Glass Block Snowman

Glass Block Snowman

Materials used:

• 1 glass block
• black felt
• white felt
• black sharpie
• orange felt
• fogging spray paint
• 1 winter hat (make sure it is big enough to fit over the glass block)
• strand of 25-50 white lights
• glass drill bit

Clay Pot Reindeer

Clay Pot Reindeer

Materials Used:

• 1 small clay pot
• 1 wooden knob
• black sharpie
• 1 small red pom-pom
• 4ish brown pipe cleaners
• brown acrylic paint
• sponge paint brush
• hot glue gun

Clay Pot Snowman

Clay Pot Snowman

Materials Used:

• 1 small clay pot
• 1 wooden knob
• 1 foot of blue ribbon
• 2 blue pom-poms
• black sharpie
• 6 inches of tin wire
• orange sharpie
• white acrylic paint
• sponge paint brush
• hot glue gun

Clay Pot Mrs. Claus

Clay Pot Mrs. Claus

Materials used:

• 1 small clay pot
• 1 fancy coffee filter
• 1 red pipe cleaner
• red felt
• 1 foot of thin black ribbon
• black sharpie
• red acrylic paint
• white acrylic paint
• sponge paint brush
• a handful of cotton balls
• 6 inches of thin wire for the glasses
• 1 wood knob
• hot glue gun

Clay Pot Santa Claus

Clay Pot Santa Claus

Materials:

• 1 small clay pot
• 1 red pipe cleaner
• 1 silver pipe cleaner
• white felt
• red felt
• black felt
• 1 small red pom-pom
• 1 small white pom-pom
• red acrylic paint
• peach acrylic paint
• sponge paint brush
• black sharpie
• hot glue gun
• 1 wood knob

Instructions:

    I started by purchasing all of the supplies listed above.  Scrap felt pieces work great for this project because it doesn't take very much felt to make.  

1. I first was able to purchase the round wood ball for the head at Hobby Lobby in the wood section.  The knobs have a flat side to them and it makes it really easy to attach it to a clay pot.  They come in a pack of four, which works great if you want to make more characters.  I made a Mrs. Clause, snowman, and reindeer as well.  You can check those out on my Pinterest page or my blog.  

2. I purchased the small clay pot at Dollar Tree.  They also have small ones at most craft stores (Hobby Lobby, Joann's, etc.). The key is to make sure that the bottom of the pot will fit the flat part of the wood knob.

3. The wood had a little bit too much wood design in it, so I started by painting the wood knob with a light peach acrylic paint.  You can choose whatever paint color you want to get his complexion how you would like.  After painting the knob, I painted the clay pot with red acrylic paint.

4. Once the paint dried, I took the clay pot and placed it upside down.  I then took the red pipe cleaner and glued it across the top of the clay pot.  If you use a smaller amount of glue, it will be easier to glue on the head.  Once the pipe cleaner is in place, you can cut down the sides, if needed.  I also rolled up the ends so that they looked more like hands.

5. Next I hot glued the wood knob on top of the clay pot.

6. I cut out a strip of felt to go around the bottom rim of the clay pot.  You may want to measure the width so that the felt strip fits correctly.  I hot glued that piece onto the pot, placing the seam in the back.  Then I cut out a strip of white to go horizontally down the middle of the front of the clay pot as you can see in the picture.

7. Next I free handed a mustache and beard for the front of Santa.  I started by drawing out a design on paper and sizing it to him.  Once you have a design that you like, you can trace the pattern onto the white felt.  Once again, I used hot glue to attach the mustache and beard.

8. For the nose, I used a small red pom-pom and just cut the puffiness down with scissors so that it was a smaller, more defined nose.  Then, I hot glued the nose onto the mustache.

9. Next I cut a strip of black felt and glued that around his middle for the belt.  I found a sliver pipe cleaner to make a buckle out of and hot glued that in place as well.

10. The hat was the most difficult part of the whole project.  I started by fitting a strip of white felt to the spot on his head where I wanted the hat to sit.  I wanted the hat to be able to come off, so once it was sized, I took the felt off his head and glued it together to make a loop.  For the red part of his hat, I used paper to free-hand a design.  I kept cutting it out and fitting it to the white loop to make the correct shape of a Santa hat.  I wanted the tip to come together enough that I could glue the white pom-pom on the end.  After a little trial and error, I was able to come up with a design that worked.  I cut out the pattern out of the red felt and hot glued it together into the white loop.  It may require a lot of modifying and fitting to his head.  Thankfully, it didn't take too long for me to figure out.  Once it was sitting correctly on his head, I took the white pom-pom and glued it onto the tip.  If you want his hat to be able to stay on, you can just put a few dots of hot glue on the sides of his head and tag it in place.

