Constellation & Co.

Other favorites from the fair:

• The Victory Garden, fun crochet in embroidery hoops
• Chet & Dot, cuteness
• Rocks and Salt, skirts
• rebe, dresses
• Stone & Honey, jewelry
• ilfant press, awesome graph paper-y stationery
• makool, clothes
• Beef & Lamb, wallets
• Bella Sisters, amazing embellished coats
• Stubborn, resin jewelry

.

I’ve got advent calendar envy with all the cool ones posted around blogland lately.  I was trying to come up with something I could make entirely from supplies I already have and ended up with this.  I have to say, it’s pretty pathetic, but I get a silly kick out of it.  It’s a funny ice cube tray I got at the Goodwill for eventual use as a resin mold.  The little bubbles made me think of a pill pack.  The shiny foil is origami paper.

I cut the foil paper to size, and rubbed it to make an impression of each bubble.  Then I numbered 25 random spaces and put something in the matching bubbles. Brush a little watered down water-soluble nontoxic glue on the top of the ice cube tray, and press the foil on.  Each day you punch through the foil to retrieve your prize.

And the exciting prize inside?  Vitamins.  Just to make it even lamer. But now I will remember to take my vitamin every day.

.

I almost decided to go easy on myself this year and not make cards.  However, the cards in the stores are thoroughly boring for the most part and I couldn’t bring myself to buy any of them (and the alternative of buying the fancier, nicer cards is more than I care to spend).  I’d been playing around with glitter and Martha Stewart double stick tape shapes as an ultimately discarded ornament idea:

One of her kits has double-stick tape strips with glitter.  Here’s a tag version of the project.  Seemed easy enough, and it would put to use the 24-color glitter set my mom got me from Christmas last year.  We printed out the message and got to glittering.  I am pretty happy with how fancy and sparkly they look.

It took a couple hours for me and Mark to make a whole pile, but it was fun to combine colors and shapes.

You can see one more experiment in the back: a leaf stamped in glue and coated in glitter.  That worked pretty well, too, but I liked the stripes better.

.

Last year I made cutout ornaments from a piece of Ikea fabric ironed on to backing.  This year I was even lazier and used cutouts from sturdier plastic placemats.  Hole punch and they’re done.  My mom and sisters helped cut them out when they visited a couple of weeks ago.  The Ikea codename is Klistrig.

I like that they’re Charlie Harper-esque.

If you would like one, I’d be happy to trade cards and/or ornaments.  Just shoot me an email (maitreya@craftlog.org) with your address.

.

I bought a wreath form on a whim the other day.  I like the look of the yarn-wrapped wreaths that are everywhere, and decided to crochet around instead to make a braided look for the edge.  I used the bulkiest yarn I could find (Hometown USA from Lion in Monterey Lime) and my trusty Crystalites N hook.  Even with the fat yarn, some of the form peeked through, so I ended up going back and painting the whole thing with a coat of matching craft paint.  This tutorial from Goodknits was helpful if you have trouble crocheting around the wreathform.  I used a tutorial from Sarah London for a seamless join to finish it.

The flowers are rolled spirals, also rampant in blogland right now (here’s one of the millions of tutorials).  I didn’t have any cream felt, so used quilt batting instead.  It worked surprisingly well.  There are a couple of ones made from cork coasters in there as well.  I like the look of the cork, but it did crack a little if rolled up too tight.  The cork ones are held together with a pin to supplement the hot glue attaching them to the wreath.

The leaves are cork and thick felt (not quite as dark green as they look in the photo).

Hung with monofilament using a pretty great trick I saw somewhere: put one of those removable sticky hooks upside down on the back of the door and drape the string over.

Now off to get our tree!

.

I had this brilliant idea to use my new-found encaustics skillz to make Christmas tree ornaments using wood cutouts from the craft store.  I should have known to abandon the project as soon as my torch refused to light.  Instead I had the bright idea of fusing the wax layers in a low temperature oven.  Not recommended.  This is what happened to some wax sheet cutouts I layered:

A cutout from a doily worked a little better, but had no contrast.

I was really excited about this idea, so particularly disappointed when it didn’t really work: paper snowflakes cut out from tissue paper and layered over one another.  The wax gives tissue paper a translucency that’s really pretty.  Unfortunately, the other layer completely disappeared.

Ah well.  I think I might play it safe and just find a pattern to make.

.

My one jack o’lantern pumpkin was pretty green when I pulled the vines a couple of weeks ago.  Sitting in the sun for two weeks turned it (mostly) orange, yay.  More orange than last year, anyway.

My pumpkin is also super lumpy.  So I carved it to look like lumpy space princess from Adventure Time.  Oh. My. Glob, you guys.  I love Adventure Time so lumpin’ much.

I copied the design from this picture.

.