Christmas gifts – Samantha Claridge Studio

More handmade Christmas fun!

DIY Christmas baubles!

I don’t need an excuse for crafting…but Christmas is a pretty good one!

Hand-making your decorations is fun, a great way of using up craft materials from your stash and gives you something special to hang every year…handmade is always best!

Today’s DIY is a great one to do with kids as it involves lots of sticking and a wild imagination!

I had some styrene balls in my stash (you can buy them at any large craft shop). I wanted to create a modern bauble with brown paper and gold glitter to match my other tree decs, so here’s what I did…

I gathered together the craft materials I thought I might need:

Styrene ball

Velvet glitter ribbon

Metallic snake skin ribbon

Narrow cotton lace frill

Mod Podge (or a mixture of PVA and water would work too)

Scissors

Brown paper

I also ended up using my glue gun and some bakers twine

Tear the brown paper into small strips/ pieces and start covering the ball with mod podge and the brown paper. I only did one layer and just made sure there were no gaps. I covered it all in plenty of glue smoothing it down with my fingers as I went (which also means you get to peel the dired glue off your fingers later -ha!)

Make sure you stick a big pin in the bauble so you have something to hold onto and somewehere to prop it up to let it dry…I ended up popping mine into a cotton reel after much faffing!

Leave to dry for a good few hours or overnight if possible

Once it’s dried you can start decorating it. Dipping it in glitter would be lovely, but I wanted to use some of the fabulous velvet glitter ribbon from the shop!

I used a glue gun to stick it down as I’m fairly impatient and like quick results!

Continue sticking the ribbon all round the bauble until you are happy. I used a simple criss cross design, but you could wrap lots of differnt ribbons around the middle for a jazzy bauble!

I then decided to keep things simple with some bakers twine for the hanging loop. I glued this to the top and et voila!

I think this looks pretty effective and definitely matches my other Christmas decorations! Let us know if you give this a go and tag us #scsblog

Happy festive season!

DIY Christmas stocking

Embellished DIY Xmas stocking!

Over the last few years there has been a huge trend for embellished adorned, scandi and rustic Christmas stockings. We absolutely love this trend and when it comes to Christmas our motto is more is more!

When Sammy tasked me with making a stocking with some of the trimmings available at Samantha Claridge Studio HQ…I couldnt have been more excited! There is literally a treasure trove of sprakles and glitter and ribbons over on the web shop…oh my!

I decided to stick with reasonably traditional colours for our stocking but added in a citrus green for a pop of colour…

I used an old McCalls pattern (5549) as I’ve had it for years and it’s well used! But you could make yours whatever shape and size you wish using a large sock as a template!

I used some cream wool coat fabric I had in my stash, this would work well with any coat fabric or felt, in fact we have some gorgeous fuchsia and rose pink coating fabric in stock at the moment!

I cut out 2 stocking peices from the wool fabric and then started to lay the ribbons and trims on to the front (think about which way round you want your stocking to hang as which ever peice you adorn, this will be the front). This fabric does not fray so I simply used a piece of glitter ribbon along the top of the stocking so it looks neat.

Once I was happy with my layout, I stitched each row down using gold thread for extra sparkle! I used a straight stitch on some of the ribbons and trims and zig zag on others (i.e the glitter ribbons) The joy of this project is that it doesn’t matter if it looks a bit messy!