Spun cotton Christmas ornaments

I've been working on updating my Christmas decorations to go with a theme I'm considering for my tree this year. Yes, I know it:s way too early but I have to craft when I can! I thought I'd go with a woodlands-enchanted forest look and want to increase the number of fun and festive animals in the tree. My younger grandchild will be entering elementary school soon so I hope I can finally pack away the toddler-proof ornaments and start bringing out more things of fragile beauty. While searching pages on eBay for "new to me" ornaments that I just can't find locally in Japan, I kept coming across pricey antique spun cotton decorations. They really weren't catching my eye as something I could afford or feel comfortable owning, though. My decorations do have a folk art vibe though and I found way too many choices as I looked online. Eventually, that caused my husband to start wondering why the postman and parcel post delivery truck were coming to our house so often!

While exploring handmade options, I remembered that I have some off-colored felt leftover from my own kids play days. I wondered about using that for some soft animals for the lower branches of the tree. You know that spot where exploring fingers won't matter too much. I, also, started to wonder if it was possible to changed the felt color with things I had around the house. Yes, apparently, you can do that with food coloring and vinegar, rather like you can dye Easter eggs! Then, I stumbled upon some Pinterest pages that outlined how to make spun cotton decorations.

Eventually, I found some really clear directions on this page: http://belsnickle.blogspot.com/2014/08/sculpt-cotton-batting-deer.html  As I made an owl first and then a fox, I obviously didn't follow the directions religiously as these directions are for a deer. They were a very helpful basis on how to get started, though! I haven't really wanted to start buying pricey new art supplies to replenish what we have at home. Instead, I worked with what was on hand.

1. unbleached cotton quilt batting
(I had some scraps left over from a quilt I made several years back and swore I'd never use cotton batting again as it was so hard to get the tiny quilting needle through it!)
2. newspaper
3. toilet paper roll
4. masking tape
5. regular white glue
6. wire (for the fox legs)
7. watercolor (standard kid stuff quality)
8. marker for some detailing
9. hair spray

Didn't have to buy anything!

 The owl was my first creation and it came together much easier than I imagined. I cut a toilet paper roll in half and stuffed some newspaper in it to create a sense of a head and a body by a bit of bending, creasing, and general sculpting. I figured an owl would be an easy first try as the body shape is so simple. Masking tape came in handy to hold the general outline shape in place. My fingers could stuff up into the roll to hold things as I worked. Eventually, I will use the crevice to anchor the owl to a Christmas tree branch. Not really knowing how to approach things I used a biggish piece of the batting and glue and did the whole thing in one fell swoop -- head, body, and the 2 wings. Later, I went back and with a bit more batting I puffed up the chest and built the legs. I used brown and black markers to define the head colors and eyes. Then, brown watercolor to add in the rest of the color. Finally, I used hair spray as a fixative for the colors.

Next, I made the fox. Realizing that one big piece of batting wasn't the most refined approach, I used much smaller strips and pieces. Newspaper and masking tape were used for the head and basic torso shaping. Once the head and torso were completed with batting and glue, I threaded in a piece of wire for the front legs. Those were delicately covered in batting and glue. Then, a tail and back legs were done with just batting and glue. Again, black marker was used for some delicate bits of color and brown and black watercolor for the other parts. Hair spray was used to seal the colors.

I was amazed that each animal only took about a day to do from start to finish. Time was needed for the glue and water colors to dry between applications so these hot days did serve a purpose beside causing me to have my own personal sweat factory going on. All in all, I found this craft easier than paper mache' or paper clay. Tactically, the cotton has a nice feel, looks a bit furry or feathery, and was easy to mold. Give it a try!

Paper Clay Santa!

Several years back, I was experimenting with paper clay and created several snowflake Christmas ornaments. Some I gave a coat of varnish to as a finishing touch and others I didn't. With the final bit of clay left in the package, I hand modeled a Santa face.

For several years, it sat untouched in the box with the snowflakes as one of those ideas that never resulted in a finished project. But, while on a roll with making some Christmas ornaments, I took a new look at it. I got out the water color kit and gave it some color. Then, I gave it a coat of Mod Podge for some stability as I found the paper clay snowflakes that didn't get a final varnish did start to crumble after a few years. Also, water color does need something to make the colorfast. 

