Hello! Here is what I made last week to meet my Creative Challenge Goals for 2023 (as introduced in this post). These are some decorative items to use for St. Patrick’s Day. The image above is deceptive in regard to size as that flower pot is a mini one only 2 1/4 inches tall.
The idea to make these wooden shamrocks out of pre-cut heart shapes and stir sticks, popped into my head one day as I was going through my supplies looking for some green felt to make a different kind of shamrock. To get to the felt I had to move aside a bag of wooden hearts I had leftover from a Valentine diy from a few years ago (previously written about here, if you’re interested). The bag, which I’d found in the regular craft supply section of Dollarama, had originally come with three sizes of hearts, but I’d used all the large and mid-sized ones in that previous project, so all that was left were a bunch of tiny hearts which were only 3/4 of an inch across. Each shamrock took 4 of the hearts.
I originally thought I’d cut some stems out of extra craft wood (left over from this project) but then I remembered I had 2 wooden stir sticks that I’d saved after a coffee shop visit last summer (waste not, want not, lol). Each was cut in half to make a stem for two shamrocks each.
I began by painting everything with acrylic craft paint in the colour “Grass Green”. It took 3 coats to get a nice deep colour.
Then, after they dried, came the fiddly part, which I almost gave up on after doing enough to make one shamrock. That was to carefully sand the edges of those tiny hearts, to give them an outline that looks white but is wood-tone. To make the four of them I had to sand 12 hearts, which, I’ll admit, was not one of my favourite crafting experiences, but in the end, I love the effect that gave, so was happy I’d done it.
Then, I used one unsanded heart as the base to which I glued three of the sanded ones. The stir stick was glued to the back and voila!
The second item is a crocheted rainbow doily. This was made mostly from skeins of crafting cotton that is usually used to make friendship bracelets. I had a bag of assorted colours, that had all the colours I needed except the purple and yellow. The bag came from Dollarama but I’ve also seen them at Micheal’s. For the purple, I used some doily making cotton thread, and for the yellow I used regular 6-strand embroidery floss. It’s a small doily and doesn’t take much of each colour.
I made it very basic, letting the colours be the focus. It’s just 3 rows or double crochet stitches to make a white centre, and then one row of stitches in each of the consecutive rainbow colours. Then I trimmed it with a scalloped edge in white. (If you’d like to make one, too, I’d be happy to write out more detailed instructions, so please email me at the address in the footer.)
Thanks for reading. If you’re also a maker of things, I hope you created something you love last week.
xo loulou
