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.