Christmas Ornament Exchange

 

My daughters and I signed up for an ornament exchange and this is one of the ornaments we came up with. I'm having a lot of fun with the new Tim Holtz snowflake die!

 

I cut them all out, the girls folded them and attached the ends, and I pulled my hot glue gun out of its holster and went to work. Dawn made the finishing touches since these were actually her project. (She had another project half-way done and the epoxy didn't set right, so they were ruined. Que Plan B.)

  

Dawn also ordered wooden snowflakes and had them drill a hole at the top for ribbon.

 

She sprayed them with pearly and blue colored mist and attached them to the outside of her packaging.

 

Here's a shot of her bags tucked amongst some of the other fabulous ornaments that were brought. Mine are right in front of hers, the envelopes with the rosette and Washi tape.

 

Valerie's ornaments are in the green boxes with ribbon.

She made the most adorable yarn balls with knitting needles on them!

She started with a paper mache form that came with a gold hanger attached to it already, which was a great help. She painted on the glue a little at a time and wrapped the first layer of yarn over it in a circular pattern. The second layer was applied by putting glue directly on the strand of yarn and winding it around. This was very time-consuming, but well-worth the results.

The knitting needles were made with skewers cut in half. It took a bit of searching, but she found beads to fit the tips and glued them in place.

I already posted about my ornaments, but here are the stars I made in case you missed it.

I cut my stars from natural-colored card stock using a die and gave each star 3 layers of embossing powder and hit them with my heat gun. (I may have a few fingerprints left!) The center star was so tiny, though, I couldn't hold it to emboss it, so I cut it from some pretty sparkly paper, the same I used for the backing.

I wrapped each one with tissue paper and tucked them inside little gold office envelopes I had inked up to give it some age. I put Washi tape around it to make it look like a gift then added my handmade rosettes as a finished touch. I also put a strip of Washi tape on the back. At the party everyone was more interested in the tape than anything else because they had never heard of it...can you imagine? hahaha! It was neat to be able to be excited and tell them all about the wonders of this magical thing we are all hoarding nowadays.
Here's a photo of the other ornaments from the exchange (I stole it from my niece's Facebook!). So much talent!

Reindeer, two glass ornaments with curled paper, elf, snowman, little felt Russian doll (what a lot of work! I mean, they all were, but this was pretty intricate), ceramic critters, plastic form filled with snow, and then ours. It was a fabulous ornament exchange with some pretty fabulous women.