Like many people around the world, I haven’t been able to travel for a Christmas gathering. This is the first time I’ve spent Christmas without my family, and so I’ve set up my very first Christmas tree in the corner of my home. I’ve made a lot of the ornaments myself to personalise it!
When I need inspiration, the Hobbycraft blog is one of my favourite places to visit. Lots of guest writers contribute ideas of various crafts to it, and I found this blog post of how to make a felt succulent letter which gave me my next idea.
The blog post showed how to make succulents and leaves, but I also did some research on how to make various felt flowers for variety.
I made a lot more than the ones pictures below, but these were the ones I was happy with! There were various techniques used including sewing and hot glue guns to roll the felt up. I also cut some green felt leaves as space filler.
Then I cut out a piece of white mount board and arranged the felt pieces with a nice layout, before I attached everything with a hot glue gun.
The finished frame is a lovely small decoration that can function as a nice gift.
Materials: felt sheets, a 20cm square white deep box frame, needle and thread, hot glue
Hobbycraft has this blog post on ways to use a deep box frame and I got inspired to make an origami-themed frame.
I used pink 7.5cm squares of paper to make Yoshizawa butterflies, and green squares to make pinwheels. I also cut them into quarters to make smaller pieces.
You also need a piece of mountboard cut to the same size as the visible frame, to glue all the pieces to.
The other day I noticed that I did not own any black bracelets when I looked through my accessories. I already knew how to do a square knot macrame bracelet, so I got some waxed black cord and black rattail, and started making a bracelet.
When I finished it and wore it, I though my wrist still looked a bit bare. I wanted more bracelets, but not using the same styles. My research of macrame knotting took me to this page by Decor Hint where I learnt different ways to apply the square knot, and a new knot called the half hitch knot.
The end result is that I made four bracelets total to wear separately or all together! From top to bottom, here is what I did:
This is the Kusudama – “Sankaku tairu to kuremachisu kumi awase” (三角タイルとクレマチスの組み合わせ) model from the Kusudama Origami book. I think you can loosely translate it to a ‘triangle tile and clematis mix’ kusudama.
The clematis is referring to this flower face that you can insert into the panels. It’s quite complicated to fold using smaller sized paper for me, so I cut octagons from 15cm square paper as my base. Then you fold a smaller square insert to cover the centre of the flower.
