t'was the season for handmade decorations

had lots of fun this year making decorations

the last 2 years i've participated in a decoration swap - there were only 4 of us this year so i made 2 stars each - one wire and bead star with a cloisonne (?sp) bead as a feature amongst lots of wire and seed beads and one felt star - plain red on the back, yellow with a star bead/stitch detail on front edged in gold thread blanket stitch and stuffed with polyfil

on our cutest little tree (it's about 70cm high fibreoptic) you can see lots of handmade stars (3 felt ones, one is mine, one from megsie at pint and one by di - who also did the stocking and red/green paper wreath - as part of the aforementioned swap); a hand detailed house, 3 paper flowers and a blue bird by marnie of onewetpants; lots of wire/bead shapes that ally and i did together and ally's little paper/peg deorations. i did the star on top reusing the beads off some wine charms i'd been gifted by kathryn shaw (see ozebaby.com.au) before she found out we don't drink. i did buy the red balls and tinsel from coles as the first decorations of this season as greg doesn't know where all our old ones are and i didn't want to leave the tree bare for my 5yo.

the gold/pink wire and seedbead ball was done for the school tree - i shaped the wire around an inflated balloon then spent about 4 hours wrapping wire and feeding hundreds of tiny glass seedbeads onto it - each family at the school was asked to make a decoration - i think only a handful did. as we are moving ally next year we wanted to give a piece that would remind them of her - so it's gold and pink (her favourite colour); handcrafted and unique - just like our bear!