So three big Mosaics.. Art, Food, and general Dabbled craftiness
(I was lazy, and didn’t link these back to the original posts, but use the search to find a project, or click through to the flickr pic and USUALLY I have a link back to the original post included.)

1. Tempest in a Teacup, 2. Humpty, 3. T-shirt Wearing Bots, 4. Poppiees, 5. Code Monkey Valentine, 6. Repair, 7. Memories, 8. Alice in the rose garden, 9. No, The Shower is NOT Vacant, 10. Sour, 11. Sluggy Freelance Guest Art, 12. Detach, 13. Little Miss Muffet, 14. Illustration Friday – Baby, 15. Electricity, 16. Strings, 17. Santa Balloon, 18. Drunken Pig – Bacon Vodka label, 19. Matching thank you notes for the Robot Spaceman Party invite, 20. A Faux Vintage Poster – Cthulhu Advertising Squid

1. Lemon Pie How-to, 2. Halloween Cocktail Experiments, 3. Freezing chicken stock, 4. Making Oatmeal Cookies, 5. Halloween Sweets, 6. Stacked Christmas Tree Cookies How To, 7. How To Make a Blueberry Pie, 8. Flayed Skin Cheeseball How-to, 9. Making Eggnog , 10. Sweet Sushi, 11. Halloween BrainDip, 12. Making Crepes, 13. Making tiny wedding cakes cookies, 14. Robot Cake, 15. Mozzarella Eyeballs

1. How to make a chair out of a champagne top, 2. Make a recycled picture frame ornament, 3. Make a Shrinky Santa, 4. Throw a White Elephant Party, 5. Make a Sweater Snake, 6. Halloween Monster Wreath Tutorial, 7. Henri, the Octo-puppet, 8. The Shrinkie Test Lab!, 9. Freezer Paper Stencil – Robots, 10. The Boy’s homemade Play Stove, 11. Robot scarf , 12. Finger Puppet Bus, 13. The Baby Ele-purse, 14. Hacking an Ikea Kritter bed, 15. Wine Bottle Cozy (Gift Bag)

It’s really easy to make… Just remove the wire from the bottom, and transform it into the ‘back’ of the chair. I’ve written up a step by step Instructable HERE!

Don’t Miss the 2008 Project Roundup… Most everything cool on Dabbled last year…

Happy New Year EVERYONE!!!

I’ve been doing some guest artwork for Pete Abrams, of Sluggy Freelance, and of course I had to do it secretly and not show it to you guys until it ran on sluggy.com. So, if you’re a fan of Sluggy (one of the best webcomics around in my humble opinion) hop over and see the my Wizard of Oz interpretation today. You’ll notice it’s in a similar style to “Poppiees”. So I’m counting this for the Illustration Friday clandestine theme..

My other clandestine project ran on the 26th:
Here it is:

And here’s the one for today:

And we have a year of illustration fridays – check em out! All Illo Friday Posts.

So, hope everyone enjoyed the guest post projects from the last few days.. Some great tutorials! If you missed them, check ’em out:

Adorable Needle Felted Gnome – as a commenter pointed out, these would be a lovely nativity scene. Or what a cute Santa!
Cute, inexpensive, and easy project! Fabulous Felt Cookies!
Great kids project – keep ’em busy and on a sugar high while on holiday! Chocolate Covered Marshmallows!

Do you have a good project to share? Email me, and maybe you’ll be featured on Dabbled too!

Also, Some Art Fabric (a past Dabbled contest winner!) has a lovely contest to win some cool fabric scraps… of course, I could keep it to myself, but go enter!!

I absolutely love to use felt to make crafts. Not only is it easy to cut and sew, but is super cheap! One 11 x 9 sheet of acrylic felt, which can be bought at your local craft store, costs around 20 cents a sheet.

My favorite item to craft out of felt is play food, especially sweets. I have done plenty of felt sweets over the past several years, so I thought I would share with you a super simple and fun felt cookie tutorial.

