Fun New Year’s Crafts!

I went to a small soiree at my friend Jessica’s on New Year’s Eve this year. We drank a bunch of interesting Michigan beers tasting-style, with everyone getting a few ounces of each beer at a time. As midnight approached, I realized we weren’t rocking any hats. Between the champagne, readily available sharpies (for marking our tasting cups) and disposable bowls, I decided to get my craft on. Here are the results, with me in the middle demonstrating the proper way to make a bowl hat stay on one’s head. The hat on the right reads Happy Meow Year and was made especially for my bff Erika.

;)

:)

NYE Craft #2: Champagne Cage Bistro Chairs

A lot of craft blogs have featured this project this week, so I thought I’d rescue the champagne cages from the party for this project. For the record, I’m not super fond of working with wire in general, but my handy needle-nose pliers were there to help. Click here for a video on how to make chairs like this from The Tamara Blog.

Supplies

The first chair I made was inspired by low-backed vanity chairs and was kind of a warming up process for me to get used to working with pretty strong wire.

I wanted to do something more interesting with my second chair, but to have enough wire to make the back of the chair more interesting, I had to make it three-legged. The pieces that make up the sides of the chair back were legs on the first chair I made.

To make the third chair leg and, I had to manually mimic the twists in the front two legs by folding the long wire in half and twisting it around a few times. At a certain point, I stopped twisting the wire around itself, so I ended up with a Y-shape. The tips of the Y-shape were then bent to fit in to the curved ends of the sides of the back.

The final piece I added was a bit of wire I had left over from cutting apart the cage at the beginning of the project. The biggest challenge I had in making this second chair was keeping the seat of the chair in place. With half of the would-be legs bent upward, the tension that kept the seat in place on the first chair was absent.

On a final note, there’s a champagne cage bistro chair contest by lilla a desgin. All you’ve got to do is email a photo of your creation to lilla.a.design(at)gmail.com. (She’s also got a how-to post sharing her method for making bistro chairs.)