Whew! Getting my Christmas in March post in just under the wire!
Last month, for Christmas in February,
I made book ornaments, and this month's project is a bit similar. I love using old book pages from cast-off tomes headed for the scrap heap to create something useful and new. Text is one of the most graphically-interesting designs in my opinion, so the
tutorial on Darling Petunia for book page ornaments caught my eye.
The blogger at Darling Petunia (I think her name is Susan, so that's what I'm going to call her!) does a great job troubleshooting the project, showing exactly how
not to do it, before presenting the best procedure for good results. So, while I will show you how I made the ornaments in my own crafting space, I highly recommend that you visit
the original post if you plan to make them for yourself!
In my Christmas crafting stash, I found these little gift tag shapes, which I used as stencils for my ornaments.
The first step is to stack up four pages of text and trace the shapes on the top page with a pencil. I used a French edition of
Don Quijote and an English edition of
The Scarlet Letter.
Then I drew a line along the middle to use as a guide for my sewing machine stitching. It is best to make sure that your center line will run straight along a line of text.
Susan emphasizes the importance of keeping your stitches inside the pencil lines you have drawn, since you will be cutting out the shapes, and do not want to cut your threads.
After you cut out the shapes you drew with pencil lines, you trim your threads on one end but use the threads on the other end to make a loop for hanging.
The final step is fanning out the paper from the four layers of book pages so that you have a nice, dimensional text page ornament for the Christmas tree!
It doesn't take too long to end up with quite a stack of ornaments. Unfortunately, I don't have a nice place to display them--like on a Christmas tree--out of season, but they will store very flat and compactly until December comes.
Merry Christmas!
Er...I mean, Happy Easter!
7 comments:
I love to work with book pages and/or text as well and very often include them in my artwork. Your ornaments are beautiful, and I would be tempted to try them as well if there weren't the part with the sewing machine.
Those are lovely, I'll have to try that
Wow. This is an exacting but pretty project that can be tweaked to make different looks. I love that!
Absolutely... CREATIVE paper project!
Thanks for sharing. ~xx
These are really pretty. What a great idea, I hope you are having a wonderful spring, Hugs Mary
Love these. Love anything with book pages.
I cut out leaf shapes from printed paper like this on my Silhouette today. Andrea, we think alike. I wish we lived closer to each other!!
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