Playing with yarn & felt

Hi.  I’m Burgess.  Remember me?  I’m the Older Sister half of HicksGirls.  I’ve been MIA.  I have a 4-year-old and a 6-month-old.  They are my excuses for not blogging.  But I have been crafting!  And I am bound and determined to find more time to document my projects.  Sister was here this weekend and we went to our first craft show of the season, and that got us both in the autumn/creating/fall-decorating spirit!  I have a couple of things to share, and they kind-of lead one into another, so bear with me.

Last Christmas I came across a couple of Etsy shops that sold yarn wreaths, and I fell in love with this poinsettia one from the ItzFitz shop:

But, in the HicksGirls spirit, I thought “I could make that!”  And finally in July, I did!  Behold the Independence Day wreath!

I don’t have pictures of the project-in-process, but I’ll tell you what I did:  I took a foam wreath form that I bought at Hobby Lobby.  I wrapped white yarn around it about a zillion times to cover all the foam and get it looking the way I wanted it to.  (That’s the time consuming part!)  I secured loose ends by gluing them down with my hot glue gun.  Then I made red stripes by wrapping red yarn.  I cut different sizes of stars out of blue felt and made little star “pillows” by blanket stitching the edges of two stars together with contrasting thread and stuffing them with polyester fiberfill.  I then glued the stars to the wreath, and voila!  Independence Day wreath! 

I would LOVE to make one for every holiday or season.  We’ll see how that goes.  But, for the time in between holidays, I found a “B” at Joann’s (my married name is Brown), that I thought would be fun wrapped in yarn. 

Now let me say that this did not go nearly as easy as the Independence Day wreath.  Because of the smaller openings in the middle of the “B,” I had to make small yarn balls from my skein first, use those balls to wrap the “B,” then when I ran out of yarn, make another ball, and so on.  Also, there were parts of the “B” that could not be easily wrapped.  So I actually cut smaller bits of yard and hot-glued them to the letter to achieve the “wrapped” look.  This one took me a while (hmmm, I actually started it the week before Part 2 of the last Harry Potter film came out, back in July, because I remember watching behind-the-scenes type shows about the movie franchise on the History Channel while wrapping the letter.  Why do I remember this?  I don’t know.), and then I got side-tracked with other projects, and just finished it a few days ago. 

I added the adorable felt flowers with, again, my trusty hot glue gun.  I found the tutorial for these cuties via Pinterest on the blog From will you? To I do!  You may start seeing these all over accessories for my Baby Girl.  Love them!  This leads me to a project I started just this afternoon…Baby Girl’s Halloween costume!  I decided she should be a witch.  Again, I got this idea from Pinterest (my new obsession!  Have you discovered it?  You should!).  The baby had on a tutu, black shirt, and a small witch hat attached to a headband.  I’ve been dying to make her a tutu, so this is as good a reason as any, but the witch hat is what I’m really excited about!  I should wait until the whole costume is completed to post pictures, but I’m too pumped about how the hat turned out to wait! 

I used the felt flowers from the above tutorial, made loops with sparkly black tulle, added some sparkly ribbon, a couple of feathers…this yields one awesome baby witch hat!  I won’t post pictures of it on Baby Girl until she’s wearing the whole costume, but suffice it to say, she looks ADORABLE with it on! 

And, Sister and I have decided to make witch hat fascinators for our annual Breakfast with the Witches at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis at the end of October.  Stay tuned for those pics!  Happy Fall!