Quilled Jewelry

I’ve blogged before about my new favorite craft – quilling.  Since then, I’ve made some more jewelry…

These were a gift for someone.  I might need to make the chandelier-looking ones in the lower right-hand corner for myself.

These are all for me.  🙂  I wear the pink & black circles one a lot.  The color of the flowers don’t really match anything I own (um, duh, think through your colors before making yourself earrings!), so I don’t wear them often.  And I just made the yellow ones a few days ago, but I already love them.  They look better in person.

I branched out to pendants too.  I got the idea for the bluish one from this blog post, but it came out my own way.  Again, looks better in person.

And just for fun — here’s a pillow I made Thursday from an old t-shirt!

I do love cutting up old t-shirts.  🙂  This is all handstitched, so it’s not fabulous, but it’s ok.  It was really easy to do.  BTW, if you ever find yourself in the Traverse City area (which I highly recommend in itself), I highly suggest hitting up the Cherry Bowl.  🙂

– Jill

Duct Tape Bouquet

I have a craft program coming up next weekend involving duct tape.  Teens can make a wallet, tote bag from a t-shirt, or flowers!  The flowers are made with pencils as the stems, so they’re useful too!  I love them and always get compliments and questions when I use them in public.

 

Kinda dark, but I hope you can still see them.

the bouquet

It’s a very easy & pretty cheap craft.  The duct tape can be a little pricey, but you can probably find coupons or just buy a few to start with.  If your pencils aren’t green to start with, you can wrap green paper around them if you want to.

To make the flowers, start with a strip of duct tape about 2 inches long.  Fold one corner toward the center, then the other, so it forms a point with a strip of about 0.5-1 inch of the sticky side of the tape visible along the bottom.  Wrap the sticky part around the end of the pencil with the point at the top.  That’s one petal.  Repeat as many times as you want.  After a few tight ones, it’s a good idea to wrap loosely, starting at an angle and pulling out a big.  That helps your flower open up.  Then when you’re almost done, wrap some more tighter like normal.

Don’t get discouraged if yours doesn’t look fabulous at first.  It takes a little practice to figure out how tight or loose to make the petals and where to place them.  But really, I don’t think they can look too bad.

If you’re having trouble visualizing my steps, check out this website.  They have very helpful photos for each step.  🙂

– Jill

Two Bat Dances

1. Bat Dance by Prince

2. Bat Dance that I considered one of the greatest songs ever written, and thus I co-created a dance to it and performed it for my 3rd Grade class after recess the following day. I think we wore matching turtlenecks and black strechy-pants…

Click here to listen. You won’t regret it.

Dracula Wallpaper by Edward Gorey! I took this picture at his house--maybe I will post on that later 🙂

Bats are takin’ over, that’s a fact.

-Amber

Quilling

I have a new craft.  One of my coworkers taught me how to quill.  I love it!  Basically it’s rolling paper into shapes.  Looks hard, but it’s totally not.

The easiest way to begin is to make snowflakes.

They work very well as ornaments.  Really these are just shapes (teardrop, scroll, marquis, etc.) put together.

Then I moved on to making earrings.

I love making earrings!  These were all for a silent auction my best friend was running.  They were pretty popular.  And they’re really pretty easy to make.  The flowers turned out better than I expected.  These are all just paper and glue.  I’ve been looking for a spray or something to make them waterproof because the ones I see sold on etsy all say that, but I haven’t found any.  I’ll probably make some more soon.  I’ll post pics when I’m done.  🙂

– Jill

Chihuly Art

Last month when I was in Florida, my family and I visited a permanent art collection by Dale Chihuly.  He creates glass sculptures from freeblown glass, and WOW are they amazing.

Gorgeous!

 

He does all kinds.  Objects like this to create huge sculptures.  Glass baskets.

This was one of the ones on sale! For hundreds (or thousands?) of dollars. 😦

Seaforms

Those are just a few.  He’s incredibly diverse in what he makes.  And they are all gorgeous.  I think my favorite might be chandeliers.  If I had several thousand dollars that I could throw around for art, I would buy one in a heartbeat.

Located in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London

Close up

 

I love sculptures.

Please keep this in mind when you win the lottery.

– Jill