11. The final step was to draw the eyes onto his face.  I just used a black Sharpie to do my eyes.  I very lightly drew them with pencil first and then traced it with the Sharpie.

Thank you so much for checking out this project!  It was a really fun one to make!  If you liked this project, you can check out my other Christmas clay pot characters.  I also make clay pot characters for most other holidays, so check out my blog to see many others!

A Week of Christmas

A Week of Christmas

Thank you for everyone who showed support during Thanksgiving!  Because of how much you guys liked the Thanksgiving crafts, I have decided to do a shortened version of my Thanksgiving posting party.  Starting on December 16th, I will post on my blog once a day for that full week.  The last day of posting will be December 23rd, the day before Christmas Eve.  I'm so excited to post some of my most recent projects!  I had so much fun doing them!  As always, you can bet there will be some clay pots involved.

Thanks again for your support!  I will see you all on December 16th as the party begins!

🎆JULY: Clay Pot Uncle Sam

Hello everyone!  It feels so good to be back!! It turns out that being an adult is quite a busy job and sometimes you don't always get to do everything that you want to.  It's almost been 6 months since my last post and I am really excited to begin another season of projects.  Although I am a week late, I thought it would be fun to share my Fourth of July project.  As you know, I am quite obsessed with clay pots.  One day, I searched for July 4th clay pot crafts and a post from The Muddy Princess popped up.  It was a cute Uncle Sam clay pot decoration.  I loved this idea and decided to put my own spin on it, making it a full Uncle Sam instead of just his head.  I hope that you enjoy this post and that it can creatively inspire you!!

Items used for this project:

• Red, White, and Blue Ribbon
• 4 small clay pots
• 2 medium clay pots
• 2 medium clay pot bases
• 1 empty regular aluminum can (well cleaned out)
• Black Sharpie
• Durable White String
• 2 Silver Pipe Cleaners
• Small piece of black felt
• White felt
• Red, white, blue, and tan acrylic paint
• Spray paint sealant
• Hot glue gun
• Hot glue
• Scissors
• 1 toothpick
• Pencil

The Body

For the body, place the clay pot upside down.  Use masking tape to tape off the bottom trim.  Also use tape to tape off a upside down triangle at the top for the white paint.  Paint the part not taped off red, as shown above.  It is important to remember that when working with clay pots, you often have to paint a few layers in order to hide the orange color of the pot.  Once the red paint has dried, put tape over the top of the red paint.  This will allow you to paint the bottom trim blue and the top triangle white.  Once the blue and white are dry, use a pencil to sketch out the collar and front of the suit.  I even put star buttons on the front.  Awkward confession, I accidentally put the buttons on the wrong side, so I decided to add buttons on the other side, too.  I need to paint over it and just haven't gotten to it.

For the bow tie, I went to Walmart and bought like 2 inch thick red, white, and blue ribbon.  I cut a piece about 5 inches long.  I folded the two ends of the ribbon to the center and glued both ends in the middle.  Then, I used my fingers to pinch the top to the bottom and wrapped a silver pipe cleaner around it.  Make sure to glue the pipe cleaner so that it stays put.  This may not make a ton of sense, but maybe looking at the picture below can help a little.

Clay Pot Snowman

⛄ JANUARY: 
CLAY POT SNOWMAN  

Hello, and welcome back!  Since it is January and all the holidays are over, most people have all their decorations down and are now wondering what to put up next.  This post is all about one of my favorite January decorations.  I made this snowman about a year ago, and because of that, I don't have any step-by-step pictures of how this one was done.  So, like always, if you have any questions, please leave them down in the comments below.  I will try to get better pictures soon and update this post.



For this project, I used:
- 2 medium sized clay pots
- 1 medium clay pot base
- 4 small clay pots
- about 30 cotton balls
- a large, blue pom pom
- a medium, orange pom pom
- white felt
- black felt
- thick, blue ribbon
- 2 small, black buttons
- hot glue
- white string
- white acrylic paint
- black acrylic paint
- sponge paintbrush

Start by painting all but the clay pot base white.  On one of the medium pots, paint the top lip black, like you can see from the picture.  Also paint the base black.  Glue the base to the medium clay pot with the black top.  Then, thread up 2 strands of string up through one of the all-white pots.  either loop it up on a toothpick that's on top of the pot, or just pull it through the hole in the pot and glue it where the head will eventually be glued on.  Then, take one long strand of string and make sure it can go all the way from one hand to the other, being glued where the head will eventually go on.

