Needle felt bauble with beads - The twenty-first door

Sometimes plans change.
This bauble had not been on my list, but it practically pushed itself on me by way of a lovely combed top dyed in tones of green and red that I got in a surprise parcel for a different project (when writing this, I don't know yet if that will (have) work(ed) out).
For me, the colors screamed Christmas, and I still had some of those styrofoam balls, you know, and obviously the only option was to get the wool around the ball somehow. This called for needle felting, what else?
It's true, I already did some needle felting for this advent calendar, but only shapes that I completely covered with beads, not covering something with felt.
An easy project was nice, especially I still had the last and biggest one ahead of me.
Also it can be extremely relaxing, almost meditative to poke wool, even more so if you don't have a complicated shape. Gundel on the pillow next to me, softly snoring, der Dekan on my shoulder, slightly lifted up by it with every poke, soft background noise, perfect.

However, it needed a bit more than just that, so I sewed on a variety of seed beads in sizes 8, 11, and 15 - silverlined red, goldlined crystal, and clear AB. When slowly twisting the bauble in the light, there is that touch of sparkle, really pretty.
I think getting that combed top was really a lovely coincidence.

Pokey bauble - The fourth door

I told you this would be a crafty advent calendar and that means there will not just be beads which sounds a lot easier than it is for me.
To be honest, I have never been the crafty type.
Whenever I think of crafting, the first image that comes to my mind is me sitting at the parish hall, around nine years old, glueing wooden clothespin halves together to make a coaster, and hating every second of it. If I'm not completely wrong, it was the only time I was at that crafting circle.

When browsing through YouTube tutorials for the advent calendar, however, I was glad to see a few that seemed right for my limited skills. Among them were sequined ornaments.
I didn't use a particular tutorial because the basics are actually rather easy. You take a styrofoam ball and pin your sequins on, in whatever way you like, striped, in swirls, combined with glitter or other embellishments ... or you can do it like me.

Doing it like me means that you take a small ball and pin on sequins in waves. Then when you are finished - you have to finish it or you won't bite your table later which is essential for the end result - you decide that you do not like that at all and take all the pins out again. Which takes a little time, but isn't that difficult because you have chosen not to use any glue with the pins (which you don't necessarily have to do, but suddenly it seems safer to you).

So you start all over again, but because you are an idiot, you use a bigger bauble this time, make a few stripes between the "poles" and then despair because the still empty surface seems endless. Because you have small sequins which will take you weeks to put on. Which you could have known beforehand. Doh.
At that point you may get a little dramatic and then think about ordering huge sequins. But wait! You have stars, tiny, small, and bigger ones. That will go much faster, won't it? It might have if you had taken into account that those stars have no holes which means you have to poke some into all of them first. With the tip of your scissors because you couldn't find your pokey tool, and because you only remembered now when writing this post that there is one in your needle felting box ...

This is a tale of poking.
You poke the golden stars that you try to pick out of the baggie while the silver and black ones, especially those tiny buggers, stick to your hands and refuse to come off again easily.
You have to poke the pins through the stars because the holes make it easier, but are still not big enough for the pins.
You dip the pin tips into glue and then poke them into the bauble using the back of your pliers as you still don't own a thimble.

After a while I got into a kind of meditative stupor until I ran out of stars. The forced break while having to wait for more stars to arrive was probably good for my hands and arms.
This ornament has about 5 million pins in it which makes it weigh about 100 kg, but maybe it just feels like that to me ;-) It would bring any Christmas tree down. And it's pokey because of the tips of the stars, hence the title.
It really sparkles like crazy, though. Mission accomplished, but believe me, this one will stay one of a kind.

Oh, and a little extra tip, don't store the bauble in a drawer together with something needle felted or you will picking off fluff forever!

Stash tackler ornaments - The seventh door

Few of you will remember my very first wire crochet Christmas baubles. Unbreakable, unusual, some of them still available ;-) Since then I have made different kinds of decorations, but most of them were wire knitted which I only realized after a conversation with a co-worker the other day. Why had I never tried to crochet around a bauble?
Well, that could easy be changed. I had already strung some, okay, a lot of mixed color seed beads on a copper wire and I choose black baubles for the filling as the contrast would show the difference between the two techniques nicely.

