DIY 8

Wire angels
In my opinion you simply can’t have too many angels at Christmas. These are really easy to do.


You need: wire 0, 5 mm, flush cutter, pearls and glass beads.



1.Cut off a piece of wire and tread some pearls on it. Twist the wire 4-5 times loosely around the palm of your hand to create a circle.



2.Secure the circle by twisting the wire a few times. This will be the angels body.



3 .Make another circle of wire but this time not as loose as the first one. Twist it in the middle so that it looks like the number eight laying down. Now you have made the wings.



5.Fasten the wings on the body by using a piece of wire but don’t use all of it.



6.Attach a pearl to the body with the last piece of wire and now your angel has a head too.



7. Keep going....



Good Luck
Jeanette

DIY 7

X-MAS cake stand
I am a jumble sale and Thrift store freak. Whenever I enter one my heart starts beating from all the possibilities that might lay hidden on the shelves and in boxes. Last week I visited the Salvation Army Thrift store and found these Christmas tellers and started thinking about making a cake stand. I knew I had some wine glasses already at home that would fit perfectly for my project. Needless to say I bought them on a jumble sale too….

Want to make one yourself? AS a X-MAS gift maybe? This is how you do!

You need: 3 tellers preferably in different seizes and 3 wineglasses also in different size. The glue from hell – or more correctly, one of those two components quick-expoxy glues. Finally you need some tape to stabilize the tellers when drying.

1. Mix the glue as instructed on the package. Glue the “rim side” of the wineglasses to the back of the tellers. Stabilize them with tape and let them dry.

2. When they are completely dry you add glue to the foot of the wineglasses. Be very careful with the glue. You don’t want to end up at the emergency room with a wineglass glued to your hand now do you?



3. Place the tellers on top of each other and stabilize them with tape. Let them dry.



4. Put something yummy on them. The recipe for these just might show up in a DIY further on…



Why stop at wineglasses?

Have fun!
Jeanette

DIY 6

Candle with text or photos
In Sweden you can buy advent calendar candles at Christmas with the numbers 1-24 on it. You light them everyday as a sort of Christmas count down. My husband is very fond of these candles but we tend to forget to light them and end up “burning” a whole week on Saturdays to keep up with the dates. I decided to make something that was more appropriate to our needs.

You need: A candle, the bigger the better. I bought mine really cheap at IKEA. You also need a printer, a spoon and a kitchen stove.

1. Print the text you want to add to your candle. I wrote December. You can use an ordinary printer and ordinary paper. Cut the letters out.



2. Place the letters on your candle. I added a tiny dot of paper glue to keep them in place.



3. Heat one of the plates on your stove and place a spoon on it for 30 seconds or so. You want the spoon to get hot but not start glowing. Observe that you can only use an electrical stove!



4. Now gently rub the spoon over the letters on your candle. What happens is that when you rub the hot spoon over the letters the candle “melt” a little bit and the letter is “glued” to the candle. Secure all of your letters in this fashion. You need to repeat the heating of your spoon a couple of times.



5. Light your candle and enjoy the feeling that you have oceans of time before Christmas Eve is here.



I love when I can make something a lot less expencive than it would cost me in the shops and have fun at the same time. The other day I was in one of them “shabby french white” kind of shops and found some very nice candles with a print of vintage photos on them together with some vintage lace. My first thought were – they would look good in the country house and my second thought ( of course) were – I can make them myself. ....and so can you using the same technique as described above. This is how one of mine turned out.

For me it is very important to respect copyrights and also to give credit to people that inspire me. I often buy old photos at thrift stores and jumble sales and scan them to my computer but also visit the kind people out in Blogland that post freebies or vintage photos for personal use. Here are links to some of them

http://artfreebies.blogspot.com/
http://graphicsfairy.blogspot.com/
http://gomakesomething.com/category/print/


I send a very warm thanks to all you lovely bloggers out there who are kindly sharing your photos and ideas. You are all muses for my creativity!

Have fun
Jeanette

DIY 5

Wire Chandelier

Dear friends, this is going to be the longest post ever. I thought that since it is Sunday and you have all the time in the world we could do a tricky DIY. All the time in the world you think, is she nuts? It`s December for crying out loud. Don`t worry, I know the feeling. There you are happily thinking its September and suddenly – WHAM – December hits you right in the face. So if you don`t want to try this out right this minute you can always save it for your summer vacation instead.

Being a tricky DIY it was also tricky to take decent photos. I had to hold the wire in one hand and the camera in the other you see.... Okid doki. Are you ready? Here goes

You need: 20 oasis florist wire 1,4 x 400 mm, 0,5 wire on a spool, flush cutters, pliers, 15 Christmas tree candles and an old tin can for embellishment.

1. Take 5 of the florist wires and secure it, by binding them together with a piece of 0,5 wire. You shall secure them about 1/3 up.

