CHRISTMAS IN JULY

Yes, it's only 6 months away!  I love making Christmas cards and decorations and goodies (especially the yummy goodies), so Christmas in July is always a fun crafty theme time for me.  That's our theme this week over at The Outlawz for the Saturday Paper a la Mode challenge.  I love to make cards, but a lot of times I want to do something more 3-dimensional.  I decided to make some decorations.  I've made something similar to these before and used them for pumpkins and hearts - very versatile if you have the right shape of punch or die, or if you have a Cricut or other electronic cutter that can cut lots of the same shape.

I decided to make 2 different ones just so you can see the difference if you use more or fewer cutout pieces.  The one with the beads only uses 8 pieces, and the other one uses 16 for a much "fuller" shape.  After I put them together, the one with the 8 pieces looked so sparse that I started looking for a way to fill in some of the empty space.  I have a lot of beads in my stash so started "engineering" (I put that in quotes, because I'm not an engineer and my solutions are typically not so "elegant" as a real engineer might make) a solution for getting the beads onto the ornament.  What I ended up using is 8 strips of very thin wire (one for each "slot") to thread the beads onto - the wire is bent in half, with the "bend" at the bottom, one leg running up through the center of the ornament and one leg running up through the beads, then twisted together at the top, where the twisted end is wound into a little spiral shape (looks a bit like something from a Dr. Seuss show).  Hopefully that explanation makes sense.  I used a variety of beads and configurations for some variety, but obviously you could use whatever colors and shapes and arrangements that make you happy.

This second picture shows the beads a little more close up so you can see the details.

Hopefully you find time over the next 6 months to get all the cards, decorations, and goodies created that you want to - I tend to always run out of time, but maybe now that this challenge has given me a bit of inspiration, I will continue with my "preparations".

Thanks for stopping by!  Big hugs and showers of blessings!