Last Christmas, or was it the one before, I simply don't remember, and it doesn't really matter, I bought a funky, stuffed and bottom weighted, snowman figure from a 2nd hand shop. When I got it home I realized that someone had painted the body of the snowman pale brown with white and black paint blotches all over it. I thought, "That looks like a snowman rolled in the dirt!" I wasn't overly fond of it, but thought maybe I could repaint it or reuse it in some way?! Well the other day when putting up our Christmas tree, we came to the realization that we hadn't a tree topper the right size for our tree. I got online and looked up tree toppers, and didn't like a single one, and the prices were outrageous. So I got on Youtube and watched some video's on how to make my own tree topper, and didn't see any I liked either. Then I gave up and went off to bed. But the next morning, as I was descending the staircase, my eyes lit upon this snowman figure sitting on some boxes. (We having got out the Christmas decor the night before.) The minute I laid eyes on it I knew what I had to do. This snowman my friends was going to get a makeover.
Here is the snowman, as you can see his bottom color is just all wrong. He is in sad need of a re-working. All that ugly brown just has to go! Fortunately for me he was painted stiff, and was tall and skinny. Just the shape I needed.
As I was taking pictures of him, I noticed he was also covered in cat hair. No wonder I had sneezed my head off every time I got near it before. I am seriously allergic to cats, and if I had noticed this in the store, I wouldn't have bought him. The first thing I did was take tape, reverse it and use its sticky side to clean up all of that cat hair. Then I carefully scrubbed my hands. No swollen red eyes and throat for me thank you.
This is the seam on the bottom. I opened it carefully with a seam ripper and dumped out all the weighting beads, and pulled out all of its stuffing. The snowman was made of sturdy canvas and as I said before, had been painted. Still it wasn't too difficult to open the seam and remove his contents.
As a craft person I have in my stash some interesting things I have collected over the years. This is a large heavy plastic yarn spool cone. This is what is used to hold large spools of yarn. I have friends and family members, who knit and weave, so was happy to obtain a few of these from them, after they had used up their yarn. It fitted exactly the length I needed. So after removing the snowman's stuffing I shoved this up inside it instead.
There was just enough length of brown canvas fabric to hot glue it all around the inside edge of the plastic cone. What you see here is me checking to see if it will fit the tree. Yippy it does! I love it when a plan comes together.
I had some fine fat quarters of Christmas fabric for crafting, so I laid several types up to see which would look the best with her outfit. I decided this small print with candy canes looked pretty sweet. To trim the bottom hem, I went in search of this dingle-ball trim I had in my stash. I would have liked it better to be white, but I intended to not buy trims, or anything else to make this, if I could help it. After I was done zigzagging the trim on, I put in a basting stitch around the top of the fabric, gathered it up, and hot glued it in place over top of that ugly brown. This figure is a bit tall, and my cloth wasn't quite wide enough to reach to the collar, so I glued the jacket closed further down, and added six small blue balls as buttons to match the hem.
Here she is all cleaned up, sans the cat hair, and I thought at first finally completed. But as I looked at her something seemed to be missing?!
It was a dingle-ball for her hat! I had a nice bag full of dingle-ball's, but rats, none the right size in white. Then I found this sparkly metallic one in blue and knew it was just the thing. It tied all of her look together, so she looked better balanced.
Here she is standing proudly for the first time atop the Christmas tree. I had just placed her there, and she fit snug as a bug in a rug.
She now goes very well with my other Christmas decor, and happily the tree too. This turned from a snowman into a snow-woman, and I think it a vast improvement. Looking at her now, you would never know she had ever been anything, but her own good sweet self.
Don't you think she looks perfect atop our tree?! I think she is the nicest tree-topper I have ever had. I do love an old fashioned homemade looking tree topper for my Christmas tree, and I adore snowmen, so this dingy snowman was just the makeover topper I needed. Merry Christmas everyone!
Comments