Anthropologie-style antiqued mirrors

I'm so tempted to give this a try! Aren't the results beautiful?

Here's a link to the tutorial in case you can't watch the video.

Sad week for wreaths

Sunday morning I came into my office to find the floor littered with shards of pink glass. I think I might have actually screamed out loud when I realized that those shards could only have come from this:

My beloved pink wreath was hanging on the closet door in my office to keep it up and away from destructive little hands. I keep a 3M Command hook on my closet door because it's a good place to photograph items for eBay and Etsy, so I hung the wreath there for photos as well. Sometime during Saturday night, the adhesive on the hook failed and the wreath crashed to the floor below.

Thankfully, the floor is carpet so the damage wasn't as extensive as it could have been.

As it is, the ornaments marked with Xs are now in the belly of my Shop Vac. I think I'll be able to carefully replace the three large ornaments around the bottom, but the sweet little bird is history and I'm not sure what I can do to fix it. I used up all of my pink ornaments on the other two pink wreaths, so I can't do anything about it until I find more anyway, which means it will probably be months.

The truly sick irony is that earlier on Saturday afternoon, I moved the other two pink wreaths downstairs and packed them carefully into wreath boxes to store them safely until next Christmas. If only I had moved this pink one instead, it would still be intact and beautiful. :(

To add insult to injury, yesterday I caught the dog in the act of eating the gumdrops off of the gumdrop wreath I made in 2009.

 I had put it in the basement because I'm still in the process of putting away my Christmas decor (I know, don't judge) and it was awaiting space in a box. I forgot it was on the floor and left the basement door open in between doing loads of laundry, and the dog wandered down there and found it. He'd denuded half of it by the time I found him, and had vigorously licked the other half. I'm sure I could have made some attempt at repair but at that point I was so disgusted and annoyed that I just pitched the whole entire thing.

It's a bad week to be a wreath in my house, apparently.

More Ornament wreaths

May I present vintage ornament wreaths no. 2

and 3:

 I was able to dig into my stash come up with enough pink ornaments to squeeze out a third wreath, though I had to mix them with silver to have enough for the whole thing.

I love them! I think I'll sell at least two of them next year, as I don't really need three pink ornament wreaths in my house (which has NO pink in it other than Maren's bedroom). Now I just need to find a way to keep them safely stored until next year--these things are fragile!

Top Ten "Junking" Finds for 2011

What do you think of the list? Is there anything missing or anything you don't agree with? What's on YOUR personal Top Ten Junking Finds for 2011 list?

Vintage ornament wreath #1

Confession #1: my Christmas tree is still up and decorated, and about half of my other Christmas decorations are still out. It's now the middle of January.

Confession #2: I don't even care!

I've never before left my Christmas decorations up so late but they're not bugging me, so I've ignored them. Part of the reason I haven't boxed them up is that I'm still doing Christmas crafts, so there are some things that I can't put away because I'm using them! All of my boxes have to fit neatly into a small space so I have to have them all ready to go and put them all in at once to make it work--it's like Christmas box Tetris.

Last night I made my first vintage ornament wreath. I've wanted to make one since, well, since I started collecting vintage ornaments about six years ago. But as with the other crafts I've shown this week, December gets crazy for me (schedule-wise and mentally) so I can't seem to get one done before the holiday. Now I'm early for next year!

I didn't hit the post-Christmas sales at Target this year because 1) I don't need anything and am trying to declutter and 2) I was lazy. :) But I did have to go to Target last week for something else and decided to wander by the Christmas aisle to see if anything was left. It was already 90% off so pickins' were slim, but I did find some colored tinsel wreaths in silver, pink, blue and green. Original price was $2.50, so I figured I couldn't go too wrong for a quarter apiece and bought the silver and the three pinks that were left on the shelf.

I used one of the pink wreaths as my base and glued on the outside ring of larger solid colored ornaments first, then filled in the middle with the fancy stuff. I wondered if maybe I ought to use a different color than my precious pink vintage beauties in case I messed up my first attempt, but luckily it worked out and I couldn't be more pleased with the final product!

I still have two pink wreaths and a silver left, which is a good thing because now I'm addicted! I've already started a pink and turquoise wreath, and I'm trying to decide what color scheme to use on the silver. I bent the remaining pink wreath into a heart shape and I'm going to see if I can't come up with something for Valentine's Day. I'll have used up all of my pink ornaments though, so that one will have to be mostly red and perhaps silver.

I'm giving myself one more week to get the Christmas crafting wrapped up and put away--just in time for all of the Valentine's decorations to come out! Guess I don't have to worry about that whole post-Christmas emptiness in my decor, right?

