Paper party

I have been a super busy Christmas Elf lately. Here are a few things I have been working on - animal Christmas cards, and an engagement card.

CRAFT DIY - Cabochon Hairslides

I love things that sparkle, and things that are unusual. When I am shopping I immediately go for the things that are new and exciting, and generally revolve around animals. When thinking about Christmas gifts I knew I wanted to hand make some, and looking through my craft stash I found some snowflake and star cabochons (flat backed sparkly things!) and thought they would look cute on hairslides. I also had some wooden cow and strawberry embellishments that I thought would look good too. Again this is a really simple craft - if you can glue and stick then you can definitely master this!

 Supplies needed:

• Selection of hairslides
• Selection of flat back gems / embellishments
• Extra strong glue!

Step 1: Gather your supplies!!

Step 2: Glue your embellishment to your slide. Make sure you know which way you want your embellishment to be facing if it can only be one way up (the cow!) but it doesn't matter for the star etc.! Follow your glue's instructions for the strongest fixture. I added a small amount of glue to the hairslide, then loosely attached to the embellishment. After about 5 minutes the glue went tacky, so I firmly pressed the slide and embellishment together to ensure a secure bond!

Step 3: Let your hairslides dry without being disturbed

Step 4: If like me, you are making these for gifts, you can jazz them up by putting them on festive card which makes them feel a bit more professional than having to wrap them up loose. I just cute some pieces of card, and trimmed them after placing the slides on. Yay for candy canes!

Hope you enjoy this little tutorial! I think my favourites have to be the snowflakes - going to have to whip some up for myself!

DIY Love - Christmas Party Ideas

I have the DIY bug at the moment! And thankfully so do a lot of other bloggers, providing me with endless ideas and inspiration! Today I am going to show you a few links of what I am loving, and will hopefully get around to doing.

Funkytime Holiday Magazine

I have a lot of respect for Funkytime. The amount of work and effort that goes into these magazines is amazing, so I was beyond pleased to see the new holiday edition went live today. There are so many ideas in here, am most likely going to have a go at the glitter cups and glitter place settings for my upcoming secret santa party with my friends. Go take a look, you won't regret it.

Honesty WTF DIY Surprise Balls

Honestly WTF is another site that constantly provides amazing quality tutorials, and inspirational photographs. In the summer I was addicted to Erica's bracelet tutorials, spending hours in coffee shops with my friend whilst making bracelets. These surprise balls are amazing, I can't wait to make these for my upcoming Christmas dinner with my friends! Just need to get my hands on some crepe paper and let loose at the supermarket / toy shops. I love how brightly coloured these are, they are going to look fantastic at the table, maybe even as place settings.


I hope you enjoy these links, please share any Christmas craft links you find, I love looking at things other people have made!

Accidental Manicure

I painted my nails in a gorgeous shade of polish from Kiko Milano (Nude 372) and as always with Kiko, I  was very happy with it. But when I was painting jar lids for a storage project, I accidentally improved it!

I think it looks kind of cool! Shame it was already chipping so it didn't last long. But I wouldn't be opposed to pairing my nail varnish to my art project in the future :)

Decoden phone case

Recently I updated my Iphone's cover as the last one was getting a bit worn. I used plastic cabochons in pretty pastel colours to decoden a plain hard iphone cover. This is a method from Japan to basically glue decorations onto things like phone cases, mirrors, nintendo DS's etc to make them more pretty! This is the fourth case I have made for myself, in the past I had an Alice in wonderland theme, a winter owl theme, and a little mermaid theme. I also made a Hello Kitty one as a gift.

This suits me best as I see a lot of phone cases to buy that are pretty, but I like the idea of having something noone else does.

This isn't a step by step DIY but it should be pretty self explanatory - get a clear hard case to fit your phone (I got mine from Amazon), and then use a strong adhesive for plastics (mine is called Deco Princess which I got from Etsy), and get gluing with your cabochons (mine came mostly from Etsy and bits and pieces from craft stores I have picked up)! It is very easy to do - it can just take a long time! A good helper is if you have a tool like this rhinestone picker to make it a bit easier and quicker to place your cabochons.

Let you imagination run wild with whatever you want to depict with your decoden, or search places like Etsy for inspiration :)

 For this case I used pearl flat back cobochons from etsy, the flower and bluebird were from Paper Valise, and the stickers are from Janetstore and feature San-X's raccoon character Kireizukin.