Wednesday 28 November 2012

Christmas Cake Earrings

I made two slices of Christmas cake last year to go on my charm bracelet but I never had time to make earrings from them, but this year I have! So now I have 5 different pairs of Christmas earrings to wear in the run up to Christmas!

Yay Cake!
These are listed on both my Folksy and Etsy











Just for fun I wanted to see if this idea of making a Christmas card with buttons would work and I am quite pleased nice and simple but effective I think :)

Thursday 22 November 2012

Button Wreath Tutorial

This is my first ever tutorial! I had far too much fun making this and i hope you will have fun too.

The Supplies:
1 Polystyrene wreath, mine measures 18cm
Green felt, any colour of your choice
Pva glue and something to spread it
Glue gun or any type of strong glue like UHU
Various size buttons in Christmas colours (or not, up to you)
Ribbon
and some tools to cut the felt

Time: About 3 hours
Cut your felt into strips about 2cm wide roughly, my felt here is 45cm long and i cut 7 strips and that was enough to cover my wreath.
Next pour some pva into a suitable container and then start spreading the glue down a strip of felt.
Then start wrapping your wreath, here i have already put two strips on. It doesn't matter too much about neat ends as we are going to cover it all with buttons!
Once the wreath is covered with felt its time to heat up the glue gun! Start gluing the buttons on, i put at least two blobs of glue either side of the holes. Bigger buttons i covered the whole of the back as i want them to be secure.
I organised my buttons so i could easily see all the designs and sizes and that way my wreath has a good variety of buttons.
All the buttons are now glued on, make sure to keep wiping away any glue spider web things. I have only put buttons on the front as the back won't be seen and will be a waste of buttons.
Next attach your ribbon or string and make sure to test how it hangs before you commit to gluing it on. My ribbon is quite thick so i wrapped it around the wreath once and then made a loop and glued it into place so that it will always face forward.
Yum buttons!











I hope I explained everything ok, if you have any questions don't hesitate to ask!

Thursday 8 November 2012

Adventures with lino

Whoops kinda let myself get behind on updating this. Anyway here is what i was doing last week:

So i first started out with some practice sheets of polystyrene and indenting it with a pencil. This first image shows the 3 stages as i was trying out my image. I decided i didn't like the way I've done this as its more of a negative.
The polystyrene sheet.
















With a good idea of what i now want the finished print to look like i transfer my image to Soft cut lino using Tracedown. Soft cut lino is so fun and easy to use, it really is soft!









Here is the first trial print to see if any edges need refining.








Then i scoop out all of the background and print it with gold printing ink on black paper (the final print will be my Christmas card for this year) i don't like the black so next i will get some red paper and then the red breast of the robin will be red and with the gold ink hopefully it will look Christmasey.
All the kit i used.
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