suburbia soup: Christmas Card Alternative

Tutorial looks familiar? A few of my favorite tutorials has made the move from Happy Find and is now residing here. Enjoy!
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Back in December 2009, I wanted to send something other than a card. I saw these beautiful poem spools from Felt at Home and fell in love. I wanted to make something that is a fusion of a card and ornament and came up with this.

Here's a fun little twist to give to friends and love ones this holiday!

Supplies:

-small wooden spools

-round wooden balls or finials

-extra small screw eyes

-ribbons & lace

-a message printed on paper

-hot glue

-sewing machine

-needle

-scissors

-thread

-acrylic paints & paintbrushes

-varnish for acrylic paints

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Take your finial or round ball and paint a skin tone all over.

Once the paint dries, using a pencil and very lightly, draw the face.

Using a very fine paintbrush, paint the face.

Oh hello, little lady!

Paint the hair.

Wait for the paint to completely dry.

Grab a screw eye...

Slowly and firmly twist the screw eye to the top of the head.

Top and center.

You can use the handle of a paintbrush to twist the screw.

Once screwed in, it should look like this.

Take you varnish and do a light layer all over the head. Let it dry.

When the varnish is dry, it will give a nice sheen to your doll head.

Grab your spool and glue gun...

and put a thin strip of glue around the top of the spool. This will bind the head and the spool together.

It should look like this.

My dear... you'll catch a cold! let's dress you up!

To make a collar or scarf for her...

take a piece of lace or any other trim you fancy and cut 2 1/2" in length.

Glue the lace along the neckline (where the spool and the head meets) all the way around.

To make the "skirt", your ribbon should fit the spool accordingly. So if your spool is 1/2" in height, than your ribbon should be 1/2" in height as well. So in this case, I am using a 1/2" ribbon.

Cut 6 1/2" of the ribbon (again, the length depends on the size of your spool). This will give enough length to wrap around the spool and for a message.

Fold in 1/4" at one end of the ribbon and glue. Set aside.

On a 1/3" x 4" strip of paper, either type or handwrite your message. Make sure to leave space all along the edge for you to sew the paper onto the ribbon.

***You could use scrapbook paper instead of ribbon with your message printed on it. This eliminates a step, but I like to torture myself and add extra steps.***

Take your message and place it on the backside of the ribbon, butt against the fold.

Set your sewing machine to the smallest straight stitch and sew along the edge of the paper.

It should look like this.

Now you will need to adhere the ribbon to the spool. With the raw edge of the ribbon, glue the ribbon to the backside of the spool. Continue to glue the ribbon to the spool until you reach the message. The message should be on the inside of the ribbon (or backside if you will) and wrap clockwise.

Set aside.

Cut 12" of thin ribbon. This will keep your message from unraveling.

Hand stitch the thin ribbon to the end of the "message" ribbon.

Take an extra piece of thin ribbon and glue it to the inside edge of the message ribbon. This will give a finished look and hide the stitch. I didn't do a good job hiding it. Sorry!