Feeling sparkly

For some reason, I started feeling very wintry and sparkly this afternoon. It has nothing to do with the weather, which was incredibly pleasant here. Usually I feel this way when there is a light dusting of snow and big flakes in the air, bundled up in a scarf and wishing for gingerbread. Maybe it was Martha did it, with her crafty ideas and wealth of wreaths and ribbons and glittery candles. Anyway, I happened to have come across a wealth of copper in the form of a discarded electrical cable, so, with a desire for candles and craftiness, I set to work.

It was simple to strip off the outer layer of protection. The inner layers are a bit more difficult. Lucky for me, not feeling up to too much effort at the moment, one strand of copper was not covered. I decided to leave the others be.

My plan was to create a candle-ier; a twisted copper hanging candleholder. Here is how I went about it...


I folded the copper length in two, and looping the middle around a door handle, pulled the ends tight and twisted them together all the way down.



I then spiraled the twist, with the loop at the top for hanging.


For a while I have had a pile of cute little tart tins in my pantry. I am sure they would be lovely for tarts, but tarts are rather fussy and it occurred to me that the pans would also make very sweet candletrays, affixed to my copper base.


So they were pulled out and, with the help of the handy glue gun (note: I used a cute little itsy-bitsy glue gun. Don't follow my example), fastened at intervals along the copper.

The spiral was bent, stairstep style, along the way in order to hold the trays flat.


Ta-da! A pretty glittery candle-ier!

I think I will tweak it a bit to hang better - the trays could use some leveling and the entire piece needs to lowering. But it has a nice warm, holiday-ish glow. Now I just need some gingerbread! Or maybe some patience.

Wrapped yarn

By far the most popular activity in my Belize art class was making God's Eyes. The first class I tried to teach had around 35 or so kids, and it seemed disastrous. The only way they seemed to understand what to do is if I went around to each, individually, and showed them on their own two sticks. I had perhaps made it to two thirds of the kids by the time the class was over.

But then I think they must have begun teaching each other, because it seemed that the next day, everyone not only knew how to do it, but were completely into it.



I had God's Eyes of all sizes and colors, all I seemed to hear was "Miss, more yarn, Miss" "I want red, Miss" "Miss I need more yarn".

This fellow took it all very seriously - he would not let me take his photograph until the large piece was finished.



To make a God's Eye:

• two sticks (we used wooden skewer sticks with the points chopped off, and later we made mini versions on toothpicks)
• yarn of various colors

Cross the sticks and tie together in the middle with one end of a longish piece of yarn.







Begin by wrapping the yarn entirely around one stick - over, under, and back over.

Move to the next point, in the direction the yarn is going, and wrap the yarn over, under, and back over.




I told the kids to repeat "over two, under one" as they worked. It also works well to rotate the cross as you go, so the point being wrapped is always pointing the same direction. Then the mantra is "over two, under one, turn, over two, under one, turn..."





To join colors, just tie the new yarn to the end of the old and keep going.

To finish, I just wrapped the yarn around the last stick a couple times and tied it off.




The second day we made these, I had the students string them together into hanging mobiles. They turned out really pretty, although it was difficult to get the kids to make crosses for the mobile structure, since they just wanted to use all the sticks to make more God's eyes.