Rainbow Gum-Wrapper Weave Bracelet

Lately I've been seeing a lot of really neat art projects with rainbows. I love rainbows and I love the look of paint chips, plus they are free. So I've decided to create some rainbow wall art using paint chips. This post is not about that wall art. Okay, I played around with the paint chips for I don't know how long and realized that I couldn't make it work while they were in one piece.

So I started cutting my stack of chips apart, tossing the white segments off to the side. My paper cutter wasn't doing a great job cutting just the white off, or maybe I wasn't doing a great job of it. Anyway, I noticed that the growing pile of white strips had thin bands of colors around them that variegated up through the rainbow as I cut through my stack. So I'm sitting there, mindlessly cutting and trying to imagine what I could possibly do with those strips. I decided to try a gum-wrapper weave with them, like the one I did the Christmas tree garland out of. I worked through the colors, trying to keep the pinks, pinkish reds, reds, reddish oranges together and so on, but not stressing about making the order exact. The chain ended up being a couple of feet long. So, how to make it into a bracelet? I decided to use a can as my form (I liked the size of a can of baby clams. Not too big on my wrist but big enough to slip the bracelet off easily.) I wound the chain around the can and started "sewing" it together with an elastic cord. I didn't want it tight, since it is paper it needed to have some give to it. Also because I didn't stitch every single link together, it doesn't look quite as pronounced that the chains don't match up exactly in the zigzags.

There are a lot of different gum-wrapper weaving tutorials online. This one is pretty good, though it starts with a wider piece of paper than I did. It would be a stronger weave, but sometimes you just make do with what you got.

Vintage Wooden Ornament Wreath

One of my favorite things about Christmas is the vintage wooden ornaments that I was given by my mother-in-law. We have funny little gnomes that have furry beards and our cats steal them all the time. The other fun set I got from her was a neat set of spinning circus themed ornaments from my husband's childhood. I then went to my mom and asked for her old stuff. I was able to find a few miscellaneous ones from my childhood and I love the look they add to the tree. I decided they would make a very cute wreath, but I have no heart to hot glue our family mementos to a wreath, so I decided to start checking the thrift stores. I found a ton of cute little ornaments that look like they were produced en mass in Japan or China in the 60s. Perfect! I think I payed less than $5 for all of them (aided by my friend gifting me a blank wreath.) I sat down with the ornaments and removed all the strings and then started randomly gluing them on. I wasn't trying for a pattern or anything because I wanted it to look like a section of a Christmas tree. I could not get any of my ribbon to look good with the wreath and I decided to try the ric rac. Perfect! It looks homemade, and it looks like something done back in the day.