More Than Just A Snowflake

Hey guys!

Two weeks ago I did a Periscope version of a Mid-Week Create Break (MWCB).

What’s a MWCB? Well, back when I lived in Tallahassee I’d invite some crafty friends over on Wednesday evenings, put out snacks and beverages, pop in a movie, and my friends would bring whatever project they wanted to work on and we’d hang out and craft. It was a lot of fun and I miss it. It’s just not feasible for my Tallahassee friends to come up to Thomasville on a weeknight and I haven’t met many folks up here, yet. In time, I’m sure I’ll be able to restart it here, but until then I’ve decided to try a virtual version.

Which leads us back to the Periscope.

An old cake decorating colleague had this rule where, if she was going to buy a specialty pan or tool, she had to come up with as many uses for it as there were dollars in the price to fully justify the purchase. It’s a good rule, or at least a guideline if you’re waffling over an upcoming purchase. Since the stencil in our Winter Whimsy kit retails for $6.99 and the snowflake use is built-in, my goal was 6 more ways to use it.

The stencil in question...

The stencil in question…

I spent 45 minutes coming up with non-snowflake-y things to do with the stencil in the Winter Whimsy kit and the materials leftover from the 20 cards I’d already made with the kit. If you’d like to watch it, you can see it on Katch (though I warn you, the audio and video aren’t syncing worth a damn).

The funny thing is (to me, at least) that the one idea I had for sure about the stencil turned out not to work at all. But I did manage to come up with 6 more designs that could be accomplished with the stencil that weren’t winter-centric.

Then, after the Periscope was finished, I set about figuring out what I could turn those uses into.

"Leftovers" remade into new and fun things!

“Leftovers” remade into new and fun things!

So far I’ve turned the little diamond shapes into mini to-do lists which I turned into a pocket weekly planner. I want to revise one thing about it and then I’ll post an actual project for it because I think it’s pretty doggone nifty!

Then I used the snowflake “arm” that I stacked and stamped into evergreens along with the random dot pattern (created by ignoring the snowflakes and just inking the filler dots on the stencil) to make the night sky card front. The border is made of nesting frames cut out of the striped pattern paper (on the back of the snowflake paper) with the middle frame rotated a half turn to turn the stripes into chevrons.

The smaller snowflakes were a cinch to turn into flowers embossed onto vellum, and some of the more spindly snowflake “arms” made good filler. With a strip of that and a little bit of all the leftover papers I made a bookmark with window and flowerbox.

Finally, I decided one of the snowflake patterns reminded me of jacks–as in the kids game–so went with that for a simple top-fold card.

There’s one last use that I haven’t decided what to do with–the accidental gears I discovered from the tiny starbursts. I’ll come up with something, I’m sure!

I certainly had fun coming up with items from the “leftovers” in the kit, and I hope this encourages you to take another look at your tools to see what else you can make with them. It’s creative “problem” solving at it’s funnest!

I’ll be giving the Periscope MWCB another go tomorrow night. You’ll find me at 9pm EDT @thecraftybrach. I hope you’ll join me!

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