Retreat Crafts Revealed

My weekend of crafting in the Redwoods yielded several fun projects. So at the risk of having the longest post ever, I’m sharing some of the goodies I worked on while the other ladies crafted their fantastic family scrapbooks.

Scrapper Linda helped me sort bags of buttons into different colors and I made more book & button flowers. I brought along lots of apothecary bottles and jars and created little nature specimens. Using small bits of excelsior to make nests, I turned and turned strands until they formed nice little bowls and used glue on the bottom to hold them into shape.
I glued very tiny craft store plastic eggs (found in the section where those little mushroom & feather birds are,) into the nests, then pinched and squeezed them down the necks of the narrow bottles and dropped them onto a glob of glue that I’d dropped in moments before. (I prefer clear E6000 adhesive.) If the necks were too narrow, I squeezed in the nests empty, then dropped the eggs in with glue on them. Then using a skewer I poked and prodded the nests back into shape and moved the eggs into place if necessary. (Sort of like building a ship in a bottle.) I also poked in and glued twigs and moss found outside on the ground. For some, I added tiny leaves cut from book pages and ephemera-style labels.

The tiniest is a little salt shaker topped with a paper wrap punch-cut from another book page and Mod-Podge’d on.

Another project I attempted was to sew paper into something 3-dimentional. This tiny purse was my prototype for sewing, I learned a lot of things from this, such as Mod Podge-ing both sides of the paper before sewing would defintely work best. (I had only painted the “podge” on one side of each page the night before.) Also, what parts to assemble first so you’re bending the paper less.

I made more wire bird nests using different colored oval beads taken from bracelets. Those were added to 3 old bottles I labeled.

Finally, I put together 11 more bottles with vintage images, old stamps, miscellaneous ephemera, wire or string and finished with wax seals made from my stash of vintage wax.

The set of 3 wire nest bottles and the set of 11 bottles are now in my Etsy store.