Necessity is the Mother of Invention.

If I had known then...what looked to be a simple ornament for this year turned into something that I am pretty sure I would never do again...for oh so many reasons.

I am a member of several craft groups online and love one in particular. The crafter is obsessed with all things primitive-which, I must admit, I love as well. After seeing her tutorial for this snowman, something spoke to me and I decided that it would be my 2019 ornament. But, because most people I would be giving it to are not primitive aficionados, I needed to make mine crystal white "snowy". And then, me being me, I started to wonder what it would look like if it turned while on the tree. The back definitely wouldn't be very attractive. And so, I decided I would need to sew two together and then give them a light stuffing. Sounded simple enough...yeah, right!

I will not bore you with the details (well, maybe just a few since I did take the pictures) but, luckily, I was smart enough to make one prototype before I got too far into it. You would not believe how many little, silly things had to be done to these cuties before they finally came together.

And, as I was moving along, I decided that a lot of the embellishments I had purchased were not working-at least for my taste. Luckily, I still have a decent stash of stuff, so I was able to improvise. I started by gathering my goodies. You might be able to see in this picture that the snowman has holes for the eyes, nose, mouth and buttons. On the original, the crafter simply outlined those areas with a marker. Since I was going to stuff mine, I didn't want to do it that way. I was going to fill those spaces. I dug through my pompom box and was lucky enough to find the EXACT number of small, black pompoms. When pushed half way into the eye hole, they look like lumps of coal.

Then, out came the button box but no way I had 36 of the right size buttons in black...and, I was NOT leaving this house! I did happen to have many of the right size in white thanks to the many, many button down Polo shirts my husband wore (they always came with 4 extra buttons) over the years. And, I did have a can of matte black spray paint. I thought I was genius when I put down a length of masking tape sticky side up, positioned the buttons on it so they didn't move when the paint spray hit them and I was good to go. Lol Luckily, it did work out just as I hoped it would.

About here is when I thought I might try to stitch and stuff and see how it worked. I did have to glue in a piece of muslin to cover the holes on the back because they would not be getting the embellishments. I also gave it a coat of iridescent glitter. So far, so good.

I didn't have anything to cover the mouth hole, so a small piece of black fabric was now needed there.

I decided I wanted carrot noses cut from felt. I can not tell you how much felt I have left from G.S. days and Halloween costumes but, as hard as I searched, there was not one piece of orange...not a square inch! That was when I just started looking for anything orange...anywhere! To my surprise, I had bought a package of felt leaves at the DT and hadn't used them. The ironic part is they are made out of the same stiff felt as the snowmen, so several leaves were sacrificed for the sake of noses. Lol

The sewing and stuffing were tedious but I got through it and thought I was in the home stretch until...

...I turned them over and saw this. Not very attractive, so the back of the hats got painted black to cover the black thread.

And, while I was there, I decided to paint the eyes, mouth and buttons black and the nose orange.

I put some snow glitter on the hats and once that was dry, I was ready with my assembly line-slowest assembly line ever. It needed two different types of glue, the tying of very small square knots (thank you to my G.S. leader all those many years ago for teaching me how to tie my tie on my uniform), much snipping and bending of wire and leaves, etc. but I finally got there!

I must say, he really is larger than I would have wanted and, in my opinion, doesn't begin to portray the amount of time and effort he took to accomplish, but I am liking him better each time I look at him. Definitely not my favorite ornament of all time but, he is done and probably the only one I will get to this year as I have a lot of exciting changes in my life the next month or so, so it is what it is. I will share more of what my November and December are going to look like as soon as I know for sure. Stay tuned.