A Very Crafty Christmas: Miscellania and Paper Wreaths

There were two other things I made for Christmas this year, but since I forgot to get finished pictures, I probably won't bother posting them. After all, who wants to see everything but the final product?

Instead, here's a little mish-mash of some of the smaller projects I made, and at the end are this year's paper wreaths.

I made these dishwasher magnets at Husband's request using magnet strips and washi tape sheets. I used an acrylic paint pen to write on them. I had some leftover magnet strips after "Dirty" and "Clean" were done, so I just made a couple matching bar magnets for the fridge. Can't have too many magnets, eh?

As calligraphy practice, I made some gift tags using kraft paper tags and gold ink. Just in case you can't read them, they say: "merry christmas", "Santa! I know him!", "Peace, Joy, Love", "Merry Christmas, ya filthy animal", and "Mele Kulikimaka", because that song was stuck in my head for WEEKS this year.

I look at these and see a lot of practice I still need to do, but it's not like people pay that much attention to gift tags anyway. Although I was pleasantly surprised to see a few people keep them after they got their presents and threw away the rest of the wrapping. :)

I've decided my favorite thing currently is to write funny or slightly terrible things in really pretty letters all over everything I can get my hands on.

I also really, really love brown paper packages tied with jute string and these tags. I just die.

PRETTY

This isn't really a gift, per se, but I adore this practice piece I made using the Flourish style worksheet from The Postman's Knock, who is basically my new favorite. Seriously, if you're a fan of pretty letters, both alphabet and postal, go check her out. She's amazing. Anyway, I had fun playing around with this style.

ALSO PRETTY

As a new mom, I caved to a Pinterest trend and collaborated with Infant to make these cute little ornaments. I used the same paper clay I made Baby Groot with, which actually gave me a lot of problems as it didn't dry flat for most of the ornaments. You can see a bit of wrinkling on the right edge of this one, and it was by far the flattest.

I can't personally recommend this project. I made nine of these suckers and let me tell you: wrestling a paint-covered foot away from a grabby, curious baby while trying to simultaneously keep him from touching you, himself, the furniture, the walls, and anything else in range, is barely fun once. It's definitely not fun nine times. 

Finally, I made more paper wreaths. I. Love. Paper. Wreaths.

This year, I got a little crazy and added feathers to a couple of the ones I made using paper doilies. I also made several recycling pages from old ARCs, which is my favorite way to reuse those suckers.

Large, with feathers. This is by far my favorite. It didn't sell at the only craft fair I did this year, so I'm totally keeping it. 

Small, with feathers. Zoomed in, so it looks bigger, but it's about 9" across.

Small, from book pages.

Large, from book pages.

This was my very first attempt at a colored wreath. It's still recycled book page flowers, but I hand-painted each individual flower layer with either a silver or blue acrylic paint wash before assembling the flowers and then the wreath. Then I added various pieces of silver and blue wreath picks and a larger focal point cluster at the bottom left.

I don't know if I'll ever make one like this again. Probably not unless I can sell it for a hundred bajillion dollars, or I really, really like the person I make it for (which, luckily, I do, for the person I made it for this year). It was truly a labor of love. 

Well, there you have it. That concludes 2014's Very Crafty Christmas. Here's to a crafty 2015!