More Christmas crafting: vintage-style hanging glass bead ornaments

Still working on the post- (or pre-, depending how you look at it) Christmas crafting. This project was easy, I just didn't ever have the time to sit down and actually do it before Christmas!

Earlier this summer I bought this vintage Christmas wreath-thingy (I really don't know what to call it) at an estate sale. It's made of glass beads and the top is shaped into a wreath, with four long dangles hanging down, and each long dangle has a small glass ornament at the bottom.

When I purchased it, two of the green ornaments were broken, but I was sure that I had something in my stash that I could use to replace them. While I was doing the repairs, I realized how simple the construction was and thought maybe I'd try to make one myself.

The supplies were minimal: glass beads in two sizes, feather-tree size ornaments for the dangles, two foil leaves and a piece of ribbon. I didn't have any vintage foil leaves in the right shape, but I did have some very similar silver holly leaves made by a scrapbooking company called Prima. I used Zip Dry glue to adhere a length of thin floral wire to the back of each one.

A word about the mercury glass beads: finding strands of these is one of my top 10, possibly even top 5 thrills while junking. I LOVE them! I've found about a dozen strands over the past few years, but here's the thing--I've never really done anything with them. They don't display well on aluminum Christmas trees, and I plum forgot to put any on my green tree this year. I could put them in a big jar like beautiful glass bead spaghetti, but I just don't have a place for that and they get tangled really easily. When I decided to attempt to make this ornament, that was the push I needed to finally DO something with them. I cut apart the strands, removed all of the broken bits and now I have a jar full of glass beads that I can actually use. Sometimes the thought of using my vintage (and therefore difficult to replace) treasures is scary, but I have never regretted it when I actually do!

The construction of the ornament is simple. I don't have photos of all the steps because it was late at night and I made it up as I went along. The colors of my ornaments were constrained by the fact that I only have a few of the larger size strands of beads needed to make the wreath: red, turquoise and royal blue. My first attempt was the royal blue. Using the green ornament as my size guide, I cut a piece of wire roughly the same size as wreath and strung on blue beads, then twisted the ends to secure.

Next, I made the little bead clusters that sit in front of the leaves. I can make a tutorial for these if anyone is interested--leave a comment and let me know! I didn't have any small blue beads for this part so I improvised and used red. Then I twisted the tails of the clusters and the wires of the leaves together. One thing I wish I'd done differently is make the wreath portion bigger. The blue beads were smaller than the green beads, but the leaves I used were larger than the originals, so I think the proportion is a bit off.

The original dangles were strung on heavy thread or string, so I used three strands of embroidery floss to make mine. I again used the original as a size guide and strung the same number of beads. When I got to the bottom, I looped through the wire of the ornament, then went back through the beads again and out the top to make each dangle. When I had all four completed, I pulled the threads through a large silver bead and tied the threads in a knot. Here again I think the proportion is just a bit off: the silver beads I used were just slightly larger than the originals, and using the same number as the original resulted in longer strands. I used two red balls to bring in the color from the clusters, but I don't know if I like how it looks and I may remove those in favor of more blue.

To put it all together, I tied the threads around the bottom of the wreath (where the wires were twisted), cut the threads close to the knot and applied a drop of glue to keep the knot from coming loose. Next I twisted the wire from the leaves/clusters around the same place. Then I made a small bow, twisted a piece of wire around the middle and attached another glass bead, then twisted the ends around the same place as the leaves. It's not as clean on the back as I'd like, but honestly the original is a bit messy in that area as well.

I liked the next ones I made better, because I figured out my proportion problems so I think they look more balanced. I made the red one with gold dangles because of the gold leaves.

My favorite is definitely the turquoise one! I wish the holly leaves were smaller, but I worked with what I had and I made the bow out of wider ribbon to try to balance them.

I'm not sure what I'll do with these--perhaps they'll end up in my etsy shop next year. I also think it would be interesting to make a smaller version, better sized to be an actual Christmas tree ornament, using some of my really tiny feather tree ornaments at the bottom of the dangles. I'm not sure what I'd use for the leaves, but I have 10 months to figure something out!

Muffin Tin Advent Calendar

This past weekend I spent working on crafty stuff--Christmas crafts, to be precise. Now, you might think that I'm about three weeks late, but I prefer to think of myself as 50 weeks early for next Christmas!

