DT Project - Christmas wrapping with a beaded charm.

 

I hope it’s not too close to Christmas to sneak another Christmassy project in?
My daughter is feeling hard up this year, so she bought a pack of chocolates and split them into individual gifts for her friends. To make them look a bit more special I gave them a pretty gift-wrapping with a beaded poinsettia and a stamped base.

 

First of all I beaded the flower charm (chart above). If you’ve never played with beads this is a really easy pattern to start with. You could use seed beads but I used Miyuki beads to make the charm a little bigger. You need 6 green beads, 42 red beads and fine beading wire.

 

I started off by picking up one green bead and looping the wire through it twice to act as a stop bead. Then I threaded on 5 more green beads and passed the wire back through the first bead to make a loop. The beads can be a bit fiddly so I used the tweezers from the 12 in one multi sewing tool to move them around. For each petal I threaded on beads 7 – 11 then looped the wire back around bead 11 and back through bead 10. Then I added beads 12 and 13, and passed the wire back through bead number 7 and bead number 1 to finish the petal and move the wire to the position to start the next petal. I repeated this for all 6 petals, then finally back through the first number 1 bead. I ran the wire through a few beads to hold it in place and left the ends long so I could fasten it to the parcel later.

To make the base for my present I cut a square of card the width of the gift plus 2 ½ inches, using a Fiskars Paper trimmer – mine was 5 inches square. I used a scoring blade to score it at 1 ¼ inches on all 4 sides, then cut out the squares in the corners. Then I inked it with green ink.

 

 I used the clear stamps mini sheet - decorative to stamp a pattern on all four sides, and a Fiskars border punch to give a decorative edge. I then placed the gift on the base, folded up the scored and decorated edges, and enveloped it all in a sheet of cellophane. I tied the cellophane with some parcel ribbon then wound the loose wire from the beaded poinsettia around the knot to secure it. I cut off the ends of the wire and curled up the ribbon ends to finish.