Christmas Crafts

Stained-glass star Christmas tree topper

2020 was a strange year for us all, and one of the (unimportant? privileged?) ways it impacted me is it meant I didn’t travel for Christmas for the first time in more than a decade. The nice thing about this is it gave more time and need for craft projects!

I did multiple projects for Christmas, but a couple stand out enough that I made videos about the creation process on my YouTube channel.

Letterpressed ice skater Christmas card

We letterpress our Christmas cards every year, but this year I made a video of the process of creating them, from trying to figure out a design all the way through to trying to figure out who to send them to.

I really like how these turned out – the design is a little out of our usual Christmas card comfort zone, and I think it was all the more successful for it. Watch the video to see the process!

The other project I videoed was a mini-project of making a stained-glass tree topper. It was my first time needing to decorate my own tree, and when we realised we didn’t have a topper, I put the skill I learned from making my cat flap (see previous post!) to work, making one out of glass.

The project came together surprisingly quickly, and surprisingly effectively too. Christmas champion!

Freezing in a Heatwave

A new record cover I created is released today! It’s the debut single for a new signing to Med School Music – a chap called Lakeway. Aside from the title, I was kind of given carte blanche with the direction for this project, so I ended up creating some artwork intended to feel ‘connected’ like nerves, which I then physically froze.

I made it by hammering some carefully-placed nails into a surface I painted, then winding cotton thread between the nails (it’s all one continuous piece again!) to form the letters. I was happy with the design at that point, but it needed to represent the frozen part of the title too, so (obviously?) I put the whole thing in my kitchen’s freezer. I sprayed it with water at intervals until the ice had built up enough around the cotton threads for the lettering to solidify satisfactorially.

It hung out with the frozen peas for a couple of days while we got final approval, then for a little something extra, I timelapsed the ice melting away from it again and reversed the result, so it was becoming frozen again. Harry at Hospital Records then swept in and edited the timelapse into some nice motion graphics to accompany the track uploads to YouTube.

It’s nice to have a bit of ice-cold artwork for this long hot summer we’ve been having in Britain!

Chimney Christmas

While I understand the conventional wisdom that Christmas cards are a postal-service-propping hassle, my good lady Lilly and I do like the annual excuse to put our tiny letterpress through its paces.

Like every year, we try and make the card vaguely thematic to an event from our own past-twelve-months, and this year’s standout event was Lilly showing how excellently she does something when she turns her hand to it – she won the World Bread Award for her home-baked wild-yeast bread this autumn!

Alas, we don’t even have a garden for a wood-fired stove, but Santa’s affinity for chimneys made it a good way to link the season with the achievement. Like one of Lilly’s loaves, the card came out great!

 
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