Small Xmas project IV: Nativity scene ornament/WP IV: Baumkrippe

If you happen to have a plastic laminator at home, this is a funny way to keep your kids (and even yourself!) happily entertained while waiting for Christmas ...!

Draw - or make your kids draw - (well, I found my pictures in a magazine) - the persons, animals and items needed for a nativity scene, cut them out, decorate them with sequins and glitter glue, let dry and then put them into the plastic laminating pockets with a bit of space between the figures.

When you've laminated them and cut them out once more (leaving a bit of plastic all around the border), punch an eyelet ring at the top and add a bit of string to hang them.

Leaving you with this for now, I wish you all a very MERRY CHRISTMAS!

(German summary: Mit einem Laminiergerät und gezeichnete Krippenfiguren - vielleicht noch etwas Glitzer und Pailletten - läßt sich ein recht lustiger Baumschmuck machen! Und ganz herzlich: FROHE WEIHNACHTEN!)

Fusing plastic/Plastik schmelzen

What I've been experimenting with lately is: fusing plastic.

Basically, what you need are plastic bags, a pair of scissors, an ironing board, an iron and some parchment paper.

Place your ironing board where you have a good ventilation (there could be fumes), cut the bags into flat sheets (cut off handles, bottom and one of the side seams), sandwich three layers of plastic between parchment paper (to protect iron and ironing board), put your iron on a medium heat and keep the iron moving on the sandwiched layers for about two minutes - turn the 'sandwich' and repeat from the other side as well.

Different kind of plastic bags behave differently, so you will have to experiment a bit with the heat and the time you keep ironing. What you want to achieve is that the surface of the bags is melting to the point of being fused - without shrinking too much or producing holes in the plastic - adjust the heat accordingly.

Let your fused sheet cool down, tear off the upper parchment paper gently and decide whether to add strips of new plastic here and there for hiding holes or wrinkles, for reinforcing or just for design reasons.

About 3-6 layers of plastic are to recommend - the thickness depends on what you want to use it for.

I decided to sew a fancy wallet, or money-bag, out of my fused plastic, using a ebook-pattern I bought from 'ki-ba-doo' at DaWanda (similar to Etsy) a while ago.

The fused plastic is very durable - still you can sew it like a fabric, using velcro strips or snap fasteners for closure. I think it's quite a cool material to work with ;-) and there are certainly a lot of projects I can think of using this ...!







(German summary: In der letzten Zeit habe ich mit dem Schmelzen von Plastiksackerln experimentiert - ein cooles Material, das sich wie Stoff weiterverarbeiten läßt und gleichzeitig sehr strapazierfähig ist! Wichtig: gute Belüftung und unbedingt das Plastik zwischen Backpapier legen, um Bügeleisen und Bügelbrett zu schützen!)

Recycling bag and plastic jewellery/Recyclingtasche und Plastikschmuck

I'm in the mood for recycling again ... besides all the well-known reasons why this is a great thing to do, it sparks the imagination!

This is a small round shoulder bag, made out of tiny scraps of different sock wools which I found in my stash.

I started with the bottom, crocheting a round piece, then I turned it and went on crocheting upwards, without doing any more increases.

I added four button loops on the last round, turned the top down to make the bag more sturdy and sew on some flower buttons, so I can close the bag if I like to. As the shoulder strap has a button hole on each end, I can unbutton the strap and use the bag as a table container if desired as well.



And this is 'plastic fantastic' - a simple summer necklace to wear on the beach with the swimming gear, for instance:



I crocheted a long necklace with a thick, multicoloured cotton yarn, then I took a dive into that box with toy plastic beads which my daughter had sorted out - and I had kept in my stash a while for some reason :-) - and added these by crocheting another round onto the cotton necklace, this time with some of that variegated embroidery yarn.

As I still had more of the thick cotton yarn, I went on by knitting two circular necklaces in stockinette stitch, letting them curl up to a kind of rope:



And the colourful combination of these necklaces could be quite an interesting piece of summer jewellery, don't you think?



(German summary: Aus vielen kleinen Sockenwollresten habe ich eine 'Topftasche' gehäkelt - und aus dem Kaugummiautomaten-Plastikperlen meiner Tochter und dickem Baumwollgarn noch einen bunten Strandschmuck gestrickt und gehäkelt. Recycling fördert die Fantasie!)