As the eye sockets were just indentations, I did build them up into eyes with a bit of paper-mache' technique. Then, with the help of a felt tip marker to do some delicate details it was done. One last coat of Mod Podge finished it off. 

I thought it was cute, but the grand-kids vetoed it from the Christmas tree last Christmas. Oh well, maybe they'll like it this year or next. Maybe it was too much of a reminder that Santa's eyes were on them!

Wood Cut Decoupage Christmas Ornaments

Decoupage Wood Slices make great Christmas tree ornaments!

Last Christmas I decided to organize a handmade Christmas ornament exchange with a group. Before the exchange deadline came due, I tried out several ideas and finally found the one I liked the best. It was decoupage wood slices! They were so fun to make that I made oodles of them -- enough for the exchange, enough for some special gifts to friends, and more than enough for my own Christmas tree. They won't break and were ever so cute so I wanted to make sure that my grand-kids would have plenty to put on the tree wherever they liked. 

 I found wood slices at a local 100 Yen Shop (like a dollar store). I tried to get the ones that had interesting bark -- some appeared to be birch, some had really curly bark, and all had a nice natural look. Others were round and had a light exterior wood and a dark inner core. None of them were pre-drilled with a hole for ribbon or string, though. They were a bit too small for that anyway. I was able to find several cut at an angle, which also gave them a nice look and made me nostalgic for the bigger wood sliced decoupaged pictures that people like my grandma had hanging on their walls when I was a kid.

The decoupage method is fairly easy once you get the hang of it. For most of them, I sized a print according to the size of the wood slice and color copied it. As there are no art supplies shops near me, I used hair spray as a fixative so the colors wouldn't run once I started to decoupage. For a few of them, I used some old wildlife stamps that my mother had affixed to a box she sent me many decades ago. The stamps were starting to peel off and I was planning to get rid of the box anyway so I rescued the stamps and used them in this project.

I found that gently tearing the paper, rather than cutting, gave the most natural edges to the print and made it blend in nicely with the wood slice.

Next, on to decoupaging. Back when I first learned how to decoupage in the 1970s, I used varnish. But, a couple of years back I learned about Mod Podge. It is easy to work with. So, I Mod Podged the print onto the wood slice. Waited for it to dry before moving on to adding the layers of Mod Podge. Depending on how quickly things dry and how many and heavy the coats are layered on, that step might finish in a day or two or maybe even several days will be needed.

Without a pre-drilled hole to hang the wood slices from, I found that ribbon tied and glued to the back worked fine. Finally, I used washi paper to cover over the backside with the exposed ribbon and Mod Podged that too.

My biggest challenge was that my local 100 Yen Shop kept running out of wood slices and ribbons that were suitable for the project!

Christmas decorations -- Making a dangerous ornament safe

I bought something second-hand at an online auction last winter and only some months later, when I was breaking down boxes for recycling, did I discover that the seller had included a couple of freebies in the package. What cute little Christmas angels, I first thought. My second thought was, that those sharp metal upturned arms and wings could poke an eye out!!! Ah, now I understand the freebie as the first owner probably had the same thoughts after purchase and wanted those out of their house and away from their own kids!

So, here is what I did with them, I took the outer parts of ribbon rolls and with a piece of reddish colored mesh, glued them together to form a stiff sturdy base. Then, I Mod Podged both sides for added thickness. Once dried, I glued each ornament onto  the base. 

Behold a red glow through the center when the light shines and the arms and wings are no longer lethal weapons!

Christmas decorations -- Updating a tacky plastic onion shape

I know, I know, Christmas is months and months away so I should be thinking about other things. But, that's just it, when the season rolls around again, I probably will get so busy yet again . Then, once again, I will have trouble finding the time to take care of jobs like sorting through my boxes and boxes of Christmas decorations and finding those that need some time spent on making repairs. It's just so much more fun to get the tree up and immediately start to decorate it! So, while digging out the summer fans in the storage closet, and before it gets too sweltering hot, I also decided to pull out the boxes of Christmas decorations and do a bit of re-organizing. I was aiming for finding the ones that need a bit of work on them and thinning out those that don't quite match the woodsy-foresty theme I'll be going for next Christmas, especially if they were being used more for their child-friendly unbreakable aspects than anything else. By next Christmas, at nearly 6 and 9, the grand-kids will hopefully be old enough to enjoy a few more fragile things on the tree without too great of a temptation... Hmm.... We'll see how that goes, but that's the hope for now.

