I spent a couple hours last night watching Mad Men and making some cute little trees to put around the house this Christmas. Christmas crafts are one of my favourite things in the world (they were my mum’s business, our house was always CHRISTMASED-OUT in November when I was growing up) but the past 3 years have been very busy at this time normally. This year I have different contracts, and two weeks off for the holidays, so naturally I’ve been crafting my little heart out.

I had a lot of ribbon leftover from the wedding in teal and apple green, which paired with red (or pink) is one of my favourite takes on the colours of the season. I went through my ribbon stash and found some red velvet, some printed twill, and some metallics in our wedding colours too.

I went to Michaels to buy a styrofoam cone, and ribbon was 70% off that day only. So I bought some ribbon, and a second cone. Oops? I used a trick P taught me for cutting many lengths the same – find something the right size to wrap it around, the make lots of wraps, and cut them all at once. My little sudoku book was just right to give me 4.5″ lengths when I cut the ribbon at each edge.

Then it’s just a whole lot of pinning until your ribbon runs out. My lengths of ribbon weren’t exactly all the same (I cut the printed twill between the words, and the wrapping method isn’t quite an exact science) so I paid more attention to the bottoms being all at the same level, rather than the tops. I tallied up the empty ribbon spools afterwards, and they added up to 41 yards. Don’t use that as your guide though – some were partially used, some of my ribbon wasn’t on the rolls, and I have a bunch of 4.5″ pieces leftover. I also used ribbon ranging from 1″ wide to 1/4″ wide. I’ve seen this project done before with more uniform ribbon, but I love the mix & matchiness of mine.

The tops were tricky to figure out – I wrapped each top in the wide teal grosgrain before I put the last layer of loops on. On the shorter one I wrapped a ribbon around the top to cover the raw ends and pins of that last row.

On the taller one I made proper loops from the ribbon and then pinned carefully, so no raw edges were showing. I used some of my extra pieces to make little loopy toppers for both trees.

The shorter tree is almost entirely stash ribbon (minus the candy print and the diamond-y print), and was my original plan of teal, apple, and red. Tree number two ended up teal, apple, pink, with a bit of red.

Crafting lesson I learned last night: When bringing your giant box of 500 pins to the coffee table, make sure you’re really actually holding on to it. I had to clean up 500 pins from our wood floors before I could start. It doesn’t help that our floorboards have settled since they were put in, and they have pretty substantial cracks in between them. I ended up using a rare earth magnet to get the pins out from between the boards.

*I’ve just discovered Pugly Pixel, which is where I got all the awesome frames for my photos! It takes way longer to get the images ready now, but I like the ease of making groups of photos, and I’m learning so much about Photoshop using her templates.

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.

I’m going to craft some Christmas ornaments this year. And yes, I will definitely be knitting some.
My first idea was an inspiration from Handknit Holidays. There’s an icord garland with pompoms in the book. There’s some yarn I’ve been meaning to get rid of, and have actually been trying to get rid of:

It’s a silver and black railroad yarn that I’m never going to use in anything else. I think a 4-stitch icord of this stuff will be a nice alternative to tinsel. I just have the two balls, so I’m just going to knit and see how long it gets.

And for other scraps of yarn, I plan on making these:

I ordered “Handknit Holidays” in from work and bought it. I eventually want to do the Aran tree skirt, but that’ll be a while.

I also want to try some felted Christmas ornaments, there’s a class at my LYS, I just need to decide if I can afford it. I’ve already signed up for a spinning class which is in a couple weeks.

I still want to make the felted Christmas boots from one of Cat Bhordi’s books. I have all the yarn, I started last year and never finished.