A few more makes for the Christmas market

Last week I showed some of the items I have been working on, ready for a charity market this morning. So here are the items I have made this week. For all of them my Silhouette cameo has been my main tool. 

The first two were a case of chosing some files and sizing them to fit on to purchased objects. Firstly I bought two plain eight-sided jars with glass stoppers, from a todo shop that was closing down. I lined them with white tissue paper studded with silver glitter, and filled them with Spanish chocolates. Then I down-loaded  the snowman file from My SVG Hut, and downsized it, and by cutting it twice, it fitted perfectly around the taller jar. For the smaller jar I used various files from my silhouette library. Then I found suitable ribbons to tie a bow round the neck of each jar.

Next I used two more files from My SVG Hut. On this site there was a note to say these can be resized to suit your project, but we recommend that you do not cut them smaller than 7 x 7inches. I made them less than half that size and they cut beautifully. Even the tiny stars and snowflakes cut perfectly. I love my silhouette when it works with me like that! I used transfer tape to place them on to round mirror plates with clear beaded edges, and sold each one wrapped with a silver candle with a blue bow on it. It is almost impossible to get a good photo of a mirror, but I wanted to show the detail in these designs.

The next two files I used came from a designer I have not used before. Her shop is called Etceteras4U. I saw some of these made up on a Facebook page, and just had to have a go. The ones on the left are made from twelve little flower shapes, again cut on my silhouette. They slot together, which is a bit fiddly, but I guess the mathematician in me, helped me to understand how it would work. As a child I made  a big collection of polygons (solid shapes), and I loved their names as well as their shapes. This is based on an icosahedron, which is made up of twelve identical triangles, and that is how this bauble fitted together. There was no gluing involved. Once the last pair of sides are locked into place, the shape is very stable. I then used a long crochet hook to thread some beads on a string, and then pull it through to add some more beads at the top, and make a hanging loop. 

The one on the right is made from just three strips of card, perforated at the circular folds, and then just linked together. Again, it needed a little patience to get it right, but I love the shape that results from it. Again I used my crochet hook to add the tassel or ribbons, some beads and a hanging loop. I liked the red one when it was made, so I had another go using some ancient bright pink mirri card, and it also worked well.

I have been asked to do a workshop to make these at my Wednesday sewing group, so I will try to get some cut out before then. In the same shop that is closing down, mentioned above, I bought some mirri-card. It was their final days and they were nearly giving things away. They had packs of huge sheets of mirri-card, bigger than A2, that's more than 4 sheets of A4 card, with six sheets in each pack, and they were just 2€ a pack, so I bought a bronze-red pack, a blue pack and a green pack. That should make quite a few ornaments for us, and leave me with enough to keep me happy for years!

My final make was a last minute effort but I am so glad I did it. I bought this file a few years ago, and I can't remember where from. It is called a mindscape, and these images used to belong to Inkadinkadoo stamps. I am not sure whether the cutting files are still available, but I believe someone shares them via pinterest. I was too intimidated to even try cutting it when I first bought it, but having used vinyl quite a lot now, I really wanted to have a go. It wasn't perfect first time, and I had to redo parts of it. Then it was a nightmare to weed out the unwanted bits. Next I found a shadow frame that I bought at The Range on my last UK visit, and cleaned the glass ready to transfer the cut vinyl. I made a major mistake then. I have a very large roll of transfer tape which I hate, but I can't afford to discard it. It is much too sticky, so before I use it I have to wrap it around my arms, or pat it on a towel. Do this too much, and it won't pick up the image. Do it too little, and it picks it up but won't let go of it. And that is what I did with this. So I had to sit with a pricking tool, carefully easing each tiny section onto the glass, and then making sure I didn't touch it again with the transfer tape or it would pick it up again. But patience was rewarded and I finally got the image transferred. Then I placed some very loosely woven linen with gold glitter through it, behind the glass, and some pale yellow vellum behind that. It looked really pretty too.

Don't you just love that image? Look at all the tiny animals, birds and people that are used to make up the main picture. For the final step I stapled a set of ten LED lights across the inner frame so they shine through the vellum when they are switched on. They just look like spots of lights in this photo, but the effect is very nice in real life, and I like that it looks good all the time, with or without the lights on.

I actually sold this at my market this morning, so now I will have to make another one, because I want one for myself!!

For the jars and the candle plates, I used up a lot of tiny pieces of vinyl, and the yellow bauble's twelve elements were also cut from scraps of matching card, so I am linking this up with Pixie's Snippets Playground.