Felt M & M Cookie

Materials:
Acrylic felt – tan for cookie; felt scraps in brown, yellow, red, green, and orange for M&Ms
Embroidery thread in matching colors
Needle
Polyfil or stuffing
Scissors
Starbucks medium cup or a small mug
Lipstick tube

Directions:

1. Place your Starbucks cup or mug onto the tan felt. Trace around the cup to make a cookie circle (trace two) and cut out circles. If you are planning on making several cookies, it might be best to use tracing paper instead of tracing directly onto the felt. You can reuse the tracing paper shape for all of your cookies.

2. Place the closed lipstick tube onto the colored felt. Trace around the tube for M&M circles (trace five, one of each color). Don’t cut the circles!

3. With white embroidery thread, embroider an “m” onto each circle. Cut out M&M circles.

4. Sew M&M circles onto one tan cookie circle using matching embroidery thread. I used a whip stitch to attach the M&Ms but you can also use a running stitch or a blanket stitch.

5. Sew the two tan cookie circles together, stuffing with polyfil as you go.

6. All done!

You can personalize the cookies however you’d like by adding your child’s name to the M&Ms, omitting the “m” on the M&Ms, making the cookies different flavors, or cutting off a corner for a half eaten cookie.

Thanks, Dot for letting me share with the Dabbled readers this simple and “sweet” tutorial.

Don’t miss the other yummy and fun Guest Posts from this past week!

Please Welcome our guest blogger for today, the lovely Hello, I’m Sally from Pollywog’s Cakewalk! Today she brings us a really great tutorial on how to make a little gnome using needle felting. I’ve never tried this process, and it looks like a ton of fun… Thanks to Sally for sharing with us today! Dot

We have several talented guest posters contributing this week, so don’t miss the guest posts! Chica and Jo’s yummy marshmallow pops would be a fun project to do with the kids home this week… and stay tuned… Hint: the next two are felt related tutorials, but very different!

If you missed any holiday posts, you can check out the Dabbled holiday roundup here.
And see all holiday 08 posts here.

And don’t throw away that turkey carcass! Remember to Make your own stock and freeze it!!!

Hi, we’re Chica and Jo! Dot asked us to share our idea with you for chocolate-covered marshmallow treats. These treats are a fantastic snack for any occasion and are a big hit for holidays, birthday parties, family dinners, or just a rainy day inside with the kids.

Jo was inspired to make these treats after having something similar at Disney World, when she had chocolate-covered marshmallows on a stick. With some quick experimenting, we found that they were very easy to create and customize at home. Here are the simple steps as well as a fun idea for what to use as the holder.

First, line a baking sheet or large tray with parchment paper. You’ll be putting the treats on here later to cool, so you want to have a nice non-stick surface ready.

Melt the chocolate in the microwave in a tall, skinny mug so that you can easily dip the marshmallows down into the chocolate. For the chocolate, we recommend using Wilton brand candy melts, which melt easily and cool to a nice, glossy finish that stays hard at room temperature. They are also available in a variety of colors. One bag of these candy melts will make about 12 marshmallow treats.

For the handles of the treats, you’ll use sturdy plastic “crazy” straws that you can get at most grocery stores. The straws are the perfect size to hold two marshmallows, they look really cute, and the kids can wash them and use them as straws afterwards or you can wash them and reuse them another time. Put two large marshmallows on the end of each crazy straw. For an extra yummy twist, look for chocolate flavored marshmallows in the store.

Now for the candies! You can use anything that’s colorful and tiny. We like to use mini M&M’s and sprinkles, but you can use whatever you like or whatever matches the occasion. Pour the candies onto plates or shallow bowls to make them easy to access.

Dip each marshmallow-covered straw into the melted chocolate to coat it and let the excess chocolate drain back into the mug. Then add the candies by holding the marshmallow over the plate and sprinkling the candies on while rotating the marshmallow to be sure you get all sides. For lightweight candies (like sprinkles) you can just roll the
marshmallow in the candy to coat it.

Once the chocolate is covered with candies, put the treat on the parchment paper to cool and harden. When the chocolate is set, store the treats in an airtight container in a cool location. You can also wrap each treat with a little cellophane bag and tie it with a ribbon.

We hope you enjoy these marshmallow treats, and for more fun project ideas (for crafts, food, and fun) please visit us at www.ChicaAndJo.com

Dot here again… do go visit Chica & Jo — tons of great ideas and how-to’s. I love this idea — This could be a fun idea to do with the kids when they are getting bored at Grandma’s… or wouldn’t these be fun wrapped in cellophane for kids party favors, too? Thanks, guys!

