New Ornament Style - Wooden Spools

I have lots of variations on the decorating the wooden thread spools over the past year, so I thought I would do some for Christmas 2014.  I used finger nail lacquer to paint the spools, usually it took three coats, so it isn’t an ornament to make in an evening, but you can ‘assembly line’ the process by having several spools being made at a time.  I used both the medium and large wooden spools available through many craft stores.

I was also able to customize the spools using both scrap-booking paper and searching images on the internet.  I few I had to use my Graphic Design background by taking a couple of elements, such as the houndstooth background and over laying the Alabama “A”.  Still have a few to go, but here are the ones which have been photographed and edited.

The Alabama ornaments will be going to several friends who are fans.

The Mickey Mouse ornaments will be going to my latest god-child who just turned 2.  Have four (4) but need to re-take the red spool as well as the white spool.

 The Minions will be going to another friend who loves them.

The red spool with the musical notes on pine colored paper were sent out to one of the ornament exchange groups I am a member of.  Original was going to send the holographic gold large spools, but I forgot them at the office so I substituted the red spools.  I also have green spool with crimson paper.

The Ren & Stimpy ornaments are going to the mother of my god-child while his father will be one set of the Alabama spools.

The Doctor Who spools are for a friend who enjoys the Matt Smith years.

Still to go are some snowflake spools, both large and small.  These will be done on spools painted white and light blue.  The metal connectors will be silver-toned and I have some small snowflakes which will dangle from the bottom.

Fun with Wood

One of the themes in the exchange group one month was “wood”, had to produce an ornament which was wooden or used wood.  I took a couple of the wooden turned eggs which you can find at craft stores and used finger nail polish to create my ornament.  The polish produced a shiny enamel coating.  Using pieces of painter’s tape I created resist strips and applied several coating of the polish. 

I also used additional wood turnings to create wooden drops, again using nail polish as the coloring medium.

Have thought about doing more with the polish, but have not gotten around to it yet.