2. Bend the shortest pieces of florist wire so you have a “foot” that looks like a star attached to a longer “stem”.
3. Secure the “foot” by twisting the 0,5 mm wire around each piece of florist wire in a spider web fashion. Weave around the foot for about 3 cm

4. Bend the five pieces of the “foot” like it is shown on the photo.

5. Continue your weaving for about another 3-4 cm more. Now you have a spider web that is 7 cm in total 6. Now you need to add to the length of the stem. You do that by taking five new florist wires and bind them together with the other ones.
7. Bend five of them in the same star like fashion as you did on the foot. This is going to make the first set of “arms” on your chandelier and on each one of the five wires there is going to be a candle.

8. Repeat number 7 two more times. You now you have three sets of arms at even intervals. You should have about 20-25 cm of stem left for hanging the chandelier.

9. You have to secure the arms too otherwise the whole thing gets extremely wobbly. You do it just like you did on the “foot”. A spider web of about 3 cm is enough.

10. Start adding candles to your chandelier by twisting the florist wire around the candle. Twist it 3-4 times. Now you have a candle holder on each florist wire.

Keep going, soon all 15 of them will be in place.


11. Soon you are going to start to pimp your chandelier. Woohoo. That’s the most fun. To be able to do so you have to hang it up. Bend and curl three of the florist wires as embellishment and keep two straight up with a finishing little curl. Hang a tread in these two last curls and hang it up.

12. You can pimp it with whatever you like. I slaughtered an old gingerbread tin and hung tiny pieces of it here and there.
13. The last thing you do is curl each piece of florist wire in the “foot”


Tadah! You are done!

All in a days work eh?

Take care

Jeanette

DIY 4

Tin can angel
I love tin cans! You can make almost anything out of them. Flower pots, jewelry, candle holders….you name it! Today I want to show you how to make a Christmas tree ornament out of a tin can. A tin can angel.

You need:
A tin can of course. A template – you can draw one yourself or find something in magazines or on a Christmas card maybe. You also need some wire, pearls and a heavy duty nibbler ( also known as a double-cut pipe cutter) for dismantling the tin can and a not so heavy duty flush cutter for cutting out your angel. You also need a sanding paper if you don’t want your angel to end up as a lethal weapon.

OK here goes.

1. Cut off the top and the bottom of the tin and then cut it through the middle. Flatten it out. You now have a rectangular piece to work with.

2. Trace your template to the tin and cut it out.



3. Use the sanding paper to soften the edges otherwise you will have made a Brazilian throwing star and not an angel. In my opinion a throwing star doesn’t go all that well with the Christmas spirit….



4. Punch a hole in it.



5. Hang it up in a string and maybe add a pearl or two as embellishment if you like.



Tadah. You are done!

Hope yoou had fun
Jeanette

DIY 3

Creations in moss

Teddy bear made with wire netting and moss

Wire netting an moss transformed into a cat

Moss draped over an old chair from a jumble sale

One thing you will notice if you tag along my Christmas DIY is that I like wire and I like moss. Moss is a fantastic material for creating all kind of lovely things for Christmas. I very often use it for wreaths and flower arrangements but also to make bigger objects like teddy bears, a cat and a tiny armchair. When I make bigger stuff I drape the moss over wire netting almost like a piece of fabric. You can also drape it directly over other objects like an old chair for example.

The cat on the photo has a story of its own. I made it as a gift for my mum and while I made it I wept most of the time. I had lost one of my dear cat companions during the summer and missed him terribly. When I gave the moss cat to my mother she said "Oh , he looks just like Nasse" so without knowing it I think a put a bit of his soul into the moss creation. I have to confess that I weep a bit while writing this too....I still miss him so much.

I made a tutorial for how to make a Teddy Bear in moss a few years back. The technique for making other objects is the same. The only thing you need is moss, wire netting, wire and ordinary sewing tread.

Believe me, once you get the hang of it you want to make all kind of creations!

To follow the tutorial - read here.

Good luck
Jeanette

PS If you make a bear you have to promise me to give it a name! It is absolutely essential. The name is what gives your bear its own personality. Sometimes when I give my teddy bears away I give them “adoption papers” on a ribbon around their neck. But usually it’s quite hard to part with them…..

DIY 2

Origami Hearts
I suck at origami. I have tried to make a crane so many times but they always end up looking more like a squashed goose than a crane. I was about to give up on origami when a friend taught me how to do origami hearts. It was dead simple....even I got it. Ha,ha!

You need: a rectangular piece of paper. Any rather thin paper will do so why not recycle some old magazines, gift papers or envelopes.

1. Fold corner to corner to make creases. Unfold.

2.Fold one corner to center



3. Fold opposite corner to the top edge



4. Fold the corners up at right angles to the center – the heart shape is starting to appear right?



5. Fold side corners back



6. Fold top corners back

7. That was really simple right?

Now you can start to pimp them if you like!

Add a string and hang them on your Christmas tree, make a garland or why not send origami Christmas cards this year.

Enjoy

Jeanette