November 24, 2015: Thanksgiving preparations

Let me start by saying I am not a tablescaping kind of person. For one, my table gets set at the last minute because of a couple of curious kitties, and also because I need room for all the food when we have a holiday meal.

Let me continue by saying that I do not own one of those big fancy die-cut machines. They seem amazing, yes. And if someone gave me one I would not turn it down (although I’m not sure where I would store it), but it is not a tool I’ve ever felt the need to own.

Those two things being said, over the past almost 11 months, I’ve made a lot of things I ordinarily would not have. This time it is place cards for Thanksgiving dinner. I wanted to do something Thanksgiving-y to counterbalance the craziness that was the grocery store earlier and I wanted to use stuff I already had.

I ended up with the simple idea of a leaf, and here is where the fun discovery happened. I had a sheet of stiffened felt that I had used once to make a snowman’s carrot nose.  It got trimmed down to letter paper size and I tried running it through my printer using a leaf template page I had found online. It worked! This is amazing for me because I am a bad tracer. No matter how careful I am, the things I try to trace end up looking…awful. There is really no other word. But here I had a nice perfect outline printed onto the felt and all I had to do was sit and cut them out.

For a further cheat, I printed the names onto a piece of terracotta-colored card stock. A few quick pulls of the glue gun trigger and I found I had made place cards. This may be the first and only time you see place cards for my table, but I love the fact that I can use my printer as a new crafting tool.

 

 

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June 4, 2015: Origami wreath

I pin a lot of ideas onto Pinterest. Sometimes, though, I forget to go back and browse through my own boards to revisit the projects I liked enough to pin. I took some time to do that, and found a pin for a fabric wreath I had forgotten about.

I decided to do a test run of the wreath using paper before I committed to cutting and starching fabric. I also have a weird thing going with origami. Sometimes it works, and sometimes I end up with a crumpled piece of paper.  I must be eternally hopeful though, because I have a partial pack of foil origami paper in my craft room. I actually remember when I bought this paper. I was living in my first apartment, so I’ve had it over 20 years. And I have further proved that you need to hold onto supplies because you never know when you will need them. 🙂

This time, the origami worked! Good thing too because this required making 16 of the folded triangles. Maybe it is because of the bright shiny paper, but this reminded me of fireworks when I was making it.