One of the projects that I did was this muffin tin advent calendar. I've wanted to make a cookie sheet advent calendar for years, ever since I first saw Teresa McFayden's fabulous creation years ago. Every year I'd plan to make one, and then every year it would be December 1 before I knew it and too late. 2010 was no exception, but this year Teresa had a new advent calendar in the Christmas issue of Inspired Ideas (the same e-magazine where I got the inspiration to make my glittery cookie cutter ornaments). Teresa's article is on pages 40-44 if you want to go check it out.

I bought my Wilton mini muffin tin at JoAnn's so that I could use a 40% off coupon, but Wilton pans frequently go on sale both there and Michael's as well. I haven't painted it or drilled the holes in the top yet, but that task may have to wait until I pull it out next year--though I ought to just get it done now, right?

I don't have the 2 1/2" or 2 5/8" scalloped circle punch that Teresa suggested, but I do have one that is 2 3/8" from Stampin' Up. It fits, but just barely covers the muffin wells, so I knew that attaching magnets to the back of cardstock circles probably wouldn't work well. I opted for another method: I purchased magnetic sheets at JoAnn's (with a coupon, of course! I'm too cheap to pay full price for anything there) and because they're thin, was able to use my punch to cut out 24 circles. I also punched scalloped circles out of some of my favorite hoarded Daisy D's vintage Christmas scrapbook paper, and ran them through my Xyron to apply adhesive to the backs. Then I simply applied one scrapbook paper circle to the top of each magnetic circle.

The most fun part of the project was definitely picking through all of my little bits o' junk to make all of the numbers. I used stuff from my scrapbooking stash (brads, metal numbers, rub-ons, chipboard, stickers, tags, metal shapes) and vintage junk as well (a domino, a checker, bingo numbers, game card, milk bottle cap, buttons, tickets, price signs). I glued it all together with my favorite Zip Dry craft glue, and I accented some of the numbers with another of my favorite crafting products, Stickles glitter glue.

If I didn't think the candy would go bad (and possibly attract bugs), I'd go ahead and fill the wells now so it would be all ready to go on December 1, 2011 when I pull it out of the box! I'm glad to finally get this project done after literally years of having it on my mind (another one out of my system)!

Ugly Sweater Party

A friend and I co-hosted an Ugly Sweater Party on New Year's Day. It was the perfect fun ending to the holidays before we all got back to real life.

It was also the perfect excuse to hit the thrifts, since I had to search for appropriately horrible sweaters for us to wear. I found mine the week before Christmas but didn't snag the Mister's until a last-minute Goodwill run two hours before the party. Mine was bad, but his truly took the prize for Worst Crime Against Fashion Perpetrated By Acrylic Yarn. The ugliness even spilled over onto the back of his sweater. It made my eyes bleed a little bit.

One of the best parts about the party (besides collapsing with laughter each time a new couple arrived in their hideous sweaters) was our photo booth! My co-host Becca is a photographer and I whipped up some Etsy-hipster-style mustaches-on-sticks and other silly props, so we were able to capture our awesomely bad outfits and post them on Facebook and for possible use as 2011 Christmas cards.

Here's my favorite--we were going for an Awkward Family Photos vibe:

I think the Mister really nailed it.

For party food we had appetizers. I made three recipes from my favorite food blog, Our Best Bites:

• Holiday Cheeseball Unfortunately, not a repeater. It was the size of a bowling ball and I came home with 7/8 of it, so it wasn't a hit.
• 7-Layer Greek Dip Yum! I think people liked this one. I'm still eating it a week later and it's still good and fresh. It's a healthier alternative to the traditional Mexican 7-Layer dip: I made my own hummus (no preservatives, only a little salt) and used fat-free cream cheese and feta cheese. Fresh parsley, cucumbers and tomatoes and kalamata olives are good for you too, and I served it with pita chips. I'd definitely make this again.
• Sweet Fruit Salsa with Cinnamon Chips This one was a winner. I used blackberries, mango, kiwi, fresh pineapple, and a few frozen raspberries. Mine didn't look nearly as pretty as the photo for a few reasons: I ignored the warning about adding berries last, and the raspberries indeed dyed the salsa and gave all the fruit a reddish tinge (I was smart enough to add the blackberries last). Also, I should have chopped my fruit much smaller to begin with. I didn't and at the last minute decided it looked more like fruit salad than salsa, and gave it a quick whirl in the food processor. The result tasted fine and the consistency was more salsa-like, but because of the red tinge, looked a lot more like vomit than I was comfortable with. The cinnamon chips were yummy.

The party was such fun we may need to make it a yearly tradition! I may start my hunt for next year's sweater right now.