ribbon – 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!

Festive fun wrapping

Beautiful modern gift wrap inspo!

It’s that time of the year again, whether you are an organised wrapper or leave it until the night before, we have found some fun inspo to make your feastive wrap more unique and eco-friendly!

There is a trend for Christmas wrap that isn’t traditionally xmassy (reds, golds, greens etc) so you can get away with using paper you may have already and jazzing it up with stickers, pom poms and other trims and ribbons…really your habby stash is fair game!!

I love the look of brown paper with neon and also beautiful marble paper…maybe you made some this summer when it was all the rage and never knew what to do with it…I certainly have! It’s perfect for gift wrapping, cards and tags…the possibilities are endless!

I’ve been trying to think about more sustainable ways of wrapping my gifts this year. So much paper gets wasted and it was normal in our household for Mum to sit with a black bag open ready for all the discarded wrapping paper when we opened our gifts on Christmas day…it makes me cringe to think about how wasteful it was!

Pinterest is always a go to for fun creative ideas…I don’t need to tell you that! So I’ve been having a browse to get some inspo for this years gift wrap…for me it’s all about using what I already have in the house, recycling papers/ fabrics where I can and using up some of my endless craft supplies to create beautiful gifts!

I love the idea of fabric wrapping and also using brown paper and stitching it…I have lots of brown paper laying around for crafting with so I may as well use it rather than going out and buying specific ‘Christmas’ paper!

What are your wrapping plans this year?

Whatever you do this Christmas, have fun with it and if you can use what you have and re-purpose and re-cycle where possible then fantastic! But, if you do need any new trimmings…we’ve got lots available in the shop and they are not just for Xmas 😉

bow brownpaper christmas christmas decorations eco-friendly gift wrap inspiration pompoms re-use ribbon stationery stickers sustainable wrapping xmas

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!