Blissful Baubles

Hello all, and thank you so much for stopping by.  I'm here with my Design Team contribution to this month's Our Creative Corner challenge, A Very Vintage Christmas.  We're looking for Christmas projects created in a strictly neutral colour palette... right up my street!  And the rest of the team have come up with some gorgeous inspiration for you, so do have a look.

Some of you may remember my recent trials and tribulations creating a set of 2D Christmas baubles for PaperArtsy (I ended up calling them my Bothersome Baubles).  Well, this time, I had an absolutely lovely time playing with all my favourite things: gesso, book pages, wood and metal, twine, linen ribbon, and everything in subtle neutrals.

This time everything went according to plan, and I'm going to hold my hand up and say I love the results.  Transforming things from their original state is one of my out and out favourite things to do craft-wise, so these are my Blissful Baubles!






There are altered baubles everywhere at the moment, and I wanted to join in with the fun, so I got myself some very cheap plastic baubles (they used to look like this!) and started playing.

I'd seen a fabulous burlap-wrapped bauble over at Scrap Therapy, Evgenia Petzer's wonderful blog - if you've never been, do click on the link, and then have a scroll around too... you won't regret it!












So, for two of my baubles, that was where I started, using burlap to encase the glittery plastic as step one.














I cut some Tiny Tabs and Tags from thick card covered with Gothic text book pages and used those to decorate the baubles, along with all sorts of bits and bobs.













There are rusty jingle bells, an Idea-ology Muse Token, tiny Studio Calico stars and hearts... and more that we'll go into later!
















And, of course, a touch of gesso for that wintry look!


















Some of the red baubles got coats and coats of gesso, smooth to start with, and then textured so that they have a slight look of snowballs about them.

I used the new Idea-ology linen ribbon around one of them, creating a criss-cross patterning and tying a bow around the top.














This one got the Muse Token treatment, with a rusty jingle bell, some curly rusty wire and one of the tiniest tabs and tags with a Calico Studio star added to it.














Another had twine wrapped around its middle horizontally, and I added part of a wooden flourish and a little wooden heart, an Idea-ology Philosophy tag, some more curly wire, a pine cone, and some of these cute sparkly berries from Live and Love Crafts.











The third gesso bauble is decorated just at the top with a bow of soft burlap ribbon which I'd cut in half lengthwise as it was too wide for the job.  The lovely side effect of that is that you get lots of fabulous fraying!

And to the bow I added a little Idea-ology key, another tab and, well, you can probably do the rest yourselves!












The rest of the baubles got a layer of torn book pages glued onto them, with plenty of semi-gloss medium to keep it in place and give it a good strong sealing coat.  I love the look of this!

The decorations for these follow the pattern of the gesso'd ones.











So there's one that's criss-crossed with linen ribbon, and this time I added another bit of wooden flourish, a slightly larger pine cone and one of the tiny wooden hearts with some berries.















Here's the one with the twine tied around it's middle...













And this time it has a bundle of twigs tied with twine (like the burlap ones had), with an Idea-ology trinket pin, bell, heart etc etc etc.













And (maybe my favourite of all - though the gesso'd Moments bauble and the burlap double-hearts run it close) there's the one with the sliced linen ribbon around the top...















A pine cone, part of a flourish, and then a shower of Studio Calico shooting stars scattered across its surface.













All the gluing was done with a hot glue gun (won over at Stamping Sensations months ago and "rediscovered" in the recent house move, still in its envelope!!).  


It was a bit fiddly, but the hot glue did make life a lot easier than I was anticipating so - all in all - I've decided that rather than the previous Bothersome Baubles, these definitely count as Blissful Baubles.


I hope you've enjoyed them even half as much as I did!! 











Do hop over to Our Creative Corner to see the beautiful neutral inspiration from the rest of the team, and we'd love to have you join in the challenge too.  All the challenge details and the linky are here.

Given I used my prize hot glue gun, it seems appropriate to enter these in the Free and Easy December challenge at Stamping Sensations
And I'd also like to enter them in the Bah, Humbug challenge over at Country View Challenges.  I had planned to go for some humbuggery, but these little b*****s (that's baubles, of course, what else were you thinking?) have got me in the genuine Christmas spirit!
And these - with all my favourite things involved in the making and the act of transformation being what I most love to do - have evolved into one of my favourite makes of the year, so I'm going to enter them over at the Craft-room Challenge where they are making Time For Favourites
And I think I'm just in time to join in with Week 2 of the Anything Goes month at the Stampotique Designers Challenge

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens
Bright copper kettles and warm woollen mittens
Brown paper packages tied up with strings
These are a few of my favourite things

Cream coloured ponies and crisp apple struedels
Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles
Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings
These are a few of my favorite things

Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes
Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes
Silver white winters that melt into springs
These are a few of my favourite things

And, barring those blue satin sashes, if we assume white roses - the song would also fit in the OCC Vintage Neutrals challenge!!