Now that the Christmas tree no longer needs to be quarantined off into the coldest upstairs room, away from toddlers, last year I packed away all of the snowmen and most of the snowflake ornaments that I'd been collecting and using for a few decades. Our backyard Japanese maple trees have matured to the point that they are the focus of attention when the leaves turn and the Christmas tree will now return to the living room to sit in front of the outdoor view! But, our climate is such that from Thanksgiving up to Christmas, our autumn leaves are at their peak and with the stunning reds and orange hues, snowmen just seemed silly. So, I invested in some new decorations and created many more that should be unbreakable and embrace what's actually happening in our local climate during the holiday season. For starters, I bought a new tree topper. It's a Gisela Graham creation and just is so delicate and charming! It looks perfect with the outdoors scenery.

Anyway, in the process of re-organizing, I came across this 3-pack of plastic onion-shaped bulbs. Festive holiday colors, right? Ah, but the "gold" was just so brassy and CHEAP looking up close. It clashed with everything hanging around it. In places, the paint was scratched and chipping off too. So, I did an experiment and gave them a watercolor paint job of orange-yellow; then a layer of Mod Podge; next a layer of varnish which dried a bit sticky; so finally another layer of matte Mod Podge. I tried out a new top to the ornaments with shabby red ribbon but ended up picking it off later after it had dried. The look of these 3 ornaments is softer, with a nod toward autumn, and hopefully it will work with the other things on the tree when the season rolls around again.

One with the first coat of orangy-yellow watercolor and one as it originally was.



Finally, dried and ready for repacking until Christmas!

My heart's In It

 I have a Japanese in-law who keeps gifting me gigantic boxes of cast-off clothes. She's convinced I can turn anything into a quilt. Her confidence is a bit over zealous, though. Nope, flimsy, transparent, polyester dresses or  the like just don't make good quilting material! 

But, I did discover this front and back to something that was never completed inside her most recent box of stuff. It was way too small for me but I wondered if it could be turned into an apron for my granddaughters...      

I stitched together the 2 fabric pieces and gave it armholes, an easy open neckline, and a hem. It was blah looking, though.  The armholes seemed overly large, too.

       I decided to add on a pocket and some tie-strings. The box held some red fabric and I looked through my fabric stash and decided that I might finally be able to use the animal print piece of fabric I'd purchased some years ago.

Voila!

Granddaughter loved the piece so much she wanted to wear it as a dress!

Baking cake!

 Do you know what the most popular cake of the 1970s was in the USA? It just has to have been the Bundt cake, of course! Before that, when I was a kid during the late 1950s and all during the 1960s, my mother would spend ages whipping egg whites for Angel Food cake. Those were ever so difficult as they could collapse just from closing the oven door when peeking on their progress. They needed a special long pronged fork sort of gizmo to gently cut and they needed a special tubed pan to bake and then overturn to cool. I was never fond of Angel's Food cake.

Then, for New Year's Eve to welcome in 1976, my mother clipped a recipe for Sherry Cake and baked it. Oh my, was it wonderful! It was absolutely the best cake my mother ever baked. Browned and shaped to perfection, it was soft, fragrant, and absolutely delicious and she even sent the leftovers back with me to college after winter break. I got the recipe from her and have been baking it just about every holiday season ever since -- or at least since I got my own kitchen and fluted pan. Since I'm in Japan and things like yellow cake mixes, vanilla pudding, and lemon gelatin aren't generally sold here, I have had to get creative some years if I don't have any of those things stocked away in my cupboard from trips home. Somehow I've never had a miss with this recipe even with various changes to the recipe. 


