Feature Friday- Christmas Paper Maché Characters

                          
My Christmas Ornament club meets this weekend and I have been working like crazy over the past several weeks to complete my projects. Our club has been meeting now for the past 19 years, and we have quite a few artistic folks in it that appreciate time spent on ornaments. But being the glutton for punishment that I am, I always choose something extremely time-consuming and difficult and struggle to get it completed every year. But I do work best in a time crunch and I guess if I wasn’t totally stressed each year, well it just wouldn’t be the holiday season.

This year, I went less with an ornament and more on the side of decoration. I chose to combine sculpture, paper maché and quilling to create a unique tabletop decoration.

 
This photo shows the ornaments in their many stages. I used styrofoam and toilet paper tubes to create the basic structure of each decoration. Once that had been established, I shredded up newspaper, mixed up white glue and water and paper machéd the heck out of it. Once it had dried, I pulled out the acrylic paints and went to work.

Each ornament has my signature plaid on it somewhere. This kinda became an issue this week when I came down with the flu and found myself upstairs painting plaid while drugged up on Robitussin. I spent quite a while on Tuesday night painting plaid on my final decorations. They looked wonderful! The next day, when I picked them back up to work on them, I noticed that every single line was choppy, crooked and ridiculous. I had to repaint them all. Lesson learned. Do not paint under the influence of Robitussin.

The final step was to put in details with cardstock and my quilling tools and then coat the entire project in Mod Podge. These decorations are made almost entirely from paper with the exception of the foam base and the 3 1/2″ wide strip of Christmas fabric wrapped around the base. Special thanks to Discount Sewing Supply for supplying some of the awesome fabric used on these decorations.

And now for the reveal….

For more details on quilling techniques, check out my Summer Blooms Quilled Frame Tutorial.  This is actually a relatively simple, but very nice gift. 

For more details on paper maché, check out my Quilled Paisley Monogram Tutorial, where I go through the basics of paper mache to create the monogram base.