I’ve been spending the past week in holiday craft mode, getting my house ready for the upcoming seasonal gatherings. I used to manage an Anthropologie store, and though a few years removed at this point, it’s home-spun influence on my decorating aesthetic is forever in my blood now. Mass-market cardboard cut-outs of reindeer tacked to the wall will no longer suffice for this artsy gal.

This yarn ball mantel piece took 12 hours to pull off and 8 skeins of yarn-at $2 a pop thanks to Wallmart. I crunched up paper from my recycle bin into various size balls, then picked a color of yarn and started to wrap until there was no more paper showing and it was a perfect sphere. I tied it off and left a long tail of string to then wrap & tie off around the branch I salvaged from my backyard from a recent windstorm (free!), each ball at various lengths. (Total cost=$19, plus 7 vodka tonics during the process-split between 2 days!)

Once I was happy with the quantity of balls and placement, up it went, and then about an hour later of untangling the balls from the hanging process, I snipped the hanging yarn that went beyond the bottom of the yarn balls, stepped back, and admired my handiwork.

On the mantel itself, I laid out a scene of cut logs pilfered from my wood pile, then unraveled a skein of fuzzy white mohair to create “snow”. Then I made more white yarn balls in various sizes (same way as above minus the tails) for the snowballs, placed them, added a string of tree lights, and called it a snowy yarn mantel masterpiece. Total time, 45 minutes. Total cost=$5 and a shot of Whiskey neat.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 29th, 2007 at 8:39 pm and is filed under culture, design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.