How to Make a Beautiful Garland to decorate with.

The things you need:

Twine as long as you would like your garland

Wire 19 gauge or a little thinner will work

Pliers cutter for wire and flat with teeth

Garden clippers

Foliage go on a walk and gather yourself a decent selection of healthy beautiful branches, berries, little fruits.. whatever you would like to decorate with.

Step 1: cut your twine as long as you would like your garland, fold it in half and tie a knot in the center

Step 2: Using your wire cutter cut 3” pieces ( or longer if your foliage is really thick) cut about 25 to start. fold them into U shapes.

Step 3: Lay out twine and begin to cut your branches into pleasing 10” or so long lengths. You want the foliage to be leafy and full. I lay them out a few feet along the twine to see how it will look before I wire them on.

In this years garland I used Evergreen boughs as the main foliage and then I used smaller branches of fall leaves from an Ash tree with berries and an Oak tree with nice big leaves.

Other times I have used Eucalyptus, olive and pomegranate.

 

 

Step 4: At the end you start with tie the end of the twine to the middle of your first branch. this will help anchor the end.

I always point the cut end of the branch toward the center of the garland. the leaves down toward the ends.

Lay out your second branch over lapping the cut end of the first branch by a few inches.

Use a wire and pliers to catch all pieces of branches and twine and twist them securely.

Continue working your way to the center of your garland, overlapping and wiring branches and leaves in a pleasing arrangement.

I leave the wire ends a little long and not completely twisted until I am completely finished with garland. You can use the excess wire ends to wire on berries, lights , ribbons… whatever.

Step 5: When you reach the center of your garland, start placing your branches the other direction, cut end to the center. Foliage toward the end of the twine. using some smaller cuts of leaves and branches overlay the center area so the foliage hides the branch ends.

Continue as before, overlapping and wiring until you are at the end. Tie the end of the twine to the center of the final piece of foliage.

You can now use the small wire ends throughout your garland to attach berries, bows, ect.

I just fold the excess wires over whatever little thing I am attaching.

If you want a bow, tie one with ribbon and leave the ends really long, gently wrap them around the garland anchoring with wires here and there.

You are finished! Now go hang it up and enjoy.

I have made these 50 feet long to wrap the whole front of my house… so you can make them as long or as short as you need.

 

 

Miniature Sparkle Houses

Christmas is coming, right around the bend…. and I hope to make almost all my gifts for my fabulous family and friends. Which means I better start getting busy, I wrote my list and checked it twice… both times I found errors. So I probably better go over it a time or two again as the BIG DAY approaches.

I write this blog in hopes of inspiring other people in this world who may stumble upon it to CREATE. Reach inside find inspiration and make things. Use what is around you, cruise the net at high speed and see what others are doing. Stop rampant consumerism ( half of it gets tossed or re-gifted anyhow) and make a little gift that will be appreciated because it came from your heart, made with your own two hands.

This year I am making all sorts of fun ornaments, and I am sharing them here. Today it is the sparkly houses.

In my last post I linked a tutorial about making paper houses. I have now made a few of my own, with my own patterns. Mine are much smaller than the tutorial’s version, about 1:60 scale. They would look great with an N scale train running by.

I have been getting very creative, I used tiny scraps of lace for curtains, model railroad windows and doors, bits of lichen for bushes. All these are really is paper, paint and glue.. and what a cute village I have. It will be hard to give them away, I really would like my own little glittering village.

You know they are adorable, are you inspired? Go make something.

Finding inspiration online.

I almost always post my own creations here on my blog, but today I want to post about Little Glitter Houses by Howard L. Lamey, also known as Putz Houses. They were very popular at the turn of the 1900's and with today's renewed interest in handcrafting I think they are a perfect project or even a purchase. You can make your own or buy a kit, or even have a custom house made.

I love them, and of course I will be making at least one or two sometime soon. I just wanted to share this inspiration with others who may also enjoy the challenge. Howard L. Lamey has shared instructions for a basic house as well as instructions on upgrading the small house to a church.

Happy creating!

Using the tweeds and fabric from yesterdays dye jobs.

My husband thought of the bow tie and spectacles isn’t that to cute ?

Next bird in the works is another owl, this one in the pinks like the bird above… all cut out and ready for stitching.

And last but not least I’m cutting out fabric 9 patch mug rugs.

Dyeing tweed, wool and silk for little Christmas birdies.

