Well, it's that time of year! Time to work on our annual, hand made Christmas decorations.
This is something I've been trying to do every year for quite some time, missing only a few years due to personal circumstances.
This year has been a bit different, in that my challenges are more physical in nature. Osteoarthritis has set into all the joints of my fingers, making finer motor control more painful. I'm losing my grip strength, and drop things far more often.
I can still do big stuff, though. Manual labour, which is something I enjoy doing, is still an option for me. Mostly, that involves gardening, but also all sorts of other outdoor chores and activities. Most recently, my big project has been building an isolation shelter for our more feral yard cats that we will have to trap to get spayed. They will need two weeks of monitoring as they recover. Using what scrap pieces of lumber and salvaged material we could find around the property, with a few items that needed to be purchased, we now have a two level cat shelter on wheels that we will be able to use to isolate any cats from the colony we are caring for. It even has a heat lamp, food bowl and heated water bowl set up in it, and the cats are already using in and getting used to it.
The down side of all this is that my hands have become very rough. I don't crochet much anymore, as most yarns get snagged on my fingers and pull off the hook, or fray. Some yarns are okay, but few yarns I'd like to use for most of the projects I'd like to be working on.
All of these factors had to be considered as I decided on this year's Christmas decorations.
In the end, it was a Pinterest suggestion that lead me to a new craft I decided to try this year. Making Singlade balls.
This project has a lot of similarities to the temari I've made in the past.
Of course, I use the materials I have on hand, so for this project, I cheated a little.
I had a 6 pack of Styrofoam balls handy, so those are the core of the balls I am making this year. I had some white yarn left over from another project, and that's what I used to wrap around the foam core, then secure the strands, the same way I wrapped sewing thread around the core of a temari project.
Here, you can see how things are going so far. Once the cores were wrapped, I found some cotton yarn that I used to divide the balls into 8 sections. This is also similar to temari, without the need to be so precise.
From there, the sections just needed to be filled using buttonhole stitch (also called blanket stitch).
With these intended for Christmas decorations, I like to include sparkling or reflective elements. I was able to include both. I had some red yarn with a silver metallic strand in it, plus a bag full of leftover bits of reflective yarn.
I've finished stitching up two balls so far. I started one in red and green, but didn't have enough this green yarn to do both halves, so the other half was done in blue.
I still haven't decided on how I will attach hangers yet. I also have some miniature Christmas decorations I might use to jazz them up a bit. For now, I'm just focusing on stitching them up.
This yarn is a lot bulkier than what is used in the video tutorial, so these do work up fairly quickly. Working with a needle and thread has proven to be easier on my hands, and the yarn doesn't have as much opportunity to snag, compared to crochet.
I do miss crocheting, though!
I'm happy with how these are turning out so far. In the future, I can see making some of these using actual scrap bits, like in the video, but with something like a bell and maybe a bit of catnip, inside. They would make great cat toys!
So that is what we are doing for our Christmas decorations this year!
How about you? Are you doing any special crafting for the season?
