Christmas Ornaments

My sister came to visit for Thanksgiving and decided to stay the rest of the week (she lives over 200 miles away).  We spent Friday and Saturday together playing with craft stuff.  Our original plan was to make gifts for the rest of our siblings, but we ended up making Christmas ornaments (which may still end up being gifts for our siblings). 

I had a carton of 48 Easter eggs in assorted sizes in my closet and was wondering if we could use them for anything.  I thought we might be able to paint them, but the paint wouldn't stick to the eggs.  I tried sanding one and painting it, but it still didn't work well, then Kathy got the idea to cover them with masking tape.  The problem was, I didn't have any masking tape.  A quick trip to the medicine cabinet revealed some medical cloth tape, so we decided to try that and it worked very well (Kathy made the green ornament above and I made the bronze one below). 

We liked it so well that we took a trip to the store to buy more tape.  While we were at it, we picked up some masking tape too.  We soon discovered that the advantage of using the cloth tape is that it stretches and conforms to the shape of the eggs.  Masking tape does not so it has a bumpier texture.

For my second ornament, I decided to go for a quilted look. After putting on the layer of cloth tape, I painted each piece of tape a different color and added a design.  The colors aren't exactly Christmas colors, but I was pleased with the overall effect.

Next, I started playing with egg halves and discovered that if I stacked a smaller half on top of a larger half, I could make a bell. I stayed with the quilted look, but skipped the stitching this time.

 

 

 

 

 

While I was doing all that detailed painting, my sister was busy cranking out ornaments.  In all, she made ten to my four.  Oh well, they didn't call me 'Pokey' for nothing when I was a little kid.

Here's my fourth ornament...

Here are some more of Kathy's ornaments...

  

 

Wordle It!

For those of you who scrapbook, Wordle ( http://www.wordle.com ) is a very cool site for creating word clouds you can use on album pages.  Write a paragraph or two about the pictures on your page, paste what you've written into wordle and see what comes out.  I pasted in my entire final reflective essay from my college writing class.  Here's what it generated:

 

The more often a word is used, the larger it prints.

Here's one I made for my youngest son:

Wordle provides a variety of fonts, layouts and colors.  You can even create a custom color palette to match your page.