Our Spot: Rufus Xavier

Sunday, February 3, 2008

Rufus Xavier

Top Side

Bottom Side

While the cat's away....We came home from Cascade last night (a post on that to follow) and I checked on Rufus. My heart pulsed in my ears as I approached the tank to find him spraweld out at the top, fortunately top side up, but he wasn't moving as I got closer. I bent down just inches from him and he jolted and quickly plummeted to the bottom of his bowl. Whew! He was just taking advantage of all the peace and quiet, thought he'd be king of the castle. I'm assured that current skiddishness will subside as we all get used to each other.

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Spotlights

Fall Felt Flower Wreath
Try this tutorial site for how to make the felt flower.
http://junepfaffdaley.blogspot.com/2009/09/sweet-sweater-rosettes.html (I changed part of this method, see below)

Items Needed:
12" Styrofoam wreath
20 - 24 felt sheets from the craft store
fabric scissors
glue gun (with plenty of sticks)
berry sprigs, garland, whatever you can find for cheep

Note on flowers: After cutting the spiral I rolled my flower up with out glueing. I added a dab of hot-melt at the end. I did not put a felt circle bottom on the flower either. I just went with gusto on the glue and stuck it to the wreath ;) That's crafting my way.

Method: First I cut two and a half of my felt sheets into one inch strips. Spiraling the strips around my wreath I glued them to the styrofoam surface. Next I went to work on the flowers.

For the Three largest flowers I simply cut the spiral and then loosily "swirled" it and added hot-melt wherever needed. I cut three sizes of flowers (5 in, 4in, and 2 in) That made something like 8 large, 12 medium, and a gazillion small flowers (don't worry you'll need them). After making all my flowers I went about arranging them. That's the hardest part for me. AND the nice part for you since you can put them anywhere you want. In the end I decided I wanted My focal spot to be the bottom right "corner" of the wreath.

I started with gluing the three large flowers first. I then snipped off a few berry's and glued them in the centers. Then I just worked out from there, using the 5in flowers to get me going out away from the focal flowers. Because I used five colors in my wreath (sage green, berry, tan, chocolate, and mustard) I tried to not only work with the right size where I needed it but also tried not to have the same color ever touching. With five colors it was easier to accomplish this than I thought. One thing I learned was to periodically lift my project up to make sure I was covering enough surface area that I didn't see the skin of on the inside or the outside of the wreath.

Voila! Ready to hang.