It’s been a while since I cooked up anything new for the Christmas Design page but we couldn’t help noticing that all our previous designs were getting thousands of hits a day. We thoughts it was time to add something fresh to the site. These Christmas baubles came about as part of a family crafty day; in fact, it tells you lots about a small family business. I paid 2 daughters £3 each to make a big set of these and another daughter £4 to draw them all out for me! So I can keep paying them for their hard work, it would be lovely if you would buy your hama bead supplies from our shop at CraftMerrily Here are easy to print small versions of the patterns. I will be creating a PDF of full sized patterns for you to download tomorrow I did make a slight error in the green one of these and forgot to colours few spaces, sorry! That was me, not Maddy, she got all her ones right. I also made a couple with thin hanging holes. They will work but if you have a rectangle board make them on that and add a row [...]

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I fell rather in love with these little chaps tonight, made by a blogger I know online. She’s really piqued my interest with her use of Flesh Coloured Fimo mixed with Metallic Copper – it hadn’t occurred to me to use flesh clay to soften a metallic colour before but I can see it would work nicely. I really must spend more time with my Fimo Source: chezmaximka.blogspot.co.uk via Merrily on Pinterest I just adore them. The colour of the ‘gingerbread’ is adorable and I love the idea of painting on the decoration rather than using all clay. They are divine I’ve added them to my Polymer Clay Christmas ideas board on Pinterest, because I think they need to be made by everyone.in.the.world. They will look lovely on a traditional style Christmas tree of tied to a wreath or garland. And… no calories Do pop over to the blog for an explanation of how they are made and let her know what you think

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Owls seem to be very popular at the moment and my daughters are always asking me to draw some owls to colour in. I’ve drawn or coloured quite a few owls recently and have worked out some basic shapes (and variations) to use to form the owl. I even made a colouring sheet, so other people’s children could colour in my owls, too – in case they wanted to as much mine!   (Click on the image to link to the post on my illustration blog, where you can download the free, printable colouring sheet.) And then Merry came up with the idea to make an owl craft activity out of them. So, here you go… Owl Cut Out Craft Download the OwlCutOut and then print three copies, each onto different coloured card. Then cut out all the shapes. If you can, cut just inside the lines, so you don’t have any lines showing. You could also cut along the lines and use the pieces upside down (though you’d need to use them all upside down for them to fit). (I cut out the little owls, too – they’re there so you can see how it all fits together, but you [...]

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