December 9th - Golden Snitches

After the Flying Broomstick-ornaments yesterday, it's only natural to follow up with some Golden Snitch-ornaments today, for my daughter's Harry Potter themed Christmas tree Advent Calendar.
There are a bunch of tutorials out there on how to make Golden Snitch-ornaments, but after some consideration, I ended up with following this one over on EPBOT, from the same brilliant crafters who had the Broomstick-tutorial. I think this way of making the Golden Snitch-ornaments is the best compromise between fast, easy and good-looking that I've seen.

When I first started planning this Advent Calendar, I bought a bunch of quite small bronze and golden plastic Christmas baubles. Plastic, because they are sturdier than glass ones. Plus you can make holes in them without breaking them, which is essential if you want to follow the tutorial I mentioned above.
So I started by making the holes, I found my very handy husband's smallest drill bit and drilled holes not much bigger than the wire. I figure that you can also use like a wood etcher and melt the holes, but I haven't tried it myself.

In this other tutorial, that I originally intended to use before I found the better one, they have painted swirly lines on the baubles with acrylic paint. I think that looks really nice, but when I made a practise-snitch like the one in the first tutorial, I thought it looked so good that I didn't bother with the painting. It would obviously (in Snape's voice) have made the process much more difficult and time consuming.

I already had my ornament hook-making wire, so I used that, cut it up in lenghts of about 25 cm and manoeuvred the wire through the holes in the baubles.

Instead of aluminium foil and spray glue, I bought 50mm wide aluminium tape and just folded pieces of it in two over the wire, as close as possible to the bauble. I made my own wing template like in the tutorial, because I couldn't find a good one online, folded it over the unfinished wings and cut them out. A toothpick and a book worked well for making the lines on the wings, as described in the tutorial. After adjusting the wings to the desired position (some of them staying there on their own, some of them helped by a little bit of glue gun glitter glue), of course I finished the ornaments by adding some swirly hooks for hanging. Here you go!





Comments