Snovej Circle 5

This past week I’ve made dozens little crochet snowflakes, as well as handmade Christmas cards. I’m including one snowflake in each card as a little surprise!

As a crafter I like the touch of handmade cards. Often I would buy them from other crafters, but in this rural town I can’t find any to buy. So I made my own. I found blank , folded cards with envelopes and decided to spruce them up and include a crochet snowflake as an extra little surprise.

When it came to the sprucing up, I drew a blank. I must have looked at hundreds of cards online for inspiration. I didn’t have all kinds of fancy materials or gadgets to my disposal. As a last resort I decided to look in a few old Christmas craft books I had picked up for free from a closing library over a year ago. One of them had lots of cross stitch patterns and when I looked at the colorful charts, a lightbulb went off somewhere in my mind. Why not use the charts! After all, they’re colorful, fun, patterned little pixels printed on high quality glossy paper.

With scissors and an x-acto knife I cut out a few designs. From bigger designs I cut out shapes, like hearts, stars, and circles for ball ornaments. Some of these I gave a pixelated look by cutting the edge along the little squares.

Then I simply glued them onto the cards. They were pretty as they were, no additional decor was needed. What do you think?

Here’s one of my crochet snowflakes. I’ll post the pattern later.

As I packed Christmas presents, I also made ruffled paper tube gifts. They’re a Christmas staple in our family. Often they contain candy or chocolate, but sometimes there’s something really special. It’s a great way to make a present of a paper confirming a magazine subscription or a trip. Just roll it up, tie a pretty ribbon around and insert it in a tube from paper towels and decorate it.

I wrote a tutorial for this in 2011, but we had to remove it because after a series of unfortunate events we lost all photos on this site. I now have new photos and will repost that tutorial soon.

This update is short. Charlotte and I had a fun, and exhausting, day shopping with Lars in Minneapolis. We’re staying at a hotel overnight, and early in the morning I’ll take a flight to Florida to stay with Maria for a few weeks.

My cute kitty “assistant” Snow wasn’t happy to see me leave. She wanted to come along for some more adventures … Just look at that face and those eyes! I’ll miss her!

Reporting from Florida next week! =D

~ Marina