And I just made my first Christmas ornament of the year!
I had bought the Martha Stewart Holiday special (with all the tasty cookies in!) and had also liked a lot of the ornaments. I wanted to have a go at the Christmas card ornaments (page 96), but unlike Martha, I don’t have a handy stack of vintage Christmas cards hanging around.

I do have to packs of old playing cards that I bought at the VV boutique yesterday, specifically for cutting up though. I decided to make a and ornament using the suit of hearts.

The next challenge was to find something round to trace. She recommends a punch, which I don’t have. Something round, something round… a glass? tealight holder? tealights are just the right size, but bendy… what do I have that is round? Ah, wait a minute:

It doesn’t get much rounder than a circle template, does it?
Then I cut out the 20 circles needed, end was left with this pile:

I don’t throw my scraps away immediately, no matter what the project. The bits are always useful as glue-spreaders, and also for testing pens or other things.
Then you’re supposed to draw an equilateral triangle on the back of each circle, for the fold lines. Somehow, my math completely left me, so I eyeballed it with a ruler. Halfway through tracing the triangle onto the circles, I realised “circumfrence/3! That’ll tell me where to put the 3 points, then I can connect the dots!”. Use math, everyone.
Soon I had this pile:

I wasn’t going for perfectly centred when I was tracing the circles on, I was purposely getting bits of hearts, off centred hearts and other lovely random things. What made the whole project even more random was tracing the triangles onto the back, without ever looking at the design on the front.
IMPORTANT NOTE: sand your cards (or whatever) if they are shiny. Do this before folding them.
I learned to embrace the bulldog clip.

Martha’s last direction is ‘hang from silver thread’. Luckily, I realised that this would be much easier before I glued the ‘lid’ on. I didn’t have silver thread, so I found some yarn. Also, because of my eyeballed triangle, the gap was quite big at the top.

Getting the top on took glueing each piece and clipping it one by one.

<3>your Christmas tree your dirty houseplant?

I put a date on one of the flaps. That’s where the scappy bits came in handy, to test pens, and finding out that I’d need to sand wherever I wanted to write.