NOEL

Once I finished the ornaments from THIS post, I realized they might make a cool letter block.  Merry Christmas would have taken me till next year to finish so I settled for NOEL.

The letters were made by increasing a font to about 2.5 inches high, cut out of paper and used as a template to cut the felt.

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FELT AND GRATITUDE

FELT
I finally got around to trying my Spellbinder dies with felt and am so sorry I waited so long. I made some ornamants that double as money/gift card holders for this Christmas.

I first tried some recycled, synthetic, felt that I purchased at Joanns or Mikes and it didn't work at all. I went searching on the web for what I was doing wrong and found a brilliant blogger (sorry, can't remember who) that said wool felt cut like buttah. Off I went in search of wool felt. The 100% wool felt looked too thick so I chose the 35% (the 20% ended up working ok too) wool/65% rayon and ran home to try it out.

I used a square, a scalloped square and a Parisian accent thingy. The basics shapes cut pretty well with only one roll through my machine which is a Wizard die cutter. The more intricate parisian accent die took a little more work. I had to add a shim of a doubled piece of cardstock and run it back and forth a couple times. It still wasn't completely cut but I did a little trimming with my trusty tiny Ginghers.

I layered the Parisian accent piece onto the maroon square and did a small blanket stitch around the edge and a bit on the inside with embroidery floss.

The circle is just an ornament. The flowers are from the Floral Doily Motif die set. I did some other felt flowers which I will have a tutorial on how they were made in a future post.

But the square is a gift card/money holder. I doubled the white scalloped square layer and stitched around three sides to make a pocket. See the money peeking out on the left side?
I loved how these turned out so I made another project that I will post tomorrow. 
Now for being grateful.

GRATITUDE
 I found out yesterday that I made the first cut of the Spellbinders Design Team (holy cow are you flippin kidding me???) search. In addition to being unbelievably excited, not to mention terrified of the competition for the next round, I am first and foremost grateful to Spellbinders for giving me such an amazing opportunity.  I feel like a goofy actor who says they are just happy to be nominated for an award regardless of whether or not they win but I really do feel that way.  So wish me luck and either way I will be happy to have made it this far.


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VINTAGE ORNAMENTS

I have a couple more vintage type ornaments for you today. I am keeping these though because I really like how they turned out. I hadn't intended to make them but Kellie Mize from THE DIGI CHICK had some new Vintage Winter Charms digis and I thought they would be perfect paired up with some Spellbinder dies I have. I cut the dies from some bronze colored craft metal. I thought it was a little too shiny so I added some bronze flake paint and dabbed a bit of pitch black alcohol ink on top to make the frames. The images were printed on semi-gloss photo paper and glued to the back of the frame with E-6000 glue. I was in a hurry to get them done so I didn't take pics of the process. Let me know if you want to see how I did it and I will post later. These are the dies I used; Spellbinders Shapeabilities Dies-Fancy Tags Nestabilities -Rectangles and circles (to cut out the inside of the tags)

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