Xmas swaps!

a wee group of friends of mine sometimes organise little craft swaps, and, being xmas time, we decided to do two - a secret santa swap, and an ornament swap!

i've already been outed for both, even though it's not even xmas yet, but that means i can finally share what i've been up to!!

first up for the secret santa, my recipient was the 9 year old son, of an incredibly (scarily) creative woman, who is really into reading, harry potter, science experiments & constructing things...

sooo.... i decided to make him a harry potter scarf-
but there are fifty gazillion plain old gryffindor scarf patterns out there, but i wanted something a bit more *magic*... and then i came across the Gryffindor Illusion Scarf!

It looks like a normal stripy scarf from the front, but if you look at it from a different angle-
the two gryffindor lions heads appear! cool huh?
(shame about the grubby camera lens! doh..)

then i added the all important enrollment letter from Hogwarts, including equipment list-
and a cool new NZ book called "How to eat a Huhu Grub; Plus a truckload of other mad, cool & dangerous ideas for kiwis who like doing stuff" and hopefully you've got a pretty happy boy!

and for our ornament swap i made 10 little crocheted snowflakes!
they're nowhere near as fine as many out there on the internet, but it was my first time trying something like this, and it was fun!
(i flatly refuse to take the next step in this ladder however - crocheted doilies!!)

this was the original pattern design-
but i wanted them to be a little less snowflakey (yay for antipodean xmases), so adapted it to more of a star shape-
they're stiffened with a 2 parts sugar to 1 part water syrup, which is rather sticky but does work quite well! i would take a lot more care in blocking them in future though...

i tried to take a pic to show how translucent & crystalline they are... but don't think i really captured it..
but they were very fun to make, and if i have some spare time next year (ha!) i might even do some for us!!