To put on the hands, pull the ends of the string through the whole in the bottom of the small pots, pulling enough through to tie a knot.  Tie a knot and it should hold.  Just to be sure, I but a big glue dot in the bottom of it.

After that is done, glue on the head piece with the medium clay pot and the base.  Once it is all set, you can start adding the details.  To add more to the arms and the legs, I just tore apart some cotton balls and glued it just on the inside, top of the 4 small clay pots.  I really like the snow texture that it added to it.  For the eyes and mouth, I once again just used white and black felt.  You can design your face any way you would like, making it your own.  I found two small, black buttons to glue to his front.  I just used thick, teal ribbon for the scarf, gluing it in the place I wanted it.

For the nose, I just used a medium sized orange pom pom and just cut the edges to a point so that it looked more like a carrot.  For the top of the hat, I just added a large, blue pom pom that matched the scarf to make it look more like a beanie.

Thank you so much for reading about this project.  I love this simple design!  The dangling arms and legs are adorable!  If you like it as well, go to the top, left corner of this page and hit the blue "Follow" button. Thank you so much to Melisa Crook for the source of the idea.  Visit her Etsy page by clicking HERE.  If you want to see her original snowman, you can check it out HERE.

We will see you all again next time!

HALLOWEEN: Clay Pot Witch

About 3 weeks ago, I posted a sneak peek of my project for my dad's Christmas present.  Today I would like to reveal it to you.

This is what this project was from the beginning.  Scroll down to see how I transformed this into an adorable festive witch.

Yes, I know it seems weird to be posting a picture of a witch craft right after Christmas, but there is a little bit of a background on this one.

Ever since I was little, I have always known that Halloween was Dad's holiday and Christmas was Mom's holiday.  My dad has always gotten a kick out of Halloween decorations that were goofy, not so much gory.  Since my dad has loved helping me with the lighting of my crafts, I decided that for his present this year for Christmas, I wanted to make him a new Halloween decoration that he could have fun trying to light.  The only problem I had was that the witch would need a hole in the back of her head so that the lights could go in the glass bowl, but the plug could still come out far enough to be plugged into an outlet.  Well, I've never drilled a hole in glass before, so, to make sure I didn't ruin the glass, I did just hand him the clear, glass, fish bowl to drill a hole into.  He did know I was making something for him, he just didn't know what.

So, since the process is still fresh in my mind, I am going to post instructions on how to make this Clay Pot Glowing Witch.  I will also likely repost this next October when we are a little closer to Halloween.

Here are the products I used for this project and where I got them:

-1 small clay pot* (Dollar Tree - in-stock only during spring; Joann's)

-1 medium clay pot* (Ace Hardware)

-1 large clay pot* (Ace Hardware)

- 1 large clay pot base (Ace Hardware)

-1 large glass bowl* (Walmart)

- green, black, and orange acrylic paint (Walmart)

- clear spray paint or paint sealant (Walmart)

- skewer-- yes the kind you put food on (Walmart)

- burlap (Ace Hardware)

- white, black, orange, and green felt (Joann's)

- two large, white buttons (Walmart)

- Orange, thick yarn (Walmart)

- Lots of Hot Glue (Walmart)

- Lights (Walmart)

- black sharpie (Walmart)

- pipe cleaners-- a pack with silver and gold (Dollar Tree)

- glass drill bit and glass--Look up a tutorial on the internet before you try it!! (Amazon)

- black ribbon (Walmart)

- scissors (Walmart)

- sponge paintbrush (Walmart)

- strong sandpaper (Walmart)

- an old, dried out marker that no longer produces any ink or a small, or circle sponge (my closet; haha)

*At this point in time, I do not have exact dimensions of the clay pots, and so, use the candy canes next to the pot as a reference to the size of the pot.

As you can imagine, this project took quite a long time to make.  My sister and I worked on it for a couple of days without stopping.  Because of that, these instructions will likely be very lengthy.  Also, because of the details in this project, it will take some descriptive instructions and I hope I am able to explain things well enough.  If you have any questions, just leave them in the comment section below.

