Vintage Ornaments in Shadow Box

I have been dying to do this project with vintage ornaments inside of a large shadow box.  I first saw it on Pinterest a few years ago and it's languished in my 'to do' file till now.

Over the holidays, I won a couple of ebay auctions of antique Shiny Brites and other 1940s-50s era glass balls. Shadow boxes are very expensive, especially the size I wanted.  However, I had a 40% coupon for Michael's Crafts and got a wicked deal on the perfect one.  There was no way I was waiting till next fall to assemble it and I am so pleased with how perfectly it worked, and showcases the best ones.

I literally have no where to hang this, but I have till next December to figure that out.

Christmas Craft Bucket List

I've been coping with some horrible stress by doing Christmas crafts like a crazed maniac.  Which is a good way to spend my time, glitter-spillage and craft room upheaval not withstanding.

So I dipped into my 'Crafts to Make: Holiday' Pinterest board and browsed around.  There was a gorgeous birdbath done with multicolour large glass balls.  My birdbath is really small, so I got one large ball & a couple packages of smaller silver balls at The Christmas Tree Shop, snipped off some greens from the yard and put this together.  I had the metal sleigh already.

I keep seeing these gorgeous, elegant bottle brush trees on Pinterest and try as I might, I just can't get them to come out looking very elegant.  Oh well.  They are still pretty.  The left one has lots of coloured glass pearls and beads.  The right one has small metal roses.

No box is safe from my altered art endeavors.

This was actually an Altoids tin Pinterest project that I followed almost to the letter. I couldn't find a super decorative top, or something to put on the bottom as a display stand.  It took forever to find that Currier & Ives picture.  There was a time when this image was used on Christmas cards, but not anymore.  

I went a little nutty with the jar crafts.  I had to sacrifice an unopened bottle of pickles too (they are in a baggie in the fridge!).  The two center ones are plastic jar ornaments I got at AC Moore, and the far right is a smaller jar I had in my stash.

I really like how this one came out, despite the giant and not-to-scale cardinal

Jar ornament.

Recreating the vintage look with the plastic tree and old pixie. I have since added a tiny wrapped package to the elf so it looks like he's holding it.

Battery operated lantern.

Won't do these again....just did them to get them off my list.  I shouldn't have used one sided pattern ribbon on the tree on the left.  The tied ribbon is also a pain and won't stay horizontal without glue and doublestick tape.  My heart wasn't in these.

I still had a couple small wine bottles left over so I put some foam snowflake stickers on it before spraying.  I got a little too much paint on the front and some of it leaked into the front snowflake.  

This one was kind of a pain.  The bottle was very thick and hard to drill.  Then I only had a strand of 50 multicoloured lights which were hard to stuff into the narrow bottle.  It looks good though.

This was another one I saw on Pinterest.  Doing a scene in a large vase with white lights under glitter snow.  I've since tweaked this to add more snow and try to stabilize the elements so they don't tip over so easily.

Not that this is a craft, but I wanted to try out a cranberry cake recipe.  I had my doubts since I've never seen a baking recipe that didn't include baking powder and/or soda, and salt.  This came out so good that it was hard to resist eating it nonstop.  I sent a huge piece over to my inlaws just to keep it out of my house!  

Last one and I was running out of steam and inspiration so I wasn't really happy with it.  The frame was a bitch to spray paint.  I had to put those large rhinestones on to cover up some errors.  The postcards didn't fit the openings so I had to back them with paper and I didn't do a good job lining them up.

Taking a quick break but will be back to cross stitching and stuff soon.  Too busy baking for Christmas Day now!

Holiday Crafts 2015

I had a bunch of balls leftover from last year so I put this together one weekend.

Also been meaning to try melted crayons inside a glass ball.  The tutorial I first looked at said to break the crayons into 1/2" pieces.  Well, those won't melt.  I had to shave and thinly slice the crayons to get them to melt.  And once they start to melt and run all over, they run together extremely quickly.  This was supposed to just be blue, purple and green.  Can't see the purple.

This is another ball in blue, light blue and light green.  I was trying to cover up an alcohol ink failure (I first started out w/ alcohol ink and it looked awful).

Here's another alcohol ink failure ball that I did with purple crayons since the purple ink didn't totally wash out.

This was to be red, pink, orange and yellow and an example of how they all ran together.  

Another one I wanted to try was glass etching cream with see through stars.  I had to punch the stars out of paper and glue them on, which was fine.  The trouble was with the cream.  My first coat wasn't left on long enough and nothing happened.  I had to wash the first layer of it off which now got the star paper all wet.  I covered the ball with more cream, but it didn't etch at all evenly.  And some of the acid went through the paper and frosted the see through parts.  

The only ball that came out good was the one where I used a glass engraver.  The other side says 'peace'.  I used a stencil and then had to free hand it to thicken the letters.  I'm keeping this one but my stepdaughter wants the other 5 and she's welcome to them!

Started this one at the end of October and finished a couple of weeks later.  I saved the white snowflakes for last, thinking they'd go quickly.  They did not.  But it came out pretty good anyway. This one's not for sale.  I just need to find wall space to hang it this season!

Saw this project on Pinterest and checked out the instructions, mostly to get what kind of paint to use and download the free pattern.  You can get them HERE.  Pretty easy to do, you just can't be real heavy handed when spraying the blue paint or else it'll drip and also be opaque.

Looks nice with a candle.  So much easier than drilling holes in bottles!

Pleased to see so many new, plastic shaped ornaments in the craft stores.  This jar is sweet.  Just remove the lid, glue in your scene, put lid back on.  Boom.  I added the puff paint snow on the outside.