We documented the process, so here it is. You’ll see both of the prototype ornaments we made in the steps. Tutorial below pictures.

(PS: We have some great guest blogger how-to’s coming over the next few days!!)

1. Felt and old wool sweater (shrink it!)., 2. Cut our your ornament shapes, 3. Cut a ‘window’ in one of your two halves, 4. Materials: sweater material, old plastic packaging, embroidery thread, ribbon or thread for hanging, 5. Cut a square out of your packagin slightly larger than the window., 6. sew the window on to your sweater, 7. Window sewn in, 8. Stitch the two pieces together,, 9. Leave a space large enough to stuff/insert picture., 10. Stich around the window to cover your thread, 11. Ready to stuff: insert picture, and stuff, and then stitch closed, 12. Hang on tree!

Materials:
Old wool sweaters, felted. I washed these in the washing machine with hot water and they shrunk nicely. Just google for felting sweaters if you need more info.
Flexible clear plastic – repurpose packaging from kids toys or similar. Mine was a bag from a diaper bag set.
Pictures
Embroidery thread
Ribbon (for hanging or embellishing)
Stuffing (polyfil or whatever you have on hand, even extra sweater scraps)

Cut out 2 matching ornament shapes from the body of the sweater.
Cut a ‘window’ in one of your two halves slightly smaller than your picture.
Cut a square out of your plastic slightly larger than the window.
Sew the window on to your sweater – I machine stitched this, but you can save a step and just sew on by hand with embroidery thread. (If your fabric has an obvious front and back, be sure to sew the ‘window’ plastic to the back of the fabric)
Stitch the two pieces together using a blanket stitch. Sew in a loop of ribbon when you get to the top, and leave an opening at the bottom for stuffing and to insert the picture (note, you can insert the picture, tacking it in with tape or glue, prior to this step if you like)
For extra interest, I stitched around the window to cover my thread. (I didn’t do the neatest job sewing it on the machine!)
Insert your picture in through the bottom hole. (I didn’t do anything to secure it, just stuffed behind it and it seemed secure enough)
Stuff and then stitch closed. I had a little extra ribbon, so I added a tassel on the bottom when I was closing up the bottom.
If you’re really good, embroider the year on the back.
All ready to wrap for a gift or hang on the tree!

The votes are in, and although I loved all our entrants, here are our top two vote getters in the Dabbled Upcycled Holiday Challenge.
1 – From She’s Crafty (shop here)
This cozy sweater bag… it even has pockets! What a great gift!
2 – From Chica & Jo: Make your Own Snowglobes! Such a fun little project with tons of possibilities! And a tutorial to make them yourself!
Since you can only win with one entry, third goes to Laurienrick‘s adorable Corduroy Trees.

Congrats to the winners… !

Check out all the entries – some really great stuff!
1. Mini Snow Globes (more, and tutorial, here),
2. Christmas Trees for a Mantle,
3. Purse from Sweaters,
4. Snowmen: Tink and Estelle (and The Colonel),
5. Retro Plaid Crossover Bag,
6. Wine Bucket Cozy, Coasters, and Table Topper,
7. Tree Skirt from Bridesmaid Dress (tutorial here),
8. Recycled Tree Stump Snowmen Ornaments (tutorial here),
9. Santa wooden centerpiece,
10. Forest Wool Hip Bag

The top 2 winners receive the following little nifty prize, a set of 4 art postcards. Please email me at Dot[at] dabbled (dot)org with your snail mail. All winners get an award button, below.

PS – I’m just trying out Artfire (linked above) – I like it thus far, no listing fees like Etsy (though the free monthly option is limited). If you’re thinking about getting your feet wet with a shop, but not wanting commitment, I think it’s a good option. If you sign up, you can go through this link and I’ll get credit for sending you! Register on ArtFire.com (Buy these as real big prints here)

Related:
Holiday Roundup – all the cool Dabbled stuff for the season in one place!

Watch this space… over the next few days we’ll have some great project how-to’s from some terrific guest bloggers!