 A year or more ago my dear Mother-in-law gave me three jars of dyes. A Yellow, Fuchsia and Turquoise… basically the three primary colors. I pondered and pandered about how to use them, as there no instructions or even a brand name… what fabric would they work on? Anyhow today I decided to stop screwing around and just experiment.

 

I did not have any extra pots or pans to donate to become a dye pot so I decided to use a freezer Ziploc bags, a ceramic bowl and then microwave the contents instead of boiling them.

I think I have acid dyes, check out Dharma Trading company to order your own. So after seeing that acid dyes are for fabrics that come from a creature such as wool from a sheep or silk from a worm.  I promptly went to my stash and cut the arm off an old wool suit, cut some pieces of tweed, cut chunks off my silk/rayon, a scrap of pure wool felt and store bought wool/rayon felt.

I say dying was a smashing success. The fabrics that contained rayon are the lighter ones in the photo, rayon is made of plant and acid dyes do not work on plant based fibers. Yet the wool part did take the dye, the silk velvet is so pretty. I can’t wait to make something from it.  

The moral of this story is, I should have been playing with dyes long ago. The microwave worked great, I only nuked each bag about 5 min until the water was clear. I am now eyeing all my fabric wondering if I should throw it into the vat.

Now, what am I doing with wool and felt and silky soft velvet?

I'm making my holiday gift stash… these will become ornaments. I plan to make at least 20 and I’ve just started fleshing out patterns. I do love birdies, this will be fun.

Now imagine these cute little birds made from the colorful  wool felt and tweed pictured above. So cute…

I’m off to create!

Scrappy Little Table topper

I love all the prints that went into this cute little table runner. I made a bunch of cute apron a years or so ago and the scraps from that project ended up cut into triangles. I have some grand plans for all those scraps, but I left then in a drawer until I don’t quite know what my plan really was….. So after a few layouts, I decided to just commit and make something cute, colorful, small and playful.

The results are so fresh and happy, I love it. It will make a fine little gift for someone special.

Project of the day, Paper piecing. I’ve never done it, but it looks doable. I made a pattern on a super cool freeware program called Quilt Assistant . You open a picture and you make your own paper piecing pattern. The website has a PDF tutorial that covers all the basics. I thought the pattern making was a cinch. What I have not found out is if I can actually make it.

My first project will be the farm house and red roofed barn. I think I made it 12”x9” or so.

We have some fun plans for this Labor day weekend, how about yourselves? Anyone going on a fun end of summer adventure?

We are going to head out to San Francisco in the morning with a couple of good friends, I get to drag my awesome husband and friends to Peapod Fabrics. Peapod has some fabulous, cuter than possible fabrics, and I will of course be buying something for a future project.

We are then heading to Cha Cha Cha for a divine Spanish Tapa’s style lunch. Seriously, this little restaurant rocks, I can’t wait. If you find yourself in the Haight & Ashbury area, GO THERE!

Then the real party begins, we are going to booze it up, go see some Giants and meet up with a bunch more friend's, party a little bit more…. at the end of the day we shall stumble to our hotel and pass out from exhaustion.

Have a good weekend my friends!

Cytel

One more room complete!

The office / music / guest room is all finished except for the curtains.

Check out the change … Top is the “after” photos, we painted the walls, built an office desk into the closet. Stained the concrete floors and framed out areas to hang the guitars. If you check out the lower photo of the office you can see what a wreck it was…the floor was blahhhh concrete with old paint and dried on glue. Nothing was organized. we have to much outdated oversized UGLY furniture… my fault I’ll drag home almost any free furniture.

Anyhow now we just love it and it is so great to see a nice clean,cool ,modern room that was transformed from chaos in just a few short weeks.

 

Before… what a mess eh?

Because I’m not one to sit back on my laurels and do nothing I have thrown myself into the Sacramento Modern Quilt Guild’s Free Spirit Habitat Challenge.

I was given fat eighths of these 6 fabrics above. These are from Jay McCarroll’s fabric line called “Habitat” made by Free Spirit. Remember Jay was a winner on Project Runway a while back. Our challenge is to use these as the focus of our quilt and we can use solids for any other fabrics we may need to complete the look.

I love challenges especially when I am pushed outside my usual comfort zone. For me I would not have sought these fabrics out at the store, but after I came up with various ideas I came to really like them.

Here are a few of the concepts I thought about…

 

The picture on the right was the winner. I am now hard at work stitching the stars to the background, and I need to make one more large star to complete the layout.