After you obtain the pieces for this project, begin by drilling a hole in a lower place of the bowl.  I got this bowl at Walmart in the wedding decoration aisle.  The glass was really weird, almost like it had a plastic layer to it, so be careful drilling the whole.  Like I mentioned before, please make sure to watch tutorials online before you drill holes in glass items.  If you do it wrong, it could break the glass, or worse, shatter the glass and injure you.  It is a lot more simple then expected though, so don't be too afraid to learn how to do it.  If you do not have the supplies to drill a whole, you can try to make the cord come out of the top of the bowl and the witch hat will just have to sit on top of the cord.

It is also important to note from this picture that the whole does not need to be very big.  Just big enough for the light bulbs to be pushed in through it.  Our lights actually came with a battery pack, so we just made sure that the cord was hanging down far enough for the battery box to be able to rest on the cupboard below the hole.

After drilling the hole, the next step that will take the longest is painting the inside of the bowl.  There are many theories of how best to paint glass.  Some will say to buy a special, expensive paint, and others will say to sandpaper the glass so that the paint has a rough surface to stick to.  Now, what I did was just paint the inside with green acrylic paint and making sure to paint in nice strokes so that it looked nice and smooth on the outside.  Look at the picture below to see what I mean about the paint strokes.  Then, I just spray painted the inside of it with sealant so that it had a protecting layer to keep the paint from getting scratched off by the lights.  This has seemed to work so far.  The only problem that I found this was that the sealant smelled very strong and took forever to dry.  Because it was Christmas time and very cold outside, it mostly had to dry out in the garage because the chemical smell was too strong in the house.  It was giving us headaches.  So please, keep that in mind.  Don't subject yourself and those living with you to brain damage from the harmful chemical odors.

While the inside of the head is drying, begin working on base of the witch.  I chose this dress design after looking through Pinterest and combining a whole bunch of other people's designs.  I ended up with this cute, button-down dress with a collar.  In order to make this work, I started by using a pencil to draw the collar and the line where the orange needed to go up to on the bottom part of the dress.  I painted the black part first because I knew that if I messed up on the orange later, it would be easier to fix by just repainting black over it.  After the main orange and black part was painted, then I did the same with the hat, drawing the lines where the orange part of the hat needed to go.  The clay pot base and the small pot were painted straight black.  Then, it was time for the polka-dots on the hat and on the dress.  I did not feel good about free handing the polka-dots with a sponge brush, and so I found an old, dried out marker that no longer had any ink and I would just dip it in the black acrylic paint before each polka-dot.  It was so much easier to free hand it this way then with a brush.

After the paint on the dress was all dried, I used a hot glue gun and glued these big, white buttons onto the front.  I also decided to hot glue a sliver pipe cleaner to the top of the orange dress trim to add more to the dress.  It took like 1 1/2 pipe cleaners to make it around that part of the pot.  It took another 1 pipe cleaner to do the same with the hat.

Now that all the pieces to the hat were complete, we hot glued the large clay pot base, the medium clay pot, and the small clay pot together to make the hat, as shown above.

Next, we decided to add arms and legs.  The arms were nothing more than a sleeve-shaped piece of black felt being glued onto an armed-shaped piece of green felt.  You can use some sort of writing utensil to draw on the felt to make sure you have the shape you want before cutting out the pieces.  Look at the picture below to see how mine turned out. I honestly just free cut my first one and then traced it to make the second arm.  Make sure that the arms both have the thumb pointing up.  Don't give her a backwards hand! :)

For the legs, I just wrapped orange felt around a pipe cleaner and hot glued it into place, putting the glued seam on the back of the leg.  I left a piece of the pipe cleaner sticking out so that it could be bent 90 degrees to be the foot.  The pipe cleaner was perfect because it allows the legs and feet to bend, depending on where you place her for display.  In the pictures above, she was just placed on my counter and I could bend her legs to fit the edge of the counter or I could just bend them straight out.  For her shoes, I just cut 2 pieces of felt that mirrored each other and glued them together on the bent piece on pipe cleaner.  Look at the picture below to see the feet and legs in more detail.  For the stripes on the legs, I just used a black sharpie and free handed the stripes. 

After the legs and shoes were done, I used hot glue and glued them at the bottom of the pot in the inside.

