Almostgotit.com

Some people play faster than others, even when you put them in charge of moving Jesus’ picture around while the rest of us are Making Stuff.

That’s why we had two projects on our weekend retreat: story boxes, and tchotchke Christmas wreaths.  That’s mine, at the top, a sort of “Where’s Waldo” deal except I called it “When Pigs Fly” instead.

There aren’t any rules for making these, really.  Which is good, because hardly any of us on the retreat are good at following the rules, anyway.

First, we found the cheapest wreath forms possible.  Which you might think were the styrofoam ones, eh, except that you would be WRONG.  The wire forms were cheapest.  So some of us padded them out with newspaper and masking tape, then wrapped fabric or ribbon around the newspaper before gluing on our junk drawer and dollar store tchotchkes.

ML made this one.  She’s a professional ARTIST, it should be noted.   So please note her particularly artful use of a meat thermometer.

ML is the one who came up with the whole tchotchke concept.  She  originally suggested covering a wreath with identifiable objects and then spray-painting the entire thing (cream or white, which she felt were more updated than the gold she’d used in previous years. )

The problem was, these were so silly and wonderful after we put them together that we couldn’t quite bring ourselves to paint them.  Maybe when I pull mine out again next year, I’ll do that…

T-of-the-tiny-gold-boxes took another approach altogether.  After wrapping fabric all around the wire around the outside edge of her wreath, she pasted paper fans to the middle, topping them off with little star and butterfly trim doo-dads.  We called this one “Fan Dance,”  which also happened to be the name of one of her daughter’s ensemble performances.

After all of this whacky creativity performed somewhat under the influence of alcohol (to calm the inner critics, of course), I’ve been in withdrawal ever since, in more than one respects.