...a few answers

I didn't intend to do a tutorial for the snowball ornaments in the post below - I always hate to assume that people actually want it but I did get a few questions about how these were made so I'm putting a few pointers in this post. Apologies for the poor pics but I abandoned the idea of doing a tutorial and didn't take a great selection.

I used polystyrene balls and I coated them in tissue and painted on loads of PVA glue, the glue soaks through and dries reasonably clear so it works well for these wee ornaments. In order to do this I spiked the balls on toothpick sticks.


Once they were dry I added the snowmen in the same way.

Once the ornament was dry again I pushed the toothpick all the way through the ball so that it made a hole through the core of the snowball.

I pushed a huge darning needle threaded with one strand about 12 inches of thin ribbon through the ball. I then pushed the darning needle back down through the hole so that i had a loop of ribbon at the top and two tails at the bottom.

I knotted the tails to prevent the snowball falling off but really there wasn't much chance of this as the ribbon was a tight fit.

I made the box to my own design because I specifically wanted to use my 1 1/2" hole punch to make the little 'tidy' tray that sits on top of the snowballs in the box - I actually cut two of these trays and mounted one inside the box about 1/2" from the base so that the snowballs would sit nicely in place down in the little holes. The other tray I decorated with polka dots and put on top to tidy everything up.

I don't have plans at the moment to put a template up for the box as it isn't something that will print onto 8.5" by 11" cardstock, but if you need it leave a comment here and if enough folks are interested I'll see what I can do.

The box measures 4" wide by 2" tall - the depth of the lid is 3/4" if that helps anyone.