Retro Snowflake Christmas Ornament

It has been... a while.  My excuse is that life has been CRAZY busy- worked at camp over the summer while looking for a real person job, then getting that real person job, moving, beginning my first year as a teacher...  Ugh, I'm tired just thinking about it.  Now that I am not running around like a chicken with it's head cut off (quite so much...) I found some time to do some crafting.

I do feel like a little bit of a cheat doing this one because it came out of a kit.  In my defense, however, this would be the easiest kit to replicate.  All you need are:

• A small Styrofoam ball (think size of a small bouncy ball)
• About 30 pins (the ones with the pearl-like endings)
• A bunch of sequins
• Snowflake sequins for the tips
• Round cap sequins for the bottom
• Plastic faceted beads
• String for hanging, and tiny pins (or a glue gun...) to attach it.

Or you could just use this...

First things first.  Attach the string for hanging the ornament to the ball.  The kit came with three tiny pins, but you could very easily use glue.  The ornament will not be very heavy, so you could use pretty much any kind (although I'd steer away from stick form...)

Next you are going to put your objects on the head pin.  The order was snowflake sequin, four beads, then cup sequin.

Stick 'er in.  The directions recommended dipping the end of the pin in glue for added security, but as the kit didn't come with any, I decided to live on the wild side.












Continue stringing and sticking.  Overlap the cup sequin so that you cannot see the white styrofoam.  Make sure you keep an eye out for what direction your pin is sticking up or you could get some crazy looking pins (I've got a couple on it that I must have been looking in a completely different direction while working on.)

One last warning- It will get tricky pushing in the pins.  I don't know if it was just the ball I was using or if my pins began to meet one another inside.  I couldn't get some of the pins pushed all the way in.  It doesn't affect the final look of the snowflake, however, and so I wouldn't worry too much about it.

And here it is- all done.

It took me about an hour to make, but it was an hour of watching adorable puppies on Animal Planet so I don't know how much of it was due to the repetitiveness of the craft versus the constant need to pause and go, "Awww..."

Speaking of puppies, here are my own.  Well, the Scottie outside (Moose) is my Grandmother's and the Welsh inside (Tally) is my parents', but still.  This was taken at Thanksgiving.  Tally gets very possessive of her space so we tended to have one in and one out at a time.  Sadly, both wanted to be where they were not (very poetic, huh?)  We played for a while with them like this before they realized we were messing with them and abandoned us.  Party poopers.