The winter season in Kansas City is a long one. Way after the glow of the holidays are over, gray, foggy and cold February lurches in. It’s the shortest month of the year by the calendar, but by the weather, it seems to go on and on and on.
We were treated to a few nice days – (logged my first bike ride of the year on the 18th). But most of it was a wear-your-long-underwear-under-your-lined-jeans-with-two-sweatshirts kind of month.
EASY TO MAKE PAPER STRIP ORNAMENT
This is one in a series of twelve paper ornaments I’m making this year, one a month so that when December rolls around, I won’t be surprised to discover I’ve done nothing about my wish to have a fully paper crafted Christmas Tree.
I’ve mentioned before that I really like the look of glitter but I don’t like the aftermath (craftermath?). No matter how careful you are, glitter spreads throughout the house, appearing in unlikely places like the ice cube tray and your significant other’s toothbrush. Side note – he never appreciates it.
In the past, I’ve taken to using digital glitter backgrounds provided by some very generous designers.
But the other day, it occurred to me that I probably could make my own, especially if someone gave me the digital recipe, like the tutorial I found that time for gingerbread letters.
Sure enough, I found a really easy and straightforward tutorial. And now I can have glittery images, any color I want, just by choosing it in my Photoshop color picker.
Once I had the technique down, I knew instantly what I needed it for. Glittery Snowflake Ornaments for my tree!
This year, three projects made their way into my crafterday afternoons:
Faux watercolor cards. While technically not a Valentine’s Craft, I combined this technique with my favorite thing – a pun – to make a cheery card. This also let me work on my brush lettering and doodling challenges that I’m doing this year.
This super cute garland tugged at my tyopography heart strings. The original post features a different technique; I used my Silhouette Cameo to cut out the large letter “U” to make my hearts. (It’s Helvetica Neu Bold Condensed if you are keeping score at home). Strung with red and white baker’s twine, it looks happy over my fireplace.
This polka dot technique is more popular as a Sharpie craft on mugs, but I used it to make a gift card holder.
Last summer while cleaning up a flooded basement after a super heavy rainfall, I found a small plastic bin with long lost craft supplies. Most everything was past it’s prime – lots of no longer sticky stickers, crumpled and faded paper and dried out paint.
But one survivor was a cute little counted cross stitch kit.
It was a great distraction from the scheduled project of mopping and bleaching the basement floors.
After I finished up the little card, I looked for more cross stitch love, and was rewarded with a lot of cool work being done on a much larger scale – pegboards!
While they looked amazing, that scope of project is a little large, literally. It would be hard to get something that big home without help from Mr. SuzerSpace, and I’m not sure he’d be onboard with such a project. He’d probably point out that it would be difficult to hang in the end as well, and he would be right.
January was cold, cold, cold (did I mention it was cold?) here in Kansas City. I know it’s winter, and I’m smart enough to wear a jacket and gloves (I’m looking at you – dude at Target on Sunday when it’s 3 degrees out and you are wearing shorts and flip flops), but this one was one of the coldest I can remember.
I spent a lot of time inside.