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Sherry Cake:

1 large package yellow cake mix
1 package vanilla pudding or 1 package lemon gelatin
3/4 cup salad oil
3/4 cup sherry
4 eggs
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon almond flavoring

Mix all ingredients together and beat for 4 minutes. Pour into greased tube of Bundt pan. Bake at 350 F (180 C) for 45 to 50 minutes or until done. Dust with powder sugar.

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The last few winters when I got out my fluted cake pan, I looked at how sad it had become. The non-stick surface certainly didn't look healthy. I'm thinking about that kind of stuff more these days as I frequently cook for my 2 young granddaughters now and I don't want nasty stuff leaching into anything they eat. I covered it with cooking paper when I first noticed how deteriorated it had become. This past year I didn't even let them see the cake I baked for fear they couldn't resist. Post holiday, I usually seem to forget about the worsening condition of the pan as it isn't used often and there's always so much to draw my attention away to more pressing needs. But, I've been on a renewal of kitchen goods craze lately.  Getting a new Bundt pan before the next holiday season was on my to-do list. The age of the internet has certainly changed my ability to shop from Japan, that's for sure! My old pan was something I brought back from a trip to the States decades ago. The fluted cake pan I've been using wasn't actually even an official "Bundt" pan, I now understand, because that's a trademark name. Well, I must have known the finer points on that that at some point in time, or maybe not. I mistakenly thought all pans in that shape are a bundt cake pan. Nope, apparently they are called a fluted cake pan, or something along those lines. But, hey, thanks to Amazon.com and other sources, it's easy enough to just order a new cake pan online so I don't have to wait for a trip home. I spent ages online looking at the various designs and weighed the merits for or against purchasing an actual German bundkuchen or gugelhupf cake pan or the American Bundt pan. Finally, I decided on the original Bundt design made by Nordic Ware. It's nostalgic for me and my memories of home, after all.

Bundt cake mixes were all the rage in my final decade in the States. Apparently, the mixes are no longer sold though. How sad is that?! Now I've learned those mixes were being created between a tie-up with Pillsbury and Nordic Ware, the producer of Bundt cake pans. Both companies are located in Minnesota. Apparently, the Bundt cake is their state cake! Hmmm... I wonder if my state has a designated cake...

Next, to test it out... I looked online and found a recipe for lemon zucchini cake. I had plenty of zucchini as it's finally made its way into something Japanese farmers have figured out how to grow in this climate. I spent ages grating the zucchini and lemon, and juicing a couple of lemons. I followed the recipe religiously and baked according to the directions. The toothpick test came out clean. On to the counter to wait the 10 minutes before releasing it onto a rack to cool down. Next thing I knew the cake had collapsed! Huh?! Well, it was my first time with this recipe so maybe that was supposed to happen. The cake rocketed out of the new pan when it was time to invert it, though. Wow, what an improvement over my old pan! I waited the required time to drizzle the glaze. Next time I think I will need to drizzle any glaze before putting it on the plate, though. 

Finally, time for a coffee break and a sample of the freshly baked cake. Oh, that's one of the joys of a Bundt cake. Yes, you can cut and sample before serving it or carrying it to a potluck! It just looks better displayed cut too! 

Well, I had read that the cake would come out soft but it was ridiculously soft looking. Next, to taste. Bleh!!!! What?! It mainly had a taste of EGGS! What happened to the delicate fragrance and taste of lemon?! Yikes, it seemed under-cooked too! How to save  most of a day's labor, the price of all those ingredients, and the gas to cook it?! Back to the internet for ideas...

From what I read online, turning it into bread pudding wouldn't work as apparently that needs somewhat dried bread to absorb the eggs and milk.  I didn't find a clear answer on what to do. Sometimes a cake can be re-baked for a bit but sometimes it's a candidate for the trash bin. I ended up scraping off the glaze as I worried that would burn. Then, I sliced the whole thing and laid the pieces side-ways onto cooking paper and back in the oven they went. Hey, if it works for biscotti, it might work for a cake too...  I set the temperature for the same as it baked at and checked every 5 to 10 minutes, turned the pieces over and over again until it looked baked through. 

It wasn't as pretty the second time on the plate but fortunately my husband didn't know the headaches I'd had with the cake. He declared it the best one ever so I let him eat and eat to his heart's content. Me, heck, that recipe went in the trash. I'll never make it again! LOL