Thrifty Acres: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly - Part One

Hello! Around a month ago I purchased a 1968 McCall's Christmas Make-It Ideas magazine for a dime at a garage sale. McCall's named this publication well, for there were dozens of craft ideas featured - enough, in fact, to warrant a trio of posts I'll do on "the good, the bad, and the ugly". That is, crafts ranging from "these would still look good today!" to "what where they thinking?!"

Of course, the designations of good, bad and ugly are subjective; what I find charming someone else might find hideous, and vice versa. But happily for me, today's post, on crafts I deemed "good", is the longest of the trio.

I'll begin with this:

Owls galore - the ones on the left are made of felt with sequins and beads. The lavender owl to the right has a cardboard body and bottle cap eyes; it's joined by other bottle cap ornaments. Interesting use of bottle caps!

Angels and three kings - all made from wooden furniture legs and other wooden bits. Cute!

"Ad-Lib A Greeting Card" is the title of the accompanying text to this project. A basic shape is drawn on white paper - in both examples shown, circles - then designs are added as desired. Still a good technique for a pleasing greeting card!

Quite the project, this one - a felt wall hanging depicting the Twelve Days of Christmas. 

A close-up of some of those figures:

This would take forever to do, of course - all that cutting out and gluing of felt shapes. I like it anyway!

Also in the category of "It'd take forever but I still like it":

According to the directions, this is constructed by making 270 "branches" - 90 pieces each from three colors of green felt, slashing each piece to make the "needles", and then wrapping and gluing the "needles" to pipe cleaner "branches". In turn, these are arranged around a styrofoam ring. Whew! Reminds me of something the folks at Martha Stewart Living magazine would have trotted out for a craft in one of their December issues - and who knows, maybe they did. If so, McCall's did it first!

Much quicker to do but still charming is this nativity scene:

Inside a 4"x5 3/4" wooden box is this quaint grouping of Holy Family, shepherd, lambs, the Star of Bethlehem and some birds. We collect Nativity sets, so this caught my eye. The figures are constructed of felt, paper and some trims. 

Also using felt, trims and other supplies are these decorations:

These faux gingerbread ornaments look almost good enough to eat!

See what I mean? This little house is adorable! I love the pastel colors used. Those rooftop "shingles" look just like Necco wafers. 

One last photo:

These cuties are 8" tall - made with knitted bodies, felt trimmings and rayon-covered pink styrofoam heads. When I saw these, I wished I was a knitter! 

Oh well, there's still plenty of other crafts I can do from this book - and there were even more in the "good" category that I left out since I've already shown off several projects here.

But as I said in the beginning of this post, not all the crafts are ones I'd want to do - I'll be showing off the "bad" and the "ugly" soon!