Christmas Decorations

On Thursday I was mucking about with little Miss Millie (age 11) thinking about Christmas tree decorations, and how we could make some with metal.

I know it seems slightly mad and a bit early to be thinking along those lines, but I had a couple of ideas I was keen to try out, and as it turned out Millie had a few of her own.

First I needed a bauble image, and there are 3 on this plate (Noel 6) so I chose one of those, and stamped it in black onto barnyard red metal which had been sprayed with gold glimmer mist.

Trace around the outline of the design, the flip over so the metal i wrong side up on the thick mat from the mat set . In a circular motion, puff the metal with a paper stump until it reaches the depth you prefer. Repeat this process, as this is a double-sided ornament.

Stick some humungo tape onto the back of 2 pieces of rectangular card sized slightly larger than the ornament. Fill the recess in the metal with glossy accents or a similar hard-drying glue. Press the card (backed with humungo) onto the glue filled ornament humungo side upwards. And repeat for the other 'side'. Leave to dry overnight. NB. You can move on sooner, but you just have to take care as the glue won't have set properly, but as long as the edges are secure you should be OK.

Run a fine texture wheel around the edge of the baubles, and then cut away the excess metal. Peel off the humungo from both pieces of card-backing, and then match the 2 halves together. Trim the metal further if required if the 2 halves don't match perfectly.

To hang the bauble I used copper finding from the PaperArtsy Bijouterie Collection. Use an eye pin, star spacer bead, large crimps, oval copper chain, and a lobster clasp.

Millie also had a great time with metal and glimmer mists. She lightly tapped a little gold viva precious metal colour onto green appletini metal. You could still see that the metal was green, but the gold paint lightens the colour a little and the paint helps the glimmer mist stick to the metal. Next she applied beautiful green, purple and blue shades of glimmer to the green-gold metal. The result was gorgeous. Then she stamped the tree from Nut & Meg plate 1 in archival jet black ink.

The tree was made into a metal-tape sandwich with card-humungo-metal laid together and trimmed out. To add texture to the metal, dots and a cross hatched pattern were added freestyle with a teflon tipped tool. The background is stamped with gold precious metal colour with a background stamp Xmas plate 4. The corner scroll comes from Nut & Meg plate 7.

So that was last week. Yesterday was very exciting as we had a wonderful day when my sister Emma came to visit from New Zealand with her boyfriend. She has been working for a year since finishing Uni, but she managed to win a highly sought after place at an Italian university to do a post grad doctorate in International Law, so we are very proud of her, and it was so fantastic to meet her really nice BF and catch up with all their news. Before she starts her 3 year course late September, they are off a whistlestop tour of Europe for the next 4 weeks.

Wishing you all a great weekend, hope you get a chance to enjoy some great weather and relaxation.

Leandra