This tree at the Hasting Museum, which they hid down in the “basement” had the most interesting ornaments of any of the other trees. The ornaments were either decorated or made from beads.
I do not need another craft, especially one that requires handling tiny beads and thin wires. The Midwest Beaders should be proud of their beautiful work.
For the past 36 years, the Hasting Museum in Nebraska has hosted a Festival of Trees event where schools and organization decorate trees to displays. Below are a few of the trees.
I do not know the official name of this tree at the Stuhr Museum, but I am calling it the Carpenters Tree. It gets a special mention because of the uniqueness of the decorations.
At first, all you really see is Home Deport cards. If you look closers, you will see ornaments made from nails and screws.
Also, on the tree is wood panels each paint with a different design.
Each year the Stuhr Museum host a tree display. The trees are decorated by schools and local organizations. Below are a few of the 2018 trees:
Pictures of all the trees are available on my Photos By Sarah Facebook page. Also, you can find 360 Videos of some of the trees: East Side – West Side.
I made three trays of these Reese Peanut Butter Cup trees and they were gone like hot cakes.
When they asked from more, this happened.
Then the engineers in the group asked for plans and specifications for building the trees. I provided them with this document.
My Christmas Cards are mailed. Enough time has passed that most of the cards should have reached their destinations. Now, I can share the cards on my blog.
This year I drew ornaments on 3.5″ square tiles. I selected the high quality tiles, because I wanted to color on the tiles. I keep the color to a minimum because I wanted the ornaments to look delicate like glass Christmas ornaments. Below are a few of the tiles. All of the tiles are located on Drawing page.
I designed the card in CorelDraw. I converted the picture below to an outline drawing to use as a background on the card.
I created an area on the card to put the tile. I have been placing the same symbol with my name on all the back of all my cards since 2004.
Outside
Inside
The folded card measures 5.25″ square. I embossed several stems on the front of the card, and attached the tiles to the cards with photo corners. I wanted the recipient to be able to remove the tile without damaging the tile. Below is one of the finished cards.
Here are the Christmas Ornaments I painted this year. The plaster ornaments were purchased from Hobby Lobby and I use acrylic paint and puff fabric paint. Some of the ornaments were painted with neon glow and glow in the dark paint.
It is the Christmas Season! All the presents are wrapped and all the cards have mailed; it is time that I share with you my Christmas Card of 2017.
I usually start thinking about my Christmas Cards around July. If I wait until Thanksgiving, I sure that disasters will strike and I would be force into buying Christmas cards from the store. This year the ideal was a Snow Globe Christmas card. I researched the ideal and knew it was possible.
But, I didn’t really want to put a piece of plastic wrap or it’s equivalent on the card. And, than I found Jullibean Soup’s Large Circles by Hampton Art. It was a quick Click and Order from Amazon. Once the circles came in, I started to work on the card.
I thought about designing a village scene to put inside the snow globe, but I wanted a little deep. Then it occurred to me; I have polymer clay, I have cutters for snowman and trees. The card was coming together.
The snowman, trees, and snow were made with Sculpey Polymer Clay using a setting of 3 in the pasta machine and cut with “cookie” cutters, bake and covered with sparkle varnish. (Which was the first mistake.) However, I need to draw the face and buttons, and color the hats on the snowman. I got out may Sharpie pens and colored the hats. They looked awful. I should not have varnished the snowmen first. What was I going to do, paint all the snowmen? Nooooo! I had just recent purchase a set of Chameleon Pens, which worked with beautiful results. It even covered where I used a Sharpie.
Since the Snowman were coming together, I could now design the inside of the card. This was done using Corel Draw. I probably spend too much time making snowflakes, but I was having so much fun. I hope the shading on the snowman gives it some dimension.
At Office Depot, I found dual color cardstock. It was light blue on one side and white on the other side. This was perfect for my card. It would give me the blue sky I wanted behind the snowman scene on the front and white on the inside. I found the snowflake paper at Hobby Lobby. I found some nice light blue glitter paper at JoAnn’s and had the silver paper left over from last year.
The Jullibean Soup circle comes with adhesive around the circle, so it was not necessary to stick it through the first layer of paper and glue everything down. I used Silhouette Studio to design the silver snow globe and the cut for the top paper layer. Everything was cut using my Silhouette Curio. I was really dreading gluing it all together.
More research. I found this wonderful blog that talked about ways to glue paper together. Did you know you can put cheap plastic wrap between two piece of paper and use a hot iron to fix them together. I didn’t use plastic wrap. The blog also talk about Xyron Creative Station for sticking paper together. This is the best machine I have bought all year. It did exactly what I expected. It basically creates stickers when you roll your paper through the machine. Afterwards, you just peel it off and stick it where you want it. It even handled the delicate “Merry Christmas”.
To assemble the card:
First step: print the inside of the card on cardstock on the correct side of the paper and cut everything. Run the snowflake paper, the silver snow globe, and the Merry Christmas through the Xyron Creative Station.
Second step: stick the snowflake paper to the correct side of the card.
Third step: Use glue dots to fix the snowman, trees, and snow to the card. Top with snow. (Second mistake.) After sitting in a box for several weeks, the trees and snowman started to come loose. The problem was I did not use permanent glue dots for those items. I had to gently open up at least half of the cards and redo the inside. I am glad I switched glue dots during the assembly.
Fourth step: Place plastic circle on tope of snowman and snow.
Fifth step: Place silver globe around circle and add Merry Christmas.
We have a finished card. Well, almost. It needed something else. I used glitter glue to around the border to give it more sparkle.
I put the card in an envelope that I stamped with snowflakes. Both, envelope and card was mail in a bubble mailer. Any thicker and the card could not be sent First Class mail.
Since I was having so much trouble printing my 3D Christmas Tree card. I created another card to send out with the card and to the others on my list. It was designed with Silhouette Studio and cut out using the Silhouette Curio.
I used plain cardstock, but the background was lacking. To spruce up the background I used Corel Draw to create the background for both the card.
My niece was excited to be “and Samantha” on the Christmas Card. She never has been an “and Samantha” before.
Thanks to my sister, she took these picture and display the tree and the card as I imagined.
I know Christmas is over and the new year has started, but this was my main adventure for November and December.
Many months ago, I got the idea that this year’s Christmas card would be 3D printed. After many rough drafts, I decided on the “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” design.
The initial design phase went smoothly. And then, I had more ideas. The words on the tree should turn, so the tree would look like it had stagger branches. The words on the tree should be readable from any angle. Oh, it need a tree skirt and the simplest design would have stars on the skirt.
It then occurred to me the tree needed a train going around it. Well, the train could not literally go around it, because the size of the train. My printer would not be able to print the tiny detail the train would need to allow it’s wheels to turn.
I still was not entirely happy with the tree skirt. The tree needed presents. I designed three unique presents and place them under the tree scaling them to different sizes and placing them under the tree at different angles.
Designing the tree was the easy part. Printing the tree out, proved to be the most challenging part. The filament started grinding. I regularly had be dismantle the extruder box to remove filament. I also had to dismantle and reassemble the printer head on no least three occasions to correct issues. That is why only 6 of these Christmas tree were sent to friends and family.
There were eight .stl files created to print the tree.
The .stl files can be downloaded from youmagine.com.
https://www.youmagine.com/designs/we-wish-you-a-merry-christmas-tree/embed
Sarah Cath's Adventures 