After starting the wire crochet bauble, I knew why I prefer wire knitting for ornaments. To achieve the perfect shape for your bauble, you actually work on the bauble, at least I do. That's a lot easier to do if you knit because the wire structure isn't as dense, is much more forgiving when you press it against the bauble and easier to shape, and of course because the beads are between the stitches.
In wire crochet you usually work from the inside if you don't have a flat piece and the beads appear on the outside, but try to do that if there is already a bauble on the inside! So I turned it the wire structure around after a few rows, so the beads are on the inside now, but you can still see them peek through.
The other downside is that it takes even longer than knitting around a bauble, but it definitely has a very different look and also gave me two new ideas for later some time.

Now the wire knit bauble. You see all the beads perfectly well, the look is very airy and less "messy" as you have just one layer of wire whereas crocheting is more three-dimensional because you pull the extra wire through to make a stitch.

Here they are in one picture together, so you can compare them even better. Let me add that in the right light the wire crochet bauble sparkles more because the layers of wire and the texture capture the light better. I wonder which one would win the sparkle battle, though, if I had used only silver lined beads or maybe even crystals as the beads are so much more visible in the wire knit bauble.
I also feel the temptation to see which one breaks more easily when dropping them, but the crochet bauble just took too long for that.
In the end I guess it's just a matter of taste which one you like better (let's not forget these are quite unconventional colors for Christmas baubles, too ;-)).

This post goes well with my other posts about the difference between techniques like wire crochet, wire knit, netting, and Viking knit, by the way. You can find them here, here and here.

The ninth door - a shimmer on the tree

Ornaments - they come in all colors, materials, shapes. But what do you know about the history of Christmas ornaments? Christmas trees used to be adorned with mostly edible pieces in the beginning. There were sugar figures, apples, nuts, gingerbread and marzipan. Some families still follow that tradition today. Then there came the ornaments made from paper, cardboard or cotton wool, sometimes amazingly intricate designs. In Rothenburg ob der Tauber is a Christmas museum and I really loved the vintage ornaments. In the middle of the 19th century finally the glass ornaments that we still know today were invented. Of course there is a legend to it, telling that a glass-blower couldn't afford to buy the expensive apples and nuts and therefore made his own glass ornaments in 1847. There are facts that speak against that. Whoever may have started it, though, at any rate it's fact that a glass-blower's order book from 1848 exists with an order of six dozen Christmas balls in different sizes. This was in Lauscha, a name that is not at all uncommon to lampworkers. Lauscha, a town in Thuringia, is famous for its glass-making and glass-blowing tradition. Discount store owner F. W. Woolworth imported the glass ornaments into the USA around 1880 where they became a big success as well. The Christmas ball, ornament, bauble or whatever you want to call it is still around today. Around mid-20th century in the Western countries the acrylic kind became more popular, due to the fragility of the glass variety (who doesn't remember the typical sound of a glass ornament hitting the floor and shattering to tiny pieces?), but that doesn't mean glass has disappeared from the tree. Different designs have been developed as well, with a touch of whimsy or a little more modern - and still you recognize the beloved old bauble. Check out these examples from ArtFire artisans - ornaments quilted, painted, with beads, with polymer clay, paper, even from wire or felted. Enjoy!

   

Christmas - already??

My goodness, are we really that close to Christmas already? Today my coworker told me she already has bought my present weeks ago (that's what I called prepared!), the stores don't play Christmas music, but ginger bread is offered in abundance and we just put up the Halloween decorations at work yesterday!

But to be true, I am getting ready as well. I ordered some wire a while ago (from my favorite place) and just had to play with colors. I am not done yet!
The idea developed from my ball pendants and the baskets, it grew, the hooks became bigger, I needed more hooks, I played, tried and experimented and suddenly I had a Christmas ornament I was happy with.
This is just a part of all the colors available, I'll keep you up-to-date here when adding new colors or even combinations.



And now they were featured in this great treasury, Ornament time! Yay! Thanks, Cindy!!