Raspberry Hanging Ornament

A group of us are getting together on Saturday at Joanne's house to make the glorious ornament that is on the front of the SU! Autumn/Winter catalogue.  When I first saw it my initial reaction was "no way am I going to tackle that!"  However, I've been persuaded to change my mind and in preparation I've purchased a hot glue gun.  I've never used one before and I'm not entirely sure I should be trusted with one LOL!  Anyway, I thought I'd practise before Saturday so I thought I'd try making one of the smaller ornaments shown on page 3 of the Autumn/Winter catty.  I chose to CASE the green one but I used Raspberry Ripple ink instead and chose not to have a sentiment banner.

I saw Laurie Zoellmer's video on Dawn Olchefske's blog so first I watched that to get an idea of what I should be doing.  Then I busily stamped and die cut 24 ornaments and then folded 18 of them in half.  I watched another video recently of someone making the big catty front ornament and she had glittered the edges of the die cut baubles.  I love a bit of sparkle so I thought I'd do that - umm yeah, this was one of those "it seemed a good idea at the time but I probably won't do that again!" ideas - there was glitter EVERYWHERE!

I then glued 6 lots of 3 folded ornaments together and then glued those to the 6 unfolded, flat ornaments to form the 'petals'.  Then I was ready to fire up the hot glue gun and attach the 6 petals together.  Oh my giddy aunt - that hot glue is messy and there are so many glue strings - but it holds stuff together really well!  I messed up when gluing my pieces together, I had much more of a gap in the centre than Laurie's ornament, I should have positioned my petals closer together.  I had to use a LOT of glue!  So I covered the centre with a 2" Gumball Green circle and then added my Snow Flurry die cuts.  I cut 2 each of the large and medium snowflakes, offset them and placed a snowflake patterned brad in the centre to hold them together.  Then I attached that to the Gumball Green circle and added a rhinestone jewel to the centre of the brad.  I punched a hole at the top of the ornament and used white baker's twine as a hanger.

Here's a close up so you can see some sparkle on the edges.

There was definitely a learning curve involved in making this and I know what I'd do differently next time.  I'm now looking forward to tackling the big ornament on Saturday, it will be great fun doing it as a group and there may be steam coming off our Big Shots with all that die cutting involved!

Supplies:
Stamps: SU! Ornament Keepsakes set
CS: SU! Whisper White & Gumball Green
Ink: SU! Raspberry Ripple
Tools: SU! Holiday Ornaments Framelits die, SU! Snow Flurry Bigz die, circle punch, hot glue gun & heatproof craft mat
Embellishments & accessories: SU! Dazzling Diamonds glitter, Dovecraft Christmas brad, jewel rhinestone