Beaded Owls

There was a bit of an owl theme this Christmas. I had seen a couple of examples of a cute owl design on some beading blogs. After some searching I found the instructions here. The instructions are in Italian, so the translate function in Word came in quite handy. For my first go at the design, I followed the instructions as written. The Swarovski components are an 18mm crystal moonlight rivoli, 8mm denim blue chatons and 4mm montana bicones. While shopping for supplies, I discovered an the online retailer Perles and Co, who have the most complete range of Swarovski elements I've come across so far. I think this may prove to be an expensive find.

 What I really wanted to do  was to make a brooch but I felt I needed to scale up the design. So this time I used a 27mm crystal Chilli pepper rivoli for the body, 10mm crystal red magma rivolis for the eyes and 4mm smoked topaz bicones for the wings. The most difficult part to scale up was the wings. If I had a bit more time I might have tried drop beads or magatamas. As it was I finished this brooch less than 24 hours before posting him off - amazing how a deadline can always get me focused on finishing :-)

Owl I want for Christmas

Our Christmas cake arrived a little late this year but it was worth the wait. For this year we did the "Owl I want for Christmas" design by Karen Taylor in the Winter 2013 issue of Cakes and Sugarcraft. Jen made the owls and I was responsible for the cake. Even Graeme got involved this time, "plastering" the butter icing - those DIY skills can come in handy in the kitchen too!

Rudolph's antlers proved to be a bit challenge. If you look carefully you can see he had a bit of an accident, so he had to be the first one for the chop! For the those of the non-squeamish disposition, here's what the owls look like inside.

 

The majority of the owls are Rice Krispies and marshmallow. There was enough of this mixture left to make 4 owls instead of the 3 in the magazine, so Jen improvised Mother Christmas herself - I love her mop cap.