It's Beginning to Look Alot Like Christmas

...or, alternatively titled by my room mate, "Are you freaking kidding me Amy? It's 70 degrees out and you've got Christmas music on? "


I love Christmas with a burning, soul consuming passion, and as a crafter my Christmas stuff started about a month ago. My big thing this year has been little felt Christmas ornaments-- my goal is to tie them onto every package I give this year, so even if I can't hand-make all my gifts I can at least have something sweet and stitched for everyone.

In other Christmas related news, I'm planning a Christmas extravaganza trip to NYC at Christmas with my sister-- should be awesome, and was the inspiration for the Rockefeller Center ornament.


It might be a tad risky to make memory-based ornament before there is a memory, but that's just how I roll. The ornaments are really quite simple to whip up-- I don't think anything's taken me more than an hour or so-- and so they grant a very high impact to effort ratio.

My other project, which you see at the beginning, is barely a craft in the traditional sense (zero creative thought involved) but I'm stitching up a Nativity scene for my nephy-poo from a kit.

As a kid, I loved playing with the nativity scene under the tree, so I love the idea of a kid friendly one-- so my mom picked up the kit for me.

I've got a few other little projects going currently-- the Christmas card has been designed but is waiting for production, I'm designing two dresses for draping and one for the student run design show, and I've picked up knitting again-- but these Christmas mini-projects are super addicting. Stay tuned for a tutorial!

Lately I've been making...

Little embroidered stuffed animals,

Spinning tops (these are crazy easy, but my nephew loved them so I hope campers will)
and this giant bolt of gold sequined fabric will ultimately become three dresses for the muses in Little Shop of Horrors. 2/7 costumes completed, and only a couple of weeks to go.

The Inaugural Post-- And a Tutorial!

I had big ambitions when I started this blog about sharing my various craft projects, but unfortunately time got away from me, and here I am writing the first post months after I created it… but here I am. I’m a soon-to-be college junior, studying textile and apparel management, with aspirations of someday going into costume design. I love crafting with children, and in my spare time at school I help lead a Sewing Club at an after school program, and during the summer I work as the arts and crafts director at a girl scout camp near my house-- thus the rationale for creating the following project.

Flower Photo Holder Tutorial

You will need:

• Cardstock (for flowers)
• Chopsticks, wooden skewers, pencils… anything stem like
• A disposable cup (or, if you have a nicely shaped one, a bottle)
• Glue(I used a glue gun and tacky glue and a glue stick, but most glues could be adapted for any of my purposes)
• Yarn
• Paper clips
• Rice, clay, salt dough, or some other substrate to weight down your vase and hold the flowers up

1. Create some flowers! I just pieced mine pretty simply out of card-stock… they can be as elaborate or as simple as you want/have time for. You want to use some sturdy card-stock, though, so they can hold up to the end use.

2. Paint your stems green. I hoard chopsticks from the dining hall at my school all year long so campers can use them, but I ended up sawing them both because they were a bit high and too uniform for my liking. Feel free to add leaves, or not.

3. Glue the stick onto the back of the flower, not allowing the stick to cover more than half of it. (you need room for a paperclip on there.)
4. I missed photographing this, but this is really a pretty simple project so it’s probably unnecessary. Glue a paperclip above the stem. This will hold the photograph. I was thinking later that a teeny clothespin might do a better job (the paperclip might distort a photo) but I don’t have any, and paper clips are cheaper for a camp budget anyway.

5. You could decorate your pot/vase any way you wanted to, but I opted to wrap variegated yarn all around it. You could achieve a neat striped effect by using two colors of yarn at once, which I intended to do but opted not to when I found the variegated.
6. Place a substrate in your vase. At camp, I would probably have the kids help me whip up a batch of salt dough, but I didn’t feel motivated at home (and I would have had a lot left over) so I just poured some rice in. A little messier, but it does the job. I might replace it with dough at camp, but it really doesn’t matter.
7. Place in photos and voila! A beautiful, customized photo-holder. (note the completely camp appropriate photos, necessary for any camp prototype.)