Next, the Broom!  I used my sisters help to decide how we did the broom.  She was playing with some scrap burlap that I had from another project and started un-weaving the burlap and cutting them into pieces.  After cutting enough of them, she had created the bushy part of the broom.  We cut the pointed ends of a skewer (yes, like the ones you use to make kabobs) off and tried our best to glue the burlap strands to the skewer.  We used a gold pipe cleaner to hold better hold the strands to the skewer, adding a lot of hot glue where the pipe cleaner was going.  Was it was in place, we added more hot glue to the top and bottom of the pipe cleaner just to make sure that it was all secure.

There are many more ways you could make the broom, whether you wanted to use yarn and a dowel stick or just try to purchase a mini one online, it's up to you!  This is just how we did ours.

In order to make the broom stay in the witches hand, I attached the fingers of the witch to the side of the dress with just a drop of hot glue.  This allows the broom to just hand loosely in her arms.

Now, the face.  I decided to use my more typical face on the witch than try to copy one off Pinterest and I like the way it turned out!  While doing the face, keep in mind that the face needs to be on the opposite side of where you drilled the whole in the glass.  I started by cutting two, even circles in white felt for the eyes.  Then, I cut two smaller pieces of black felt out for the black part of the eye.  I positioned the black on the white the way I wanted and then hot glued them in place.  Then, for the nose, I used a pencil to draw out the shape that I wanted, which is just like shown below.  I used black sharpie to outline the nose to accentuate it and then I drew a simple circle on it for a wart.

For the mouth, I just free-handed the smile from black felt and used a small square of white felt to make a tooth.  I just glued the tooth to the back of the smile.  It's kind of hard to see it in the pictures, but I really love what the tooth added to her face.  Once all 3 parts were ready to glue on, I tried to place them as best as possible before gluing them down.  The slippery surface just makes it kind of difficult to keep them in place while trying to place.   

Once all the pieces of the face were glued on, I glued the head onto the clay pot.  This was hard because the glue peels right off if you just directly hot glue the glass onto the pot.  So, we had to rough up the glass with some pretty strong sandpaper so that the hot glue had an uneven surface to stick onto.

Last, but not least, the hair!  I will not lie, this was probably the most difficult part of this project.  While I was painting the clay pot, I had my sister cutting pieces of yarn all the same length.

After there was quite a good lock of cut pieces, then we cut a few more that were like half the length of the rest to be bangs.

Gluing the hair is where it gets tricky.  I would line up strands of hair side by side between my two fingers. After I had like 5ish lined up, I would put a line of glue on the underside of the hat and press the tops of the strands down on the line of glue, using the side of the scissors so that I didn’t burn my fingers.  I just continued that for quite a while, making sure that there was quite a lock of hair on each side of the head.  I didn’t worry too much about getting hair on the back of her head since no one would really see it and it allows for more light to glow out the back.  When I was down with both sides of the main hair, I lined up the hair for the bangs and put them across the front on the underside of the hat.  But, the bangs are a little more to the side, so I made sure not to glue them all the way across the front, just more on the side that I wanted the bangs to be on. 

After the hairs are all glued on and in place, I put the hat on the witch to make sure that everything was laying correctly.  Originally, I had tried to glue the hat on glass bowl; however, this proved to be very difficult, so we decided that it would stay pretty well if we just set the hat on and didn’t permanently glue it down.  This also proved to be easier when storing the witch in a box.  We didn’t have to find such a tall box.

If the hair is all laying the way you want it to, you can then begin to work her hair.  After trying to braid the hair and failing at it, I decided that I just wanted two pigtails on the sides.  I gathered the hair up with my fingers about where I wanted the ribbon to hold the hair.  Then, I held the hair as my sister tied it with black ribbon.  This is shown in the picture below.  After the first one was tied into place, we did the same on the other side, making sure that it was even with the first one.

Once everything is in place and looking the way you want, you can decide on what kind and color of lights you want to use.  We just bought simple, bead LED lights at Walmart (after-Christmas sales on lights are great).

We then pushed the lights through the hole in the back of the witch’s head.  Another nice thing about not gluing on the hat is that you can bend the light strand around the way that you want inside the head to make the lighting balanced.

Once you are done with the lights, the witch is complete!  As you can tell from the length of this, it is a very detailed process, but I was having fun every step of the way.  Thank you so much for reading this article and for all of the positive feedback!  If you liked this project, you can hit the blue “Follow” button in the top, left side of the blog for much more!  Also, click the link below in the footer to go to my Pinterest page and follow me there, too.

Again, thanks for joining me today!  If you have any questions, please feel free to leave them in the comments below.  Have a great day and stay tuned for more to come soon!