"Simple" snowman ornament

I suppose it's my own fault. I started making ornament covers for my coworkers from this pattern, but was having trouble getting motivated. My mind started wandering to what I could do with the leftover ornaments. 

"I know!" I thought. "I'll make an amigurumi snowman! I made my alien and penguin; how hard can it be?" How soon the mind forgets.  Usually I work from a pattern, but the amigurumi are exceptions. The construction itself seems simple on its own: wrap the ornament, make a nose, and make a hat.  The ornament wrapped nicely, but still took me a few tries to get the fit right.  It didn't help that the ornament is sparkly and sticks to the yarn. 1 hour already gone.  "That's ok," I thought, "I'll get the rest done during my lunch hour at work. Then I'll have plenty of time for other projects!"  It took 2 lunches just to get the hat right and the nose was made at home.  Finally, after what seemed like forever, I have something to be proud of.  

Here's the result:

Now to take some more pictures and put him in my shop!

How an ornament cover turned into a bracelet

So I found these great ornament covers online: http://www.free-crochet.com/detail.html?code=FC00488&cat_id=324  I already had some gold thread and thought, "That would make a great Christmas gift for my coworkers!" With pattern in hand, all I needed were 12 solid ornaments. Simple, right? How wrong I was.  I stopped at the local big box everything store only to find that they sold packs of mixed sparkly colors, ornaments with patterns, and even tempted me with cute penguin ornaments. But they didn't have mixed solids.  Undaunted,  I grabbed a box that looked promising. I could tell some of the ornaments would be unusable because of their shape but the rest were either blue or silver.   "Silver and gold look fine together," I argued to myself. "It's like the song." But when I got home, the thread washed out against the silver. The next day I trekked out to the not-so-local big box craft store.  There they were: shining, glittering, solid ornaments, 8 to a box.  They were also $10.  I'm cheap; I'm not spending $10 on ornaments.  Now it was time to change tactics. Ornaments were out of the question, but I still had all those silver ornaments at home. "Thread!" I thought.  "I'll get some thread to contrast with the silver and it will be awesome."  I picked out a nice forest green (Slytherin colors) and marched joyfully home.
It didn't work.
The color's great, the ornaments are beautiful, but the green just doesn't work with the silver.  So I'm using the thread to make a Victorian bracelet instead.
You win this time, ornaments. But I'll get you...someday.

Welcome

Hello all!  I've been posting some projects on Ravelry and thought it would be nice to share some stories of how I get my ideas and create my projects.  Later on I might add some videos, although there's already a wealth of great videos out there for pretty much everything.  If you have any suggestions, let me know.  

You can watch this space for special codes to use in my Etsy shop and know ahead of time what's going to be up.  Thanks for visiting!