The Five Minute Wreath- Halloween

Oh, Martha Stewart... or I guess Martha's Minions who craft for her magazine... you always come up with stuff that is so simply obvious, but clearly not obvious enough for me to invent on my own... and then leave me kicking myself for not thinking of it first!


Take this cool black Halloween door decoration featuring slithering snakes on a grapevine wreath, for example. I'm actually kind of surprised there's a tutorial for this, it's so simple!

Anyways... I loved it, so I decided to make my own. I ordered a bunch of rubber snakes on Amazon.com: a 12-pack of 36" snakes and a baggie of little 6" buggers. The grapevine wreath was from Michael's. And this is all I needed...


So, basically, all I did was weave the snakes in and out of the grapevines, starting with the big ones. They were more coiled than I expected, so they fought with me a little while I was trying to stretch them out, but they keep their shape nicely once they were adjusted. I gravitated towards the black and green snakes I guess, and ended up using four of them. Then I added the little guys, intertwining them with the big ones and making them all slithery-like.




Now, the original plan was to take the whole thing out back and give it a coat of matte black spray paint like the original Martha wreath, but once I took a good look I actually really liked the green snakes. Perhaps if I get a chance I'll remove the snakes (they're not glued in or anything), and paint the grapevine black, then put the snakes back in. Maybe. If I feel like it.


And that's my 5-minute crafty tutorial for October. :) Simple, easy-peasy.

The fun part is that I have plenty of snakes left over! I could make two more wreaths... perhaps I'll try a painted one next. Or maybe there's some other fun crafty thing to make with rubber snakes?...


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Football Blanket Crochet Chart

Image
Here is the chart I worked off of for the football blanket... it is sized for a baby afghan, about 36 by 48 inches, but the chart can be easily modified to make it bigger. I worked the entire blanket in double crochet, and the white laces in the center were made with the tapestry stitch, in which the color not being used is carried across the top of the work and the stitches are made over it, concealing the color. Here's a pretty good tutorial for the tapestry stitch, although as I stated earlier, I did all double crochet for this project, but the concept is the same. For this particular blanket, I used five balls of Bernat Waverly yarn in brown, and almost a whole skein of Red Heart Super Saver in white for the lines and laces. I believe I used a size J hook, which made the project go nice and quick. Adjust the size of yarn and hook to fit your needs- everyone crochets differently! Happy crocheting! :) Update: if you love this football blanket, check out my football
Read more

Temperature Record Cross Stitch

Image
I tried telling people years ago that cross stitch was cool again... and I WAS RIGHT! Pay no attention to the random pet hairs... I'm in this crazy cross stitch group on Facebook that features non-traditional subject matter, from naughty words to feminist themes to potty humor and beyond. While I don't consider it my style to be crass or subversive, I do appreciate the modern approach to a very old craft that is normally associated with "grannies" (not that there's anything wrong with that, either). This group has introduced me to a variety of interesting new project ideas, including the concept of a temperature stitch. Essentially, each day's high and low temperature are recorded in different colored stitches to provide a really interesting visual of our climate and seasons. This whole idea has my head spinning around ways to physically represent climate change in artsy-crafty form by going through the last hundred years and stitching a huge collecti
Read more

Kaffe Fassett Jelly Roll Jam Quilt

Image
Here it is! I tried something new with this quilt, and I'm not sure I was 100% successful. The binding was unusual for me. I normally do the whole 2.5" strip, hand-sewn binding thing, but I wanted to try using the backing as the binding this time to keep it simple. I LOVE this backing fabric ; it's so soft, and it tied in so nicely with the color scheme of the Kaffe Fassett "Tides" jelly roll. I have noticed though, that this particular fabric shows a lot of poke holes, so be careful with pin placement and try to get your seams right the first time around. I worked really hard to turn my edges under nicely and pin well, at least every 2 inches. Unfortunately, as I kind of  suspected, some of the loose ends bulged out in between the pins as my presser foot went over them. Now that I've washed the quilt, I can see that I need to do some seam ripping to fix a lot of little peeks of batting and frayed edged. Sad face. I also noticed tha
Read more