Cinnamon bird ornaments

As I've mentioned before, the theme of this Christmas, for me, seems to be birds. Don't ask me why - I have no idea! I saw these super cute cinnamon bird ornaments in a Martha Stewart magazine, though, and I just had to make them. They are really easy to make and turn out very nicely with very minimal effort.

This is all you need to make the dough:
Cinnamon, apple sauce and craft glue.

You mix it all together,


and roll it out.


Then you cut out the templates (you can download the templates at the link I provided above)


trace around the template onto the dough and let dry for 24 hours. They mention in the article that you can bake them for 2 hours at 200 degrees in the oven. I did this for some of them and the ones I baked turned out much darker than the ones I air-dried. This affects the way the glitter and beads look, and I liked the look of the lighter dough better.

Anyways, after they're dry you use various colors and sizes of glitter and beads to decorate and voila you have some beautiful bird ornaments.






Stop by Wednesday Dec 3 to enter to win one of my favorite of these guys in my Christmas give-away #2!

Christmas ornament exchange

"It is the beautiful bird which gets caged."
~Chinese proverb

I finished the ornaments for my bloggers ornament exchange. I used a bird pattern from spool sewing and tweaked it a bit to make three fun fabric bird ornaments.

Here's how I did it:

First I downloaded the bird pattern as mentioned from spool sewing. I knew I wanted three ornament so I chose 4 fabrics, the crazy striped one to be the belly on all of them and then one for each of the 3 bird bodies.

I cut out the two pieces from the contrasting fabrics - one bird body, on the fold, and one bird belly.



Next as per the directions on spool sewing (just want to be sure I give them their due credit), I pinned and sewed the belly, first to one side of the bird body, right sides together, then to the other. Spool sewing touts this as a good simple hand sewing project, but I went ahead and carefully and slowly used my machine and I think it turned out ok.

I will mention that always starting from the tip of the belly no matter which seam I was sewing made the intersections come out quite nicely.

Next, I inserted a piece of looped gold cord so that the loop was on the current inside of the bird (which flipped to be the outside).

I found it easier to sew if the two ends of the cord were side by side rather than on top of each other.

Then I carefully stitched the bird's head closed stitching the cord into the very back edge of the seam.

You might notice that the thread I used in this demonstration picture is red, but I found it very important to use matching thread for the real deal because I liked to stuff my birds pretty tightly which caused the stitches to show a bit.

Next, I clipped the corner of the beak and turned it right side out. With the cord on the right side it made it much easier to flip the bird right side out. I found the tip of my closed scissors worked nicely for popping the beak right side out.

I then stuffed the bird and hand stitched his tail closed. I repeated these steps three more times with the other fabrics and my fabric bird Christmas ornaments were born!

But did I stop there? Oh no! I thought they needed a bit of je ne sais quoi, so I sewed on a few beads with gold metallic thread to give them a bit of shininess and flash. They sparkle nicely in the glow of the Christmas tree now. Though, I think the simple fabric birds would be quite lovely hanging on a tree as well!

Christmas theme

"A turkey never voted for an early Christmas."
~Irish proverb

Every year, it seems, I sort of unintentionally pick a theme for Christmas. It's not really that I pick it, it just sort becomes the focus of what I like in terms of decorations, handmade gifts, etc. Last year it was snowflakes. This year it's birds. It seems that something just sort of catches my eye early on, gets associated with Christmas, and then becomes the theme. So don't be surprised if you see alot about